/lit/ - Literature

Here I am. I am writing my thesis for my master's degree in philosophy. Too little is said about Leopardi on /lit/. Things need to change. This guy came from the shittiest and most retrograde province of Italy and managed to shit on the heads of all the Romantics, Heidegger, the existentialists and much of the philosophy of the 20th century. Then he also predicted major socio-political changes such as the atomization of society and the fact that everything is beautiful apparently but no one is really happy anymore. He also wrote one of the few stylistically perfect books: The Operette morali.

English speakers probably do not know his full intellectual potential because the first good translation of the Zibaldone (his 4,000+ page diary/workbook) into English came out in 2013.

>>22619722
Shut the fuck up, retard

>>22619722
>english speakers
there we have it. not that your claims weren't outrageous enough before that.
how do you feel being part of the greatest problem plaguing academia, being an opinionated unscientific fuck?

how come all fucking meds/italians are like this? I met a guy who thought he discovered some secret project in hegel, another schizo retard who thought he could read heidegger with his B2 German and another fuck face who was really into American philosophy and thought that reading Peirce was special and Peirce was leagues above everyone else because he was the only one in my class who bothered to read him.

mexicans don't have complexes as bad as most italians and spaniards I've met, and Mexico is *the* cope nation. what the fuck is wrong with your cunts?

>>22619722
Any book reccs about his Zibaldone and the way he managed his notes? I'm a zettelkasten autist from /g/ and want to know more about his method.

>>22619732
Anon's claims are 'outrageous,' and what YOU endeavour to supply, as if in 'rebuttal,' is an inventory of your own personal.. experiences? Take your meds, boss
t. English speaker who's read the Z

>>22619725
>>22619732
Actually killed yourselves, retards

>>22619732
>how do you feel being part of the greatest problem plaguing academia, being an opinionated unscientific fuck?
How is he wrong? Every time people try to make a thread on Italian literature that isn't about the Comedy, it dies in less than twenty posts.

>>22619722
Tell me more, please.

>>22619587
really tempted to learn Italian just so I can read Leopardi in the original

>>22620190
No u

>>22621563
Dante, Ariosto, Petrarch, Bocaccio, Tasso, Manzoni, Eco, Leopardi.
These reasons are sufficient to learn italian

>>22621555
It is not easy to make a summary of his thought. His life is his works. He lived totally for writing and through his writing. The son of a count from a town in central Italy, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) by the age of 12 had learned everything there was to learn and his tutors were dismissed. He had at his disposal his father's library in which there were more than 120000 volumes, ancient and modern classics. His favorite authors were the Greek and Latin classics (for him the greatest poet who ever lived was Homer, (he adored Virgil and Cicero, Moschus, Lucretius, Epictetus, Lucian) and the moderns, to whom he spared no fierce criticism such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, Chateaubriand, Foscolo, Madame De Stael.

Unfortunately, during these years of study, the disease that would haunt him for the rest of his life manifested itself. It is thought to have been tuberculosis with repercussions on his skeleton (he had a hump in both front and back). He spent periods without being able to see, which caused him severe depression.

Leopardi's philosophy touches so many areas. From linguistics to aesthetics (which is what I am concerned with), politics, sociology, psychology, gnoseology, and more. His thought is often associated with pessimism, but it goes through many phases and the matter is much more complex. Certainly his intellectual forces focused on the relationship between man and nature, the difference between the ancients and the moderns, the emerging industrial society and individualism, nihilism, imagination and memory, the role of art and the existence of beauty, being and non-being, the end of the universe, the meaning of life for a materialist agnostic, and so on.

He was the greatest Italian philosopher of the 1800s and one of the greatest in Europe. Shopenhauer described him as a genius, and Nietzsche said of him that Leopardi is the greatest prose writer of the 19th century. Nietzsche himself was offered to translate Leopardi's Canti but backed out. Leopardi, like Blaise Pascal, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and later Kafka, can be seen as an existentialist or at least a precursor of Existentialism.
If you have any specific questions please ask. Sooner or later I will do a guide on Leopardi or some other thread.

