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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  A Manuscript Found in a Bottle

  The Genesis of the Zibaldone

  Giacomo Leopardi: A Short Biography

  Ancients and Moderns

  Animals, Body, Senses, Passions

  Experience, Autobiography, Memory

  History, Politics, Government

  Language and Style

  Metaphysics, Theology, Philosophy

  Nature, Culture, Society

  Philology, Archaeology of Language

  Poetry, Voice, Music

  Scientific Knowledge and Natural History

  Editorial Criteria

  Note on the Translation

  Zibaldone

  Leopardi’s 1827 Index and the “Separate Slips”

  Editorial Notes

  Premise

  Notes

  List of Sources

  Bibliography

  Editorial Index

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  The realization of the first complete English edition of Leopardi’s Zibaldone, a project that has taken seven years to bring to fruition, would not have been possible without the constant moral and financial support of the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani (CNSL) under the leadership first of Franco Foschi and then, after his death, of Fabio Corvatta. The Leopardi Centre at the University of Birmingham (UK), founded with the sponsorship of the CNSL in 1998 to promote teaching and research around the figure of Leopardi, adopted the edition of the Zibaldone in English as its flagship project in 2006, once the pilot translation (Z 100–400, by Kathleen Baldwin) had shown that the enterprise, daunting as it appeared to be, was possible and feasible. The next challenge was to raise sufficient funds to complete the translation, and in this we were helped by private individuals, cultural foundations, and institutional bodies in Italy. We particularly want to acknowledge a grant awarded in aid of the translation by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as the generous support of the Fondazione Christian Cappelluti, the Fondazione Luigi Berlusconi, the University of Rome “Sapienza,” and the numerous smaller and larger contributions made by individual citizens in response to a public appeal for funds in aid of the translation. We wish also to express our particular gratitude to Antonio Moresco and Massimiliano Parente for their support in this phase of the project. Once the translation was well under way, we felt sufficient confidence to approach the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for support with the editorial dimension of the work. The council awarded a research grant for the period between September 2008 and March 2011, which enabled us to appoint a research fellow, Dr. Martin Thom, who during his tenure provided essential backup to all the principal aspects of the edition, and to employ a small and dedicated cohort of postdoctoral research assistants, revisers, and checkers: their work is described below.

  The support of the AHRC also enabled us to mount three public events connected with the edition in the course of 2010: a half-day symposium, “(Re-) Translating the Italian Classics,” held at Birmingham in February; a day-long seminar on quotation practice in European and non-European cultures (“Con voce d’altri: scrittura, riflessione, citazione,” University of Rome “Sapienza,” held in May); and a two-day international conference titled “Thinking in Fragments: Romanticism and Beyond,” again at Birmingham, in December. These events were enhanced by additional financial support from the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music at Birmingham, the Faculty of Oriental Languages at “Sapienza,” and the Society for Italian Studies, as well as by the continuing support of the Leopardi Centre and the CNSL. Our thanks go also to the University of Birmingham, whose granting of a one-year sabbatical to Michael Caesar in 2008–2009 allowed him to devote himself full-time to the project during that period, and to our publisher, Jonathan Galassi, whose interest and support have been a constant stimulus and reassurance.

  The seven principal translators listed on the title page—Kathleen Baldwin, Richard Dixon, David Gibbons, Ann Goldstein, Gerard Slowey, Martin Thom, and Pamela Williams—were responsible for the translation of several hundred Zibaldone pages each. We also wish to acknowledge the contribution made by Judith Landry and Jenny McPhee, who translated shorter passages. The process of translation was both iterative and collaborative. Agreed working practices were established at a three-day workshop held in the Marche in the fall of 2008, not far from Leopardi’s hometown, thanks to the hospitality of Richard Dixon and Peter Greene, and these were reinforced by exchanges of views between the translators themselves and between the translators and the editors, and constant revision on the part of the editors, advised as necessary by other experts, as the translation matured.

  We would like to thank our translators for all the work they did (sometimes beyond the call of duty). We owe an additional debt of gratitude to Ann Goldstein and Gerard Slowey for their translations here and here of the Introduction, respectively, and to Margaret Brose, who, as well as providing us with invaluable guidance on the text as a whole, also translated here, here, and here of the Introduction.

