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 irreversible, 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.