Leopardi's philosophy - the species, the races, the kingdoms, the spheres, the systems, the universes

I have read two translations of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti.  Besides the poems they are both packed with scraps of Leopardi’s prose.  Leopardi essays and fragments and satirical dialogues (the Operette Morali or Moral Essays) have been translated and packaged in a number of books, and I recommend them to readers allergic to poetry.  I certainly recommend spending some time with his published prose before jumping into the 2,600 page Zibaldone.

Jonathan Galassi’s translation puts the prose in the usual place, in the endnotes, matching excerpts from Leopardi with excerpts from Italian experts.  The J. G. Nichols translation moves the prose right next to the poems.  Each poem is followed by a paragraph or even an entire essay, making the book an unusual verse-prose hybrid.

The “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia,” a poem about the indifference of the moon and all things to man’s happiness, is accompanied by the complete “Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander” from the Moral Essays.   An angry Icelander has tracked the personification of Nature across the globe, finally cornering her in the “interior of Africa.” He makes his complaint:

I reach the conclusion that you are the declared enemy of mankind, and of other animals, and of all your works: you lie in wait for us, you threaten us, you assault us, you sting us, you strike us, you tear us in pieces, you are always either injuring or persecuting us.  By custom and by edict you are butcher of your own family, your children, your own flesh and blood.  (Nichols, p. 101)

Nature maintains her indifference – “even if I happened to exterminate your whole race, I would not be aware of it” – and goes even farther – “the world itself would be harmed if anything in it were free from suffering” (102).  The Icelander rejects all of this as specious nonsense but is then, unfortunately, at that point either eaten by lions or buried in a sandstorm, mummified, and eventually placed in a European museum, something close to a happy ending.

The closest equivalent in English to these dialogues are the Imaginary Conversations of Walter Savage Landor, and who reads those now?

These two translators, and the critics Galassi quotes, treat Leopardi less as a poet than as a philosopher, so making the ideational content of the poems clear is more important than prettying up the poetry. 

My philosophy makes Nature guilty of everything and, exculpating men completely, directs the hatred, or at least the complaint, to a higher cause, to the true origin of the ills of living creatures.  (Zibaldone 4428, Nichols p. 149)

Whether this is actually a philosophy or a temperament, a stance – I take these as distinct categories, perhaps wrongly – the books of Leopardi’s I have read, and I mean here the apparatus, the background and notes and so on, always treat the ideas as the center of Leopardi’s art. 

Not the individuals only, but the human race was and always will be inevitably unhappy.  Not the human race only, but all animals.  Not the animals only, but all other beings in their own way.  Not just the individuals, but the species, the races, the kingdoms, the spheres, the systems, the universes.  (Zibaldone 4175, Nichols p. 149)

No, the claim that plants and slime molds and asteroids are unhappy, this is not philosophy.  This is literature, brilliant, high-level literature, which if why I find happiness returning to Leopardi, regardless of what I understand.

therefore there never is any moment of true pleasure - Leopardi relieves boredom

In the two poems following “Night Song of a Wandering Asian Shepherd,” Giacomo Leopardi describes the remedy for boredom.  A violent storm has passed by, and the village returns to life.

    Every heart is happy.
When is life as sweet,
as much enjoyed as now?  (ll.  25-27)

The argument darkens, though:

Pleasure, child of suffering,
empty joy, effect
of dread that’s past
which made the man who hated life
tremble with fear of death,
which turned the people
cold and mute and pale
and made them sweat and shiver in long torment
seeing lightning, clouds, and wind
arrayed against us.  (ll.  32-41)

In other words, we only enjoy life in the lee of the threat of suffering and death. “Surcease form suffering is happiness for us” (ll. 45-6).

The next poem, “Saturday in the Village,” reverses the conceit, identifying the hours before the holiday as happier than Sunday itself.  So we are happiest when relieved of suffering or in anticipation of pleasure.  The pleasure itself will likely disappoint.  Everything else is “sadness and boredom (tristezza e noia)” (l. 41).

Obviously there is a lot of psychological insight here, even for a reader of a quite different temperament – me, I mean.  Thank goodness we have so much trouble sitting alone in a room.  Our restlessness helps create the contrasts that bring pleasure, regardless of the actual results.  The contrast is what matters.

… pleasure is always either past or present… therefore there never is any moment of true pleasure, although it may seem that there is.  (Zibaldone 3550)

That last bit was J. G. Nichols.  Otherwise I am using Galassi.

One of Leopardi’s favorite concepts is vagueness or indefiniteness, vago, which has been an obstacle for me and will be for anyone whose aesthetic calls for precision.  The two poems I have mentioned here have stuck with me a little more not because of their philosophizing but because of their concreteness. 

