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.

There is no doubt that a considerable role in this affair was played by the suspicion surrounding Leopardi the thinker during the dominance of idealism in Italy, over many decades; nor did things improve with a “materialist” discourse that was no less ideological and factional, incapable of looking toward new horizons. It is only in the past few years that the landscape has begun to change, and new studies, oriented in different directions, are reconceptualizing Leopardi as one of the key thinkers of modernity. This is why, so we believe, the moment has come for the Zibaldone to go out and find its true audience among those readers who, from different countries, languages, and cultures, will read it without prejudice, like a manuscript found in a bottle.

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The only complete translation of the Zibaldone to have appeared to date, in French, was published in 2004, a little over a century after the first Italian edition. An immensely long time for one of the true geniuses of humanity. A gap that is justified in part by the cultural context in Italy, and in part by the difficulty of the task of translating 4,526 pages in which Leopardi expresses himself in Greek, Latin, French, and (occasionally) English as well as Italian, enters into dialogue with at least seven classical and modern languages, and works into his own argument quotations that may be long or short from the most disparate texts. But there is something else, and it concerns the peculiar form of a text that, though conceived in the nineteenth century, really required a reader who, as Benjamin said of Baudelaire, would be “provided by posterity.” A reader who is capable of understanding the reticular structure of Leopardi’s thought, constantly in tension between “particulars” and “system,” going so far as to arrive at the paradox of a system “that consists in the exclusion of all systems” (Z 949); that is, in essence, the specific and individual form in which Leopardi brings together all the fields of knowledge in a kind of modern, fluid, questioning encyclopedism, marked by time and circumstance (the date at the end of each entry, the continual additions and corrections). From this point of view Leopardi’s modernity consists, once again, in a return to the ancient. It is his voice that truly fascinates and educates us, because it is never a “specialist” who is talking, but an ancient teacher who thinks poetically: “The sciences would have much less need for the living voice of the teacher if writers of treatises had a more poetic mind” (Z 58).

Leopardi does not teach a specific doctrine, but seeks, like Socrates, to communicate the very method of thought, that is, himself: he is one of those good teachers who “are capable of retracing in detail, and holding accurately in their minds the origins, progress, mode of development, in short, the history of their own notions and thoughts, their knowledge and their intellect” (Z 1376). His thought concerns the relationship between natural, historical, and social objects and the cognitive and expressive processes that represent them.

To translate a text of this sort is to make a translation of a translation, since every mind, that of the author like that of every reader, behaves in the manner of a camera obscura, inside which, as Leopardi says of translations, external objects are reproduced in different ways (see Z 963). It is pointless, therefore, to pretend to oneself that one is being faithful to Leopardi. The important thing, as he has taught us, is to battle strenuously against the limit, oblivion, nothingness.

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To help readers find their way in the Zibaldone, the next section enters into more detail about the structure and internal mechanism of the notebook. Following a concise biography of the author, the remainder of the introduction is devoted to ten short essays that sketch out possible pathways through the forest: we have selected thematic areas that seem to us particularly important, but are well aware that others could have been chosen, and also that many other connections could be made within the themes that we have chosen. Our selection is meant as encouragement for those readers who want to follow pathways of their own, pursuing their own lines of inquiry, with the aid also of three additional tools: the multitude of internal cross-references in the text, supplied either by Leopardi himself or by the editors (see Editorial Criteria § 10); the further suggestions that are given in the editors’ notes; and the Editorial Index (which complements the indexes compiled by Leopardi in 1827). But there are no obligatory routes: one of the joys of the Zibaldone, in addition to the intellectual rigor that subtends and sustains it, is that every reader, if they are only curious enough, can construct a Zibaldone of their own.

[FD]

The Genesis of the Zibaldone

The first page of the Zibaldone is extremely untidy, written in a labored, almost childish hand. It contains some poetic images, a comment on a fable of Avianus, an anecdote told in dialogue, some verses, and, finally, the beginning of a small essay on aesthetics. There is a date, “July or August 1817,” but it was added much later, probably in January 1820. Only then, when he had written a hundred pages, Leopardi must have realized that his notes were becoming something: what, he perhaps still didn’t know. Thus the knowledge of a new organism that was growing slowly in the silence and isolation of Recanati goes back to January 1820. From then on, Leopardi almost always recorded, with scrupulous care, the time and place at the end of every note: time is the primary matrix of this text, which speaks of the loss of the past and of its possible recovery in memory and language.

From 1817 to 4 December 1832, the day when, on page 4,526, the last word was written, the Zibaldone covers a period of about sixteen years, taking the author from youth to full maturity. Yet the dates are deceptive. By the end of 1823, Leopardi, at the age of twenty-five, had already written 4,006 pages, that is, in essence, almost the whole diary.