  A crucial new tool came to our assistance with the release in 2009 of the CD-ROM version of the Zibaldone, including the photographic reproduction of the manuscript and extensive search facilities, edited by Fiorenza Ceragioli and Monica Ballerini. We are very grateful to Lorenzo Enriques of Casa Editrice Zanichelli for making the CD-ROM available to us free of charge, and to Pasquale Stoppelli for giving us permission to use the transcriptions from Greek, revised by Daniele Fusi. In the thorough back-checking of the initial English translations against the Italian original, with particular reference to consistency, we were assisted by Valerio Larena and Davide Martirani; Valerio Larena also afforded us skillful guidance in our translations from Latin and Greek. Ann Goldstein, Gerard Slowey, and Martin Thom, in addition to their own translations, also undertook to review certain particularly difficult passages. We are additionally grateful to Ann Goldstein for her expert copyediting of the first thousand pages, which set a high standard for the final revision of the text as a whole, as well as for her comments on the notes to many of these pages.

  * * *

  For the compilation of the editorial notes, we are particularly indebted to the late Contessa Anna Leopardi, who both encouraged and welcomed us to make full use of the historic library housed in Palazzo Leopardi, and to Francesco Fabretti and Carmela Magri for their unfailing helpfulness. Much of the research, in particular the thorough checking of the sources mentioned or alluded to in the Zibaldone, was undertaken with the help of Elisabetta Brozzi and Valerio Camarotto. Gerard Slowey did significant research on the index of names (subsequently incorporated into the single editorial index), and Marco D’Urso established a number of the more important or more problematic of the thematic index entries, structured according to the new criteria established by the editors. At proof stage we were able to count on the kind collaboration of Ilaria Andolfi, Nadia Cannata, Enrico Cerroni, Rodney Lokaj, and Maurizio Sonnino.

  Throughout the editorial process we have been supported by our advisory board—comprising Margaret Brose, Christian Genetelli, María de las Nieves Muñiz Muñiz (Leopardi), Paul Hamilton (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and philosophy, Romanticism), Giulio Lepschy (language and linguistics), Roberto Nicolai (classical languages), and Giorgio Stabile (philosophy, science
, and theology)—whom we have consulted on a regular basis, and by many friends and colleagues, who have acted either as specialist consultants or in response to specific queries or requests for help. In particular, we would like to mention the following.

  Specialist consultants for Chinese: Federico Masini; Classics (Latin and Greek): Albio Cesare Cassio, Simon Swain; German literature: David Hill, Giovanni Sampaolo; Hebrew: Alessandro Catastini, Jeffrey Einboden, Giuliano Tamani; French literature (seventeenth- and eighteenth-century): Nicholas Hammond; law: Giorgio Pino; Leopardi: Lucio Felici, Alberto Folin; linguistics and history of Italian language: Grazia Basile, Nadia Cannata; medieval and modern history: Simon Ditchfield, Carla Frova, Chris Wickham; Mongolian/Tibetan: Elisabetta Chiodo, Cristina Scherrer-Schaub; musicology: Antonio Rostagno, Colin Timms; philosophy and history of science: Antonio Clericuzio, Maria Conforti; Roman history: Marco Maiuro; Romanticism: James Vigus; Slav philology: Janja Jerkov; Sanskrit: Daniele Maggi, Raffaele Torella; Spanish language and literature: Camilla Cattarulla, Fernando Martínez de Carnero; translation matters: Peter Hainsworth, Ann Hallamore Caesar, Tim Parks, Prue Shaw.

  On specific questions: Francesco Paolo Brandi, Francesco Bausi, Francesco Borghesi, Fabiana Cacciapuoti, Fabio Camilletti, Maurizio Campanelli, Mario Capaldo, Alessandro Carrera, Patrizio Ceccagnoli, Paola Cori, Franco D’Agostino, Marco De Nicolò, Ken Dowden, Miguel Angel Giglio Bravo, Elystan Griffiths, Giorgio Guzzetta, Annalisa Landolfi, Massimo Natale, Letizia Panizza, Gaspare Polizzi, Luisa Pranzetti, Luca Serianni, Luigi Severi, Emilio Speciale, Renata Sperandio, Cosetta Veronese, Stefano Versace, and Leslie Zarker-Morgan. Last but not least, our warm thanks go to Nicola Gardini, whose disinterested support was key to making this publication possible.