    The young girl comes in from the country
as the sun is setting, carrying
her sheaf of grass, and in her hand
she holds a bunch of violets and roses
that, as always, she intends to use
to decorate her breast and hair
tomorrow, on the holiday.  (“Saturday in the Village,” ll. 1-7)

Even in English – the Italian verse is much prettier – Leopardi quickly evokes the scene, even though no individual detail is out of the ordinary.  An old woman tells stories, the sun sets, the church bell rings, children run around, and a carpenter works late.  Not much more than that.

I am tempted to write a bit about the longer poem “Broom, or the Flower of the Wilderness” because it is the thickest in physical observation, as Leopardi wanders Pompeii and its surroundings, looking at the flowers and thinking of – well, what else does anyone think of there – the destruction of all things in an apocalyptic disaster.

Nature has no more esteem
or care for the seed of man
than for the ant.  (ll. 231-3)

but if I spend too much time rooting around for the little nuggets that I usually look for, I miss the kind of poet Leopardi is.  So I will set that idea aside and write one more post where I try to look at him the way so many other writers look at him, as a philosophical poet, a poet of ideas.

Aren't you bored? - Leopardi's "Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia"

Giacomo Leopardi is among literature’s greatest pessimists.  I will enjoy his pessimism in the form of the “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia” (1831), a lament in 143 lines, the most song-like of the Canti.

What are you doing, moon, up in the sky;
what are you doing, tell me, silent moon?
You rise at night and go,
observing the deserts.  Then you set.  (ll. 1-4)

An Asian shepherd, maybe Kirghiz suggests a note, complains to the moon about his lot and the lot of mankind.  Maybe the moon will sympathize with him.  No one else does. 

Aren’t you tired
of plying the eternal byways?
Aren’t you bored?  (ll. 5-7)

A reader might think – I sure did – that these lines are a little bit on the plain side.  I have read two versions, the recent Jonathan Galassi and the older J. G. Nichols (The Canti, Carcanet, 1994), and even my ignorant comparison to the Italian shows that the translators exaggerate Leopardi’s plainness.  Still, “Night Song” is kind of plain.

If life is misery,
why do we endure it?
This, unblemished moon,
is mortal nature.
But you’re not mortal,
and what I say may matter little to you.  (ll. 55-60)

Se la vita è ventura,
Perchè da noi si dura?
Intatta luna, tale
È lo stato mortale.
Ma tu mortal non sei,
E forse del mio dir poco ti cale.

Someone who knows Italian can correct me, but this does not seem too elaborate, although the music of some of the lines, the last for example, is undeniable.  The rhyme scheme is arbitrary, with Leopardi rhyming where and if he likes.  The one exception is that at the end of each stanza, as in the lines above, there is a significant rhyme using -ale.  These lines even have a bonus: “such,” “mortal,” “you don’t care” (calére, to care for: “This verb is rarely used.”)  “Life for me is wrong (male)” (l. 104) or

Tell me why it is
all animals are happy
resting, at ease, while I, if I lie down,
am plagued with tedium?  (ll. 129-32, animale / assale – Galassi scrambled this one)

The shepherd is envious of his sheep (he is addressing his sheep now, not the moon). 

I sit on the grass, too in the shade,
but an anxiousness invades my mind
as if a thorn were pricking me,
so that sitting there I’m even further
from finding peace or resting place.  (ll. 117-21)

Here we have a great Leopardian theme, shared with Pascal and the author of Ecclesiastes, the central problem of boredom, which Leopardi sees as both a curse and “the chief sign of the grandeur and nobility of human nature” (Pensieri LXVIII, tr. W. S. Di Piero).  The shepherd works through a series of ills – pain, death, meaninglessness, not just of his own life, but of everything (“any purpose, any usefulness / I cannot see,” ll. 97-8).  He cannot decide how he would be happier, as the moon or as a sheep.  Anything but what he is.  “[T]he day we’re born is cause for mourning” (l. 143).

Poor, miserable shepherd; poor Giacomo Leopardi.

I’ll fight alone, I’ll fall alone - Giacomo Leopardi inspires Daniel Deronda

A poem of Giacomo Leopardi made a surprising appearance in Daniel Deronda (1876).  I mean I was surprised.  The beautiful Jewish singer Mirah is shown, to the extent a novel can show such a thing, as performing a single song, a setting of Leopardi’s 1818 “To Italy” (“All’Italia”), his first published poem.  He was twenty at the time and had mostly written and published, as teens do, works of Greek philology.

