, Signature Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi ( Italian:; 29 June 1798 – 14 June 1837) was an Italian philosopher, poet, essayist,. He is considered the greatest poet of the Italian nineteenth century and one of the most important figures in the literature of the world, as well as one of the principal of literary romanticism; the depth of his reflection on existence and on the human condition - of and inspiration - also makes him a thick philosopher. He is widely seen as one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century. Although he lived in a secluded town in the conservative, he came in touch with the main ideas of the, and through his own literary evolution, created a remarkable and renowned poetic work, related to the era. The strongly lyrical quality of his poetry made him a central figure on the European and international literary and cultural landscape. Palace of Leopardi in Giacomo Leopardi was born into a local noble family in, in the, at the time ruled by the.
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His father, Count, who was fond of literature but weak and reactionary, remained bound to antiquated ideas and prejudices. His mother, Marchioness Adelaide Antici Mattei, was a cold and authoritarian woman, obsessed with rebuilding the family's financial fortunes, which had been destroyed by her husband's gambling addiction. A rigorous discipline of religion and economy reigned in the home. However, Giacomo's happy childhood, which he spent with his younger brother Carlo Orazio and his sister Paolina, left its mark on the poet, who recorded his experiences in the poem Le Ricordanze.
Leopardi Following a family tradition, Leopardi began his studies under the tutelage of two priests, but his thirst for knowledge was quenched primarily in his father's rich library. Initially guided by Father Sebastiano Sanchini, Leopardi undertook vast and profound reading. These 'mad and most desperate' studies included an extraordinary knowledge of classical and philological culture – he could fluently read and write Latin, ancient Greek and Hebrew – but he lacked an open and stimulating formal education. Between the ages of twelve and nineteen, he studied constantly, driven also by a need to escape spiritually from the rigid environment of the paternal palazzo. His continual studies undermined an already fragile physical constitution, and his illness, probably or, denied him youth's simplest pleasures. In 1817 the classicist arrived at the Leopardi estate. To Giacomo he became a lifelong friend and derived from this a sense of hope for the future.
Meanwhile, his life at Recanati weighed on him increasingly, to the point where he attempted to escape in 1818, but he was caught by his father and brought home. Thereafter relations between father and son continued to deteriorate, and Giacomo was constantly monitored by the rest of the family. When in 1822 he was briefly able to stay in Rome with his uncle, he was deeply disappointed by the mood of corruption and decadence and by the hypocrisy of the Church. He was impressed by the tomb of, to whom he felt bound by a common sense of unhappiness.
While lived tumultuously between adventures, amorous relations, and books, Leopardi was barely able to escape from his domestic oppression. To Leopardi, seemed squalid and modest when compared to the idealized image that he had created of it.
He had already suffered disillusionment in love at home, with his cousin Geltrude Cassi. Meanwhile, his physical ailments continued to worsen. In 1824, a bookstore owner, Stella, called him to Milan, asking him to write several works, including Crestomazia della prosa e della poesia italiane.
He moved during this period between,. Leopardi on his deathbed, 1837.
In 1827 in Florence, Leopardi met, although they did not see things eye to eye. He paid a visit to Giordani and met the historian.
In 1828, physically infirm and worn out by work, Leopardi had refused the offer of a professorship in Bonn or Berlin, made by the Ambassador of Prussia in Rome. In the same year, he had to abandon his work with Stella and return to Recanati. In 1830, Colletta offered him a chance to return to Florence, thanks to a financial contribution from the 'Friends of Tuscany'. The subsequent printing of the Canti allowed him to live away from Recanati until 1832. Later he moved to Naples near his friend Antonio Ranieri, hoping to benefit physically from the climate. He died during the cholera epidemic of 1837, the immediate cause probably being or, due his fragile physical condition.
Thanks to Antonio Ranieri's intervention with the authorities, Leopardi's remains were not buried in a common grave (as the strict hygiene regulations of the time required), but in the atrium of the Church of San Vitale at. In 1898 his tomb was moved to the and declared a national monument. There have been suggestions in academic circles that Leopardi may have had homosexual tendencies. His intimate friendships with other men, particularly Ranieri, involved expressions of love and desire beyond what was typical even of Romantic poets. He also wrote in his poetry of directing amorous attention on the younger brother of a woman he admired.