>>22621572
Absolutely agree. We can also add Montale, Ungaretti, D'Annunzio, Macchiavelli, Pirandello, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Svevo and many others.

Very interesting thread. I was planning to study Italian Philology for a while – will definitely check Leopardi out once I reach a decent grasp of the language.

Would you recommend reading Opuscula Moralia in translation for a start or would that be a bad choice as a first pick?

>Immaginavi tu forse che il mondo fosse fatto per causa vostra? Ora sappi che nelle fatture, negli ordini e nelle operazioni mie, trattone pochissime, sempre ebbi ed ho l’intenzione a tutt’altro che alla felicità degli uomini o all’infelicità. Quando io vi offendo in qualunque modo e con qual si sia mezzo, io non me n’avveggo, se non rarissime volte: come, ordinariamente, se io vi diletto o vi benefico, io non lo so; e non ho fatto, come credete voi, quelle tali cose, o non fo quelle tali azioni, per dilettarvi o giovarvi. E finalmente, se anche mi avvenisse di estinguere tutta la vostra specie, io non me ne avvedrei.

I've had a copy of Zibaldone for years. It's a really fun book to flip through at random and read an interesting passage, and then follow the footnotes or the "suggested/related passages" trail. Truly an impressive work, and even the feat of translating it to another language deserves credit. I affectionately refer to the book as "the final boss of European literature".

>>22619587
Yeah, I live this deformed little gremlin. Proof that beautiful things can come in ugly packaging

>>22621572
>Eco

>>22619587
I've spent the last months thinking a lot about him.

>>22619722
He also anticipated much of Nietzsche, and was in fact one of the writers Nietzsche favored the most.
He is quite possibly the only truly great philosopher-poet of the modern era, by which I mean someone who was at the same time a great philosopher and a great poet. In my opinion he is much greater and more original than Goethe.
It is also highly illuminating to reread his poetry under the light of his philosophy, because the words start to mean something very different, and much more definite. For me he was always a great Romantic poet, like Keats or Blake, and for years that's how I saw him, being only familiar with the Canti, but after reading his Pensieri this year and some bits of the Zibaldone I realized he was much more than that, and undoubtedly the greatest author of his era.

>>22622375

Thanks man, I'm glad you appreciate this thread.

Leopardi was one of Europe's best philologists. He began his intellectual activity in his teens as a philologist. The best study on his philological activity is "The Philology of Giacomo Leopardi" by Sebastiano Timpanaro. I don't know if it is available in English or other languages.

I would say you can read the "Operette Morali" for the first time in a translated version. Leopardi invented much of modern Italian prose. It is not difficult for today's Italians to read Leopardi's writing from the early 19th century precisely because one of his goals was to give modern, fresh, philosophical prose to Italy.

>>22625262
>>22623540
>>22625149

Absolutely right

>>22619587

LeoparDEEZNUTS!

>>22619587
Yes, very much. I have read the Zibaldone and it is a criminally underrated book. I will translate some excerpts and post them.
>>22619722
This post. I just would like to add that the reason why this guy does not get the credit he deserves outside of Italy is because Italy was (and still is) and ideologically stale country. It is incredibly difficult to survive as an Italian intellectual, and Leopardi did so at the expense of his own body and health. If there is a person who has been a martyr for culture, it's this guy. It is and will forever by a shame on the cultural world of my country to have labelled him as a "pessimist" and to have attempted to bury his actual philosophical ideas so much and so deeply that he was not allowed to have the influence he deserved in Europe. Our philosophy may have taken a completely different course, if he was properly read and published - and if Nietzsche or Schopenhauer had had access to a wider amount of his works, western philosophy may have looked very different.

On top of all this, he is also one of the few writers and philosophers I have read who seemed to have been a genuinely good human being.

Has anyone read Iris Origos biography of him? Is it good?

>>22626718
What kind of philologist was he? Classical?

>>22627030
latin, greek, hebrew, modern languages etc

Oh hey just I posted my first translation from him 2 weeks ago.