In chapter 39, Mirah runs through a fictional music setting – if that means anything – we can’t hear it regardless – of “some words” of Leopardi’s poem:

O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi
        E le colonne e i simulacri e l’erme
        Torri degli avi nostri
        Ma la gloria non vedo

Or in Jonathan Galassi’s translation (Canti, 2010, p., 3) – Eliot of course just has the untranslated Italian:

   O my country, I can see the walls
and arches and the columns and the statues
and lonely towers of our ancestors,
But I don’t see the glory;

The title of the poems tells us that Leopardi is writing about Rome and Italy, but Eliot appropriates the lines to invoke the Jews exile from their homeland.  The lyrics link to a later episode about a painting set in the ruins of Jerusalem.

Deronda later hears Mirah perform the song at a concert:

He knew well Leopardi's fine Ode to Italy (when Italy sat like a disconsolate mother in chains, hiding her face on her knees and weeping), and the few selected words were filled for him with the grandeur of the whole, which seemed to breathe an inspiration through the music…  Certain words not included in the song nevertheless rang within Deronda as harmonies from the invisible –

            ‘Non ti difende
  Nessun de’ tuoi?  L'armi, qua l'armi: io solo
  Combatterò, procomberò sol io’ –

they seemed the very voice of that heroic passion which is falsely said to devote itself in vain when it achieves the god-like end of manifesting unselfish love.   (Ch. 45, boldface mine)

I don’t know anything about Leopardi’s reception in English, but I found this scenes curious.  Deronda already knows the poems so well that hearing it evokes lines that are not in the song!

        None of your own defend you?
To arms!  Bring me my sword:
I’ll fight alone, I’ll fall alone.   (ll.36-38, Galassi again)

The removal of the Italian context is slyly done here, as Deronda unconsciously (at this point) shifts “you” from Italy to Mirah and her people.   To Deronda, the song creates “the vivid image of a man dying helplessly away from the possibility of battle.”  At the end of the novel, he will have launched himself into battle, no longer alone.

Leopardi makes a strange move in his ode (which is five pages long, thus the “few selected words” in the song) – he shifts the action and point of view to the Spartans at Thermopylae.  What first looks like a patriotic poem in the tradition of Alfieri (tyrants are overthrown) and Foscolo (tombs are embraced) becomes more strangely personal, with Leopardi imagining himself as a soldier in the service of antiquity.  Italian patriotism is, as with Foscolo, cultural and literary. 

If only I were down below with you,
and this sweet earth were wet with my blood, too.
But if my fate is unlike yours,
and will not let me shut my eyes
dying fallen on the field of Greece,
still may the modest glory of your bard,
if the gods allow it,
endure as long as yours
in times to come.  (ll. 132-140)

I’ll spend a couple more days seeing how the bard did.

Now that Italian valor lies uprooted, one huge ruin - Leopardi, Belli, Manzoni, Nievo

I went to a different Leopardi poem, Canto VI, “Bruto Minore, ” p. 57 in Galassi.  Giacomo Leopardi is the great poet and essayist of pessimism.  I am tempted to go on and on about him, but I should save that for a longer treatment.

One inspiration for turning to Italian literature was to take a crack at the 2010 Jonathan Galassi translation of Leopardi’s Canti (1818-35), which is proving to be ideal as a study guide.  The translation is on the literal side, and not so poetic.  The J. G. Nichols translations from 1994 are more poetic.  Nichols matches each poem to a prose selection from elsewhere in Leopardi’s gigantic corpus, from his brilliantly ironic essays and dialogues or his enormous ragbag book Zibaldone.

The latter appeared in English last year, almost 2,600 pages by a team of translators, quite a feat.  A sane reader will want to start with the selections assembled by Leopardi in the (short) book Pensieri, and to the Canti, and the Moral Essays, and then will want to return to them again and again, until he decides to write a monograph on Leopardi, and only then will he want to read Zibaldone, although in Italian, obviously.

You give Zibaldone a try and tell me how it goes.  I’m not going to read it.

Giuseppe Belli was a contemporary of Leopardi’s, but otherwise a polar opposite.  He wrote satirical sonnets, most profane, obscene, or both, in Romanish, the Roman dialect.  You may have noticed that every writer I have mentioned so far has been from northern Italy.  Belli stretches Italian literature to Rome for me.  The rough, crackly Harold Norse translation is a great treat – he moves the dialect into Brooklynese to good effect – but these five poems recently done up by Charles Martin give the flavor of Belli.

Two early novels, both candidates for Greatest Italian Novel.  I have read Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827 / 1842) twice and do not plan to revisit it now – someday, I hope – but I recommend it highly.  It is a strange book, a mix of sentimentalism and grit, Catholic apologetics and action.  It’s structure is odd, its characterization is odd.  It is a historical novel, set during a 17th century Austrian invasion of northern Italy.  The plague scenes are horrifying.  With Decameron, this means two of the greatest prose fictions in Italian are about plague epidemics.

