5/11/2014 Book review: Zibaldone, By Giacomo Leopardi, eds. Michael Caesar, Franco D'Intino - Reviews - Books - The Independent

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Now superseded by blogs, their virtual cousin, commonplacebooks are so rarely kept these days, let alone published, that it iseasy to forget how ubiquitous they once were. As sought-after asBibles from the Renaissance to the 18th century, they were stillin such high demand in the 19th that Mark Twain's soleprofitable invention was his "self-pasting scrapbook", whosepages were lined with adhesive strips to avoid any gluey mishaps.

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Nevertheless, the genre had mostly diedby the second half of the 20th century,despite the odd releases by statesmenand poets in their dotages, like the UN

Book review: Zibaldone, By Giacomo Leopardi,eds. Michael Caesar, Franco D'Intino

This extraordinary 'mish-mash' opens up the creative workshop of Italy's greatRomantic poet

ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY

Friday 23 August 2013

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5/11/2014 Book review: Zibaldone, By Giacomo Leopardi, eds. Michael Caesar, Franco D'Intino - Reviews - Books - The Independent

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leader Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings(1964) or WH Auden's A Certain World(1970). Yet unlike the majority of hispredecessors or successors, theRomantic poet Giacomo Leopardi(1798-1837) compiled his Zibaldone –Italian for mishmash – during histwenties and thirties, not that this wasunusual considering his precocious

education.

Aged 11, Leopardi had already taught himself Hebrew, Greek,Latin, German, Spanish, French and English. He spent most ofhis adolescence ensconced in his father's impressive library,from which he emerged crippled by scoliosis, his health wreckedfor life. Beginning his Zibaldone at 19, Leopardi had producedroughly 3,000 of its 4,526 pages by 26 – and when he put thefinishing touches on it in 1832, five years prior to his death, thebook stood at just under a million words.

Coincidentally, Leopardi put the Zibaldone aside just as Goethefinished the second part of his Faust, and the two share afascination with the notion that humanity had sold its soul to thedevil for progress, thereby losing the very instincts that made ushuman in the first place. As Leopardi puts it: "As man movesaway from nature and toward society, the methods that naturehasprovided for attaining those ends are changed or replaced byother methods… as man loses his natural happiness… so, too, heloses his actual power of instinct, and those inborn methods forachieving this happiness."

In these notes, Leopardi attempts to dismantle our naive pictureof the world and wrestle with the nihilism that resulted from thecollapse of our anthropocentric vision of the universe. He wasamong the first to contest the concept of eternal space andeternal time: "Nothing in nature actually announces infinity, theexistence of anything infinite. Infinity is a product of ourimagination, and at the same time of our smallness and ourpride."

Although Leopardi is chiefly remembered for the long lyricpoems that encapsulated the spirit of the Italian Risorgimento –most recently translated by Jonathan Galassi, whose superbCanti (Penguin) is an essential companion – the Zibaldone canfirmly establish his role as one of the 19th-century's greatestthinkers. Even though it's hard to imagine Nietzsche withouthim, Leopardi has always been too private a voice to claim anystrong hold on the public imagination. Thanks to thistranslation, we now have a window on his workshop and candelight in his readable and thought-provoking reflections onpolitics, philosophy, literature, philology – even a bit ofphrenology – and a wealth of tastefully selected quotes.

Finally available in English thanks to a monumental effort byMichael Caesar and Franco D'Intino – who shepherded a team ofseven principal translators – the Zibaldone marks the end ofnearly a decade of work at the University of Birmingham'sLeopardi Centre. There is something heroic about such a project;commonplace books have rarely elicited much attention,especially while their authors were still alive. Paul Valéry'sCahiers were published 30 years following his death; Milton'smouldy manuscript was discovered two centuries after his

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5/11/2014 Book review: Zibaldone, By Giacomo Leopardi, eds. Michael Caesar, Franco D'Intino - Reviews - Books - The Independent

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passing.

Congratulations are due to everyone involved in this landmarkpublication. Leopardi's Zibaldone is quite simply a work ofgenius – and what better way to end than with his own words: "Itis a property of works of genius that, even when they representvividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly showand make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life… suchworks always bring consolation, and rekindle enthusiasm, and,though they treat and represent nothing but death, they restore,albeit momentarily, the life that it had lost."

André Naffis-Sahely's translation of Laurent Seksik's 'The LastDays' is published next month by Pushkin Press

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5/11/2014 Book review: Zibaldone, By Giacomo Leopardi, eds. Michael Caesar, Franco D'Intino - Reviews - Books - The Independent

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5/11/2014 Book review: Zibaldone, By Giacomo Leopardi, eds. Michael Caesar, Franco D'Intino - Reviews - Books - The Independent

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5/11/2014 Book review: Zibaldone, By Giacomo Leopardi, eds. Michael Caesar, Franco D'Intino - Reviews - Books - The Independent

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