In 1830, Leopardi received a letter from, nowadays interpreted as a declaration of brotherhood. Leopardi's close friend was a. In the course of his life, Leopardi had more than twenty-five sentimental female friendships, such as the ones with pr. The Leopardi's family share the origin of, at the time of the Roman emperor St. Pensaments ( Pensieri) by Leopardi: a Catalan translation from Italian These were rough years for Leopardi, as he started developing his concept of Nature. At first he saw this as 'benevolent' to mankind, helping to distract people from their sufferings.
Later, by 1819, his idea of Nature became dominated by a destructive mechanism. Leopardi up to 1815 was essentially an erudite philologist. Thereafter he began to dedicate himself to literature and the search for beauty, as he affirms in a famous letter to Giordani of 1817. Pompeo in Egitto (Pompey in Egypt, 1812), written at the age of fourteen, is an anti-Caesar manifesto. Pompey is seen as the defender of republican liberties. Storia dell'Astronomia ('History of Astronomy', 1813) is a compilation of all of the knowledge accumulated in this field up to the time of Leopardi. From the same year is Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi (Essay on the popular errors of the ancients), which brings the ancient myths back to life.
The 'errors' are the fantastic and vague imaginings of the ancients. Antiquity, in Leopardi's vision, is the infancy of the human species, which sees the personifications of its myths and dreams in the stars.
The year 1815 saw the production of Orazione agli Italiani in Occasione della Liberazione del Piceno (Oration to the Italians on the liberation of Piceno), a paean to the liberation achieved by Italy after the intervention of the Austrians against. In the same year he translated (the war between the frogs and mice in which Zeus eventually sends in the crabs to exterminate them all), an ironic rhapsody which pokes fun at Homer's Iliad and was once attributed to him. In 1816 Leopardi published Discorso sopra la vita e le opere di Frontone (Discourse on the life and works of ). In the same year, however, he entered a period of crisis. He wrote L'appressamento della morte, a poem in terza rima in which the poet experiences death, which he believes to be imminent, as a comfort.
Meanwhile, there began other physical sufferings and a serious degeneration of his eyesight. He was acutely aware of the contrast between the interior life of man and his incapacity to manifest it in his relations with others. Leopardi abandoned his philological studies and moved increasingly toward poetry through reading Italian authors of the 14th, 16th and 17th centuries, and some of his Italian and French contemporaries. His vision of the world underwent a change: he ceased to seek comfort in religion, which had permeated his childhood, and became increasingly inclined toward an empirical and mechanistic vision of the universe inspired by among others. In 1816 the idylls Le rimembranze and Inno a Nettuno ('Hymn to Neptune') were published. The second, written in ancient Greek, was taken by many critics as an authentic Greek classic. He also translated the second book of the and the first book of the.
In the same year, in a letter to the compilers of the Biblioteca Italiana (Monti, Acerbi, Giordani), Leopardi argued against 's article inviting Italians to stop looking to the past and study the works of foreigners, so as to reinvigorate their literature. Leopardi maintained that 'knowing', which is acceptable, is not the same thing as 'imitating', which is what Madame de Stael demanded, and that Italian literature should not allow itself to be contaminated by modern forms of literature, but look to the Greek and Latin classics.
A poet must be original, not suffocated by study and imitation: only the first poet in the history of humanity could have been truly original, since he had had no one to influence him. It was therefore necessary to get as close to the originals as possible, by drawing inspiration from one's own feelings, without imitating anyone. Thanks to his friendship with Giordani, with whom, in 1817, he had begun a prolific correspondence, his distancing from the conservatism of his father became even sharper.