  As with every edition of a major text, this one owes an immense debt to the groundwork provided by previous editors. We do, however, make a point of drawing attention to important conjectures and interpretations put forward by our predecessors, and to our divergences from them where they occur, as explained in the Premise to the Editorial Notes. For this edition, the two editors have worked in constant dialogue through every phase and every aspect of the project. With the exception of “Philology, Archaeology of Language,” written by Elisabetta Brozzi [EB], the segments making up the introductory material were written by the editors. The authorship is indicated by the initials at the end of each piece. MC has the final responsibility for the translation, FD for the editorial notes.

  Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino

  Introduction

  A Manuscript Found in a Bottle

  Giacomo Leopardi is the most radical and challenging of nineteenth-century poets and thinkers, yet the recognition of his genius outside his native Italy has been sporadic, at times enthusiastic and engaged, at others distracted. The posthumous publication of his collected works in the 1840s sparked detailed critical essays from Sainte-Beuve in the Revue des deux mondes (1844) and, in England, from G. H. Lewes and William Gladstone in Fraser’s Magazine (1848) and the Quarterly Review (1850), respectively. Later in the century (1873) Herman Melville would pay him homage by turning him into a character in Clarel (a skeptic “stoned by Grief”), just at the time when James Thomson, who had translated many of the Operette morali in the late 1860s, was dedicating The City of Dreadful Night (1874) to “the memory of the younger brother of Dante, Giacomo Leopardi, a spirit as lofty, a genius as intense, with a yet more tragic doom,” and Nietzsche, in the second of his Unfashionable Observations, was describing Leopardi as the model of the modern philologist and the greatest prose writer of the century. Into the twentieth century too, writers of the caliber of Walter Benjamin and Samuel Beckett drew on the Operette morali and the Canti. Then there was a gradual falling away, at least from the moral dimensions of his thought and his poetry, in thrall perhaps to an aesthetic reading of Leopardi’s verse that judged it to be exquisitely beautiful and immensely challenging to translate, in equal measure.

  Apart from contingent causes, however, there may be a more deep-seated reason for the waxing and the waning of Leopardi’s reputation. Leopardi lived and wrote in that shadow-land that lies between the impetuous fire-burst of the first Romantic generation (Hölderlin and Novalis, Coleridge and Wordsworth) and the generation that came after him, that of the founders of the modern lyric (Baudelaire in Europe, Whitman and Dickinson in America). The shadow-land was called, in post-Napoleonic Italy, the Restoration, an age of discontent, frustration, melancholy, eyes cast toward the past or the future, but a future beyond this world. It was no longer a time of revolution, or progressive Romanticism (in the manner of Schlegel). The subject can no longer draw on himself to achieve a higher state of being. Instead he must choose whether to give way to the mysterious and frightening “mechanism” of the world or to withdraw into the realm of the “spirit.” In the contemporary novel, particularly the novel of the 1830s (Stendhal, Balzac, Musset), this means either speculating on the stock exchange and cynically enjoying oneself at others’ expense, or monkish withdrawal. This kind of choice is also at the heart of Goethe’s Faust, completed in 1832, and it will later inspire the dualistic world of Baudelaire, divided between spleen and idéal. The second option seemed obligatory for someone like Leopardi, who was born in a hidden, isolated corner of Europe, a little town in the Marche, which then was under not only the spiritual but also the political rule of the Pope. The expectation was that the young Giacomo would become a cleric, a fate that he did everything he could to resist (successfully, but, in certain moments of his life, at the cost of extreme deprivation), while neither plunging into what Franco Moretti, in the wake of Lukács, has called “the prose of the world” nor giving way to the fascination of nihilism.