Good thread. Maybe they is hope for this place yet.

>>22619732
>I met a guy who thought he discovered some secret project in hegel, another schizo retard who thought he could read heidegger with his B2 German

lol this is true. I do not know what happened, but Italians really can't get into philosophy anymore

>>22619722
>>22626957
Schopenhauer actually knew about Leopardi and read his book. Schopenhauer sarcastically remarked that Leopardi made best use of his philosophy

>>22626957
>It is and will forever by a shame on the cultural world of my country to have labelled him as a "pessimist"
It isn't limited to "your" country only. In every country Pessimists are the most marginal individuals in the culture.

I'm reading Zibaldone right now (in italian), it's really full of interesting philosophical thoughts. He actually represents the contrary of a pessimist. Even with the shitty life he has lived he kept on dreaming.

>>22619587
How do I into Leopardi?

>>22629404

>meets three or fewer people of one nationality who, in his subjective and personal opinion have some different opinions and/or gaps in philosophy
>thinks that all people of that nationality must necessarily be deficient in philosophy

>>22628139
Your translation sucks since you use AI and clearly don’t know Italian

>>22619732
dude, it's not my fault american philosophy is trash

>>22630505
American Universities are the only reason why your shitty Italian continental “philosophy” has any relevance and interest

>>22630508
bullshit, philosophy is made out of quality and not out of quantity/importance, 200 years ago Hegel was the fad, nowadays only deranged leftoids and post-leftists read and quote him, he's no longer relevant


i long for a better world where people like Giacomo Leopardi, Panagiotis Kondylis, Reinhart Koselleck and Baltasar Gracián are held to the highest order


angloids are such soulless beings i'm not even kidding

>>22622312
If he's so great why has he been ignored (in the Anglosphere) for two hundred years? Don't so no translations, because everything worthwhile has been translated into Englsh.

>>22630550
I'm looking forward to read Kondylis and Koselleck in the future – especially since there's a small Kondylis "revival" in Germany with many rereleases –, but I don't see the need of needlessly attacking Hegel.

>>22630922
Hegel attacked Ludwig Von Haller first


https://hallertime.substack.com/p/hegel-v-haller

>>22630550
Is Baltasar Gracian really worth reading? Why do you think he is? Also, have you read Koselleck's Critique and Crises? This is a book I intend reading soon.

>>22631033
all of them, dread it, read it, kneel it

What doest thou in heaven, O moon?
Say, silent moon, what doest thou?
Thou risest in the evening; thoughtfully
Thou wanderest o'er the plain,
Then sinkest to thy rest again.
And art thou never satisfied
With going o'er and o'er the selfsame ways?
Art never wearied? Dost thou still
Upon these valleys love to gaze?
How much thy life is like
The shepherd's life, forlorn!
He rises in the early dawn,
He moves his flock along the plain;
The selfsame flocks, and streams, and herbs
He sees again;
Then drops to rest, the day's work o'er;
And hopes for nothing more.
Tell me, O moon, what signifies his life
To him, thy life to thee? Say, whither tend
My weary, short-lived pilgrimage,
Thy course, that knows no end?

And old man, gray, infirm,
Half-clad, and barefoot, he,
Beneath his burden bending wearily,
O'er mountain and o'er vale,
Sharp rocks, and briars, and burning sand,
In wind, and storm, alike in sultry heat
And in the winter's cold,
His constant course doth hold;
On, on, he, panting, goes,
Nor pause, nor rest he knows;
Through rushing torrents, over watery wastes;
He falls, gets up again,
And ever more and more he hastes,
Torn, bleeding, and arrives at last
Where ends the path,
Where all his troubles end;
A vast abyss and horrible,
Where plunging headlong, he forgets them all.
Such scene of suffering, and of strife,
O moon, is this our mortal life.
In travail man is born;
His birth too oft the cause of death,
And with his earliest breath
He pain and torment feels: e'en from the first,
His parents fondly strive
To comfort him in his distress;
And if he lives and grows,
They struggle hard, as best they may,
With pleasant words and deeds to cheer him up,
And seek with kindly care,
To strengthen him his cruel lot to bear.
This is the best that they can do
For the poor child, however fond and true.
But wherefore give him life?
Why bring him up at all,
If _this_ be all?
If life is nought but pain and care,
Why, why should we the burden bear?
O spotless moon, such _is_
Our mortal life, indeed;
But thou immortal art,
Nor wilt, perhaps, unto my words give heed.