It was in the following year that he wrote All'Italia ('To Italy') and Sopra il Monumento di Dante ('On the Monument of '), two very polemical and classical patriotic hymns in which Leopardi expressed his adherence to liberal and strongly secular ideas. In the same period, he participated in the debate, which engulfed the literary Europe of the time, between the classicists and the romanticists, affirming his position in favour of the first in the Discorso di un Italiano attorno alla poesia romantica ('Discourse of an Italian concerning romantic poetry'). In 1817 he fell in love with Gertrude Cassi Lazzari and wrote Memorie del primo amore ('Memories of first love'). In 1818 he published Il primo amore and began writing a diary which he would continue for fifteen years (1817–1832), the Zibaldone. The Zibaldone.
Zibaldone di pensieri, written by Leopardi The di pensieri (see also ) is a collection of personal impressions, aphorisms, profound philosophical observations, philological analyses, literary criticism and various types of which was published posthumously in seven volumes in 1898 with the original title of Pensieri di varia filosofia e bella letteratura ('Various thoughts on philosophy and literature'). The publication took place thanks to a special governmental commission presided over by in occasion of the centennial anniversary of the poet's birth. It was only in 1937, after the republication of the original text enriched with notes and indices by the literary critic Francesco Flora, that the work definitively took on the name by which it is known today.
In the Zibaldone, Leopardi compares the innocent and happy state of nature with the condition of modern man, corrupted by an excessively developed faculty of reason which, rejecting the necessary illusions of myth and religion in favor of a dark reality of annihilation and emptiness, can only generate unhappiness. The Zibaldone contains the poetic and existential itinerary of Leopardi himself; it is a miscellanea of philosophical annotations, schemes, entire compositions, moral reflections, judgements, small idylls, erudite discussions and impressions. Leopardi, even while remaining outside of the circles of philosophical debate of his century, was able to elaborate an extremely innovative and provocative vision of the world.
It is not much of a stretch to define Leopardi as the father of what would eventually come to be called., in mentioning the great minds of all ages who opposed and expressed their knowledge of the world's misery, wrote: But no one has treated this subject so thoroughly and exhaustively as Leopardi in our own day. He is entirely imbued and penetrated with it; everywhere his theme is the mockery and wretchedness of this existence. He presents it on every page of his works, yet in such a multiplicity of forms and applications, with such a wealth of imagery, that he never wearies us, but, on the contrary, has a diverting and stimulating effect. Main article: Between the years 1823 and 1828, Leopardi set aside lyric poetry in order to compose his prose magnum opus, Operette morali ('Small Moral Works'), which consists (in its final form) of a series of 24 innovative dialogues and fictional essays treating a variety of themes that had already become familiar to his work by then. One of the most famous dialogue is: Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese, in which the author expresses his main philosophical ideas. Canti Pisano-Recanatesi (1823–1832) After 1823, Leopardi abandoned the myths and illustrious figures of the past, which he now considered to be transformed into meaningless symbols and turned to writing about suffering in a more 'cosmic' sense. Il Risorgimento In 1828, Leopardi returned to lyric poetry with Il Risorgimento ('Resurgence').
The poem is essentially a history of the spiritual development of the poet from the day in which he came to believe that every pulse of life had died out in his soul to the moment in which the lyrical and the sentimental were reawakened in him. A strange torpor had rendered him apathetic, indifferent to suffering, to love, to desire, and to hope. Life had seemed desolate to him until the ice began to melt and the soul, reawakening, finally felt the revivification of the ancient illusions. Having reconquered the gift of sentiment, the poet accepts life as it is because it is revived by the feeling of suffering which torments his heart and, so long as he lives, he will not rebel against those who condemn him to live. This recovered serenity consists in the contemplation of one's own conscience of one's own sentiments, even when desolation and despair envelop the soul. Leopardi rejoices to have rediscovered in himself the capacity to be moved and to experience pain, after a long period of impassibility and boredom.