The other novel.  I was poking around on the internet trying to find a novel I had looked through in a library.  Success!  The Castle of Fratta by Ippolito Nievo, which I was surprised to discover was only an abridgment of a much longer novel, Confessions of an Italian (1867), which I was even more surprised to see will be published in a complete 928 page translation in the United States in three weeks.  Which I took as a sign that I should take a swing at it.  No idea what I am getting into.  The novel has maps and a timeline and a list of characters.  The list of characters includes a dog.  Is it an Italian War and Peace?  Or an Italian The Count of Monte Cristo?  Or, like The Betrothed, something unique.  Italo Calvino loves the book, but he is not to be trusted, since he, like me, likes everything.

Aside from writing a thousand page novel when he was 27, Nievo was a revolutionary and follower of Garibaldi, a real adventurer, who sadly drowned in a shipwreck, age 29, before he had found a publisher.  There’s some Italian valor.

one man unworthy of his cowardly age - Alfieri, Goldoni, and Foscolo - 700 words and I can only cover three writers

What is Italian literature?  I ignored the question; it is an important one for this literature.  These judgments are always retrospective: Italian literature is what people interested in the subject treat as Italian literature.  But I am not only working with a conventional contemporary idea, but a central question going back to Dante, at the least.  What is the Italian language?  What is Italy?

Yesterday I glanced at some of the highlights of almost three hundred years of arguing about these questions, the extraordinary run from Dante Alighieri to the visionary poet Tommaso Campanella, who gets us into the 17th century.  Something happens to the literature then; the life sputters out of it.  My glib explanation is the Counter-Reformation.  But around 1609, Claudio Monteverdi perfected and popularized the form of musical theater we for some reason call opera, and if anything the cultural prestige of Italian music only increased.  There was no obvious lack of, to use a dubious metaphor, cultural energy in northern Italian kingdoms and cities.

I don’t know what happened to Italian literature.  Spanish literature caught the same flu about fifty years later and took two hundred years to recover.

My next Italian landmark is the Venetian comic playwright Carlo Goldoni in the mid-18th century, author of The Servant of Two Masters (1743) and dozens of other comedies.  I read a couple over the weekend, including the recent adaptation by Richard Bean, One Man, Two Guvnors (2011) that was such a big hit in London.  That is one funny play.  I’ll write about these soon.

Then there is the proto-Romantic Count Vittorio Alfieri, founder of Italian tragedy, possibly the only Italian tragedian of consequence.  He is a giant in Italian but not in English, and I can guess why – first, English barely has room for its own tragedies, and second, Alfieri’s almost singular dramatic theme was the overthrow of tyrants, which may have more juice in Italy and France than in England or the United States.

I’ve read his best known  play, Saul (1782), about the overthrow of a tyrant, and am now reading his posthumous (1806) Autobiography, about the triumph of a tyrant.  I have gotten to some good stuff, but not to the good stuff, e.g.:

… claiming to be a democrat because he never struck his servants with anything but his open hand, yet stretching out his valet with a bronze candlestick because the valet pulled his hair slightly while combing it…  and then sleeping – or claiming to sleep – with his bedroom door always open so that the valet might come in and, in revenge, murder him in his sleep.  (Ford Madox Ford on p. 655 of The March of Literature, first ellipses mine, second his)

A big personality.  It might make similar sense to read a couple more autobiographies contemporary with Alfieri, the Memoirs of Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte or more temptingly the massive Story of My Life of Giacomo Casanova, but I doubt that will happen.

Finally, the 19th century.  I plan to revisit to major figures from Italian Romanticism.  One is Ugo Foscolo, a genuine revolutionary and  fine poet although with a lyrical gift that has perhaps defeated his translators.  I remember many years ago running across a website with some lovely versions of Foscolo’s Graces (1803-1822) but I cannot find it now.  Foscolo also wrote The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1802), a novella that is a conceptual politicized Italianization of The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I hope to revisit it and see if it is as clever as I remember.  Or impassioned, or propagandistic, or whatever it is.

And then there is Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi.  The title quotation is again from Leopardi, from the same poem I used yesterday (p. 39), and is a description of Alfieri.

                                           He was the first to go
down into the ring alone, and no one followed,
for idleness and brutal silence now own us most of all.

The idea that Leopardi can be described as idle or silent is hilarious.  But look how long I have gone on.  I will start with Leopardi tomorrow.  I gotta pick up the pace.  At this rate – well, pretty soon I’ll get to books I haven’t read.  My ignorance should constrain the babble.