  This was the literally paralyzing situation (he could not leave the house without his tutor), the gray zone of depression and secret passions, unrealized ambitions and repressed desires, from which the adolescent Giacomo had to find an exit in order to survive. To start with, he found it in philology, then, more efficaciously, in poetry: “A great thing, and sure mother of pleasure and enthusiasm, and magisterial effect of poetry when it succeeds in enhancing the reader’s concept of himself, and of his misfortunes, and of his own dejection and annihilation of spirit” (Z 260). This is an essential point to grasp, if one is to understand the radicalism, and the sheer determination, of the search on which he embarks, founded as it is on a searing necessity: the existential choice between life and death. From this point of view, the poetry and the daily secret writing of the Zibaldone run in parallel, and serve the same vital function. The secret of Leopardi’s originality lies precisely in this daily resistance to the limits set first by nature, and then by his family and society: illness and bodily deformity, physical and intellectual isolation far away from the centers of European culture, the fruitless search for professional work and a means of subsistence. He became a philosopher without knowing Kant, he became a poet without knowing Goethe—except for what he could learn of either from Mme. de Staël, his poor Baedeker guide to modern philosophy—because in himself he was able to find the strength to reach beyond the confines of his age, and, with comparable acuity, to see forward and backward in time.

  Nature and the ancients were his salvation and his true teachers. He therefore chose to start again from zero, from the primordial energies of man, from the origin of the self and the body, from the childhood of the world. We should not be deceived by the initial idealization of nature and the ancients. This is a regressive choice, which begins by borrowing the vocabulary of Rousseau. But it allows him to reject the present without giving in to the enticements of idealism or of any ideology, and to analyze the subject without turning it into an immaterial entity, on the contrary, rooting it in the body, in nature, and in history. Leopardi’s position in fact immediately becomes more complex and probes deeper. Nostalgia for the origins goes hand in hand with the analysis of the process that has led him to move ever further away from them, and turn him into a modern. This process is i
rreversible, there is no possibility of going back. The awareness he acquires, leaving Rousseau behind, makes Leopardi an anthropologist of modernity: “Modern civilization must not be considered simply as a continuation of ancient civilization, as its progression … [T]hese two civilizations, which are essentially different, are and must be considered as two separate civilizations, or rather two different and distinct species of civilization, each actually complete in itself” (Z 4171).

  It is not, in short, a question only of nostalgia (although such an outlook is deeply rooted in Leopardi). Rather, it is an exploration leading toward ever deeper and more archaic strata of the self, an archaeology conducted in a context that is historical and at the same time cosmic. From contemplating an infinite universe where there is not a trace of man’s primacy (Giordano Bruno), Leopardi turns to investigating the ways in which the “human” is constituted through language, interrogating the mechanisms of his own mind which he understands as a body that speaks and thinks, a mechanism that produces reason and imagination, computation and poetry. From this point of view, he is the successor of, on the one hand, the idéologues, the only modern philosophers that he knew a little bit more closely, and, on the other, Vico. But his ability to go beyond disciplinary boundaries and codified languages, his extreme intellectual flexibility and freedom, open up new roads before him, along which, for example, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Benjamin will travel, and many post-structuralist thinkers after them.

  This very great freedom of thought finds an ideal, radically new, form in Leopardi’s poetry, a poetry “that has no name at all” (Z 40), and in a book that is also not easy to place or to name in a roll call of the genres. A book that is unique, infinite, almost monstrous: the Zibaldone. A book that is not a book, a huge secret manuscript, which for a long time no one knew anything about (except, perhaps, for a few close friends), and which lay buried for years in a trunk, only for it eventually to come to light after its author had been dead for more than half a century (1898–1900). We are looking at one of the strange quirks of history. While the absence of the Zibaldone throughout the nineteenth century caused Leopardi to be for the most part ignored as a thinker and philosopher, the publication of the manuscript by Giosue Carducci, at the beginning of the new century, did nothing to change things. The Zibaldone was certainly enthusiastically received in Italy by a few perceptive critics, but these proved will o’ the wisps that quickly faded: the book was, with few exceptions, confined to specialists in Italian literature, who had no interest in the ways in which Leopardi had reflected on man, society, and nature, or in the implacable originality with which he had set about interrogating all the fields of knowledge. This meant, even after publication, that there was no impact on anthropologists, historians, linguists, psychologists, philosophers, political scientists, aestheticians, musicologists, and scientists, who would yet have found treasure there, anticipations, and astonishing intuitions. Such obtuseness, inexplicable in itself, damaged the poet too, in the long run, if it is true that the fame of some of the great exemplars of the European poetic canon (suffice it to mention Novalis, Coleridge, Baudelaire) rests also upon solid theoretical and philosophical writings.