With Risorgimento, lyricism is reawakened in the poet, who composes canti, generally brief, in which a small spark or a scene is expanded, extending itself into an eternal vision of existence. He reevokes images, memories and moments of past happiness. A Silvia. : Monument to Clelia Severini (1825), which inspired the poem. In the canto Sopra un bassorilievo antico sepolcrale ('Over an Ancient Sepulchre Bas-relief'), a young woman has died and is represented in the act of saying goodbye to her loved ones. The poet weighs the pros and cons of death, remaining in doubt about whether the young woman's destiny is good or bad. Leopardi, even while being highly conscious of the indifference of nature, never ceased entirely to love it.
In these verses, the poet poses challenging and pointed questions to nature, enumerating the ills and sufferings which, because of death, are inflicted on humanity. Under the influence of love, the poet had apparently found happiness at least in death ( Il pensiero dominante, Amore e morte). Now, instead, even this last illusion has fallen and he sees nothing but unhappiness everywhere. Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna scolpito nel monumento sepolcrale della medesima ('On the portrait of a beautiful woman sculpted in her sepulchral monument') is basically an extension of the above. The poet, drawing his inspiration from a funerary sculpture, evokes the image of a beautiful woman and compares her breathtaking beauty to the heart-rendingly sad image that she has become; one that is no more than mud, dust and skeleton. As well as being centred on the transience of beauty and of human things, the poem points to the specular between human ideals and natural truth.
Leopardi does not deny—if anything, he emphasizes—the beauty of the human species in general, and by the end of the poem extends his point to all possible forms of beauty, intellectual as well as aesthetic. However, this universal beauty remains unattainable to a human nature that is nothing but 'polvere e ombra' ('dust and shadow'), and that may touch—but never possess—the ideals that it perceives, remaining rooted to the natural world in which it was born, as well as to its demands. La ginestra. The tomb of Leopardi (, ).
In March 1837, shortly before his death, Leopardi announced that he would gather into one volume some 'thoughts' ('pensieri') on man and society. Such a collection was supposed to be part of a French edition of the complete works of Leopardi.
A few months later (on 14 June) the poet died, leaving the work incomplete and the fragments were published by his friend Ranieri, who also provided the title. The bulk of the contents of Pensieri are derived from the Zibaldone. The tone is sharply argumentative with respect to humanity, which Leopardi judges to be malevolent and it almost seems as if the poet wants to take his final revenge on the world.
Leopardian poetics. Main article: In popular culture.
In 'The Part about the Crimes', the fourth part of 's novel 2666, Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia is extensively quoted by a television psychic named Florita Almada who somewhat confuses it for an account of the early life of. refers to Leopardi's work several times in his critical study and quotes a passage from 'A Se Stesso,' 'non che la speme il desiderio,' in the English version of his novel. The title of 's album, is a quotation from the same poem. The 2014 Italian film is about his life. Selected English translations. Leopardi, Giacomo (1923).
The Poems of Leopardi. Text, translation and commentary by G.L. New York: New American Library. Leopardi, Giacomo (1966). Giacomo Leopardi – Selected Prose and Poetry.
Edited, translated and introduced. New York: New American Library. Leopardi, Giacomo (1976). The War of the Mice and the Crabs.
Translated by Ernesto G. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Leopardi, Giacomo (1982). Operette Morali – Essays and Dialogues.
Translated by Giovanni Cecchetti. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leopardi, Giacomo (1997). Leopardi – Selected Poems.
Translated by Eamon Grennan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leopardi, Giacomo (1998). The Canti, with a selection of his prose. Translated by J.G. Manchester: Carcanet Press.
Leopardi, Giacomo (1998). The Letters of Giacomo Leopardi, 1817–1837.
Edited and translated by Prue Shaw. Leeds: Northern Universities Press. Leopardi, Giacomo (2002). Translated by J.G. London: Hesperus Classics.
Leopardi, Giacomo (2010). Dialogue between Fashion and Death. Translated by Giovanni Cecchetti.
London: Penguin Classics. Leopardi, Giacomo (2010). Translated by Jonathan Galassi. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Leopardi, Giacomo (2013). Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Leopardi. Edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino; translated by Kathleen Baldwin et al.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Leopardi, Giacomo (2014).
Translated by Tim Parks. New Haven: Yale University Press. See also. – Russian poet often compared to Leopardi References.