Yet thou, eternal, lonely wanderer,
Who, thoughtful, lookest on this earthly scene,
Must surely understand
What all our sighs and sufferings mean;
What means this death,
This color from our cheeks that fades,
This passing from the earth, and losing sight
Of every dear, familiar scene.
Well must thou comprehend
The reason of these things; must see
The good the morning and the evening bring:
Thou knowest, thou, what love it is
That brings sweet smiles unto the face of spring;
The meaning of the Summer's glow,
And of the Winter's frost and snow,
And of the silent, endless flight of Time.
A thousand things to thee their secrets yield,
That from the simple shepherd are concealed.
Oft as I gaze at thee
In silence resting o'er the desert plain

>>22631092
Which in the distance borders on the sky,
Or following me, as I, by slow degrees,
My flocks before me drive;
And when I gaze upon the stars at night,
In thought I ask myself,
"Why all these torches bright?
What mean these depths of air,
This vast, this silent sky,
This nightly solitude? And what am I?"
Thus to myself I talk; and of this grand,
Magnificent expanse,
And its untold inhabitants,
And all this mighty motion, and this stir
Of things above, and things below,
No rest that ever know,
But as they still revolve, must still return
Unto the place from which they came,--
Of this, alas, I find nor end nor aim!
But thou, immortal, surely knowest all.
_This_ I well know, and feel;
From these eternal rounds,
And from my being frail,
Others, perchance, may pleasure, profit gain;
To _me_ life is but pain.

My flock, now resting there, how happy thou,
That knowest not, I think, thy misery!
O how I envy thee!
Not only that from suffering
Thou seemingly art free;
That every trouble, every loss,
Each sudden fear, thou canst so soon forget;
But more because thou sufferest
No weariness of mind.
When in the shade, upon the grass reclined,
Thou seemest happy and content,
And great part of the year by thee
In sweet release from care is spent.
But when _I_ sit upon the grass
And in the friendly shade, upon my mind
A weight I feel, a sense of weariness,
That, as I sit, doth still increase
And rob me of all rest and peace.
And yet I wish for nought,
And have, till now, no reason to complain.
What joy, how much I cannot say;
But thou _some_ pleasure dost obtain.
My joys are few enough;
But not for that do I lament.
Ah, couldst thou speak, I would inquire:
Tell me, dear flock, the reason why
Each weary breast can rest at ease,
While all things round him seem to please;
And yet, if _I_ lie down to rest,
I am by anxious thoughts oppressed?

Perhaps, if I had wings
Above the clouds to fly,
And could the stars all number, one by one,
Or like the lightning leap from rock to rock,
I might be happier, my dear flock,
I might be happier, gentle moon!
Perhaps my thought still wanders from the truth,
When I at others' fortunes look:
Perhaps in every state beneath the sun,
Or high, or low, in cradle or in stall,
The day of birth is fatal to us all.

Bump for the greatest italian poet after Dante (here in Italy this opinion is quite common, suprised to see that Leopardi is so unknown internationally)

>>22630589

>everything worthwhile has been translated into Englsh

Unfortunately, this is not the case. And there are plenty of examples in the world of literature and philosophy. The first thought is not "come on, let's translate everything into English." Especially if an author fails to achieve a definite level of fame in his lifetime.

Well, there are multiple reasons, historical and political.

Leopardi's most intellectual and philosophical text, Lo Zibaldone, was bequeathed by the author to his friend Antonio Ranieri in 1837. He did not publish it and it remained in a chest for more than 60 years. The Italian Sate managed to grab it and snatched it from the maidservants to whom the Zibaldone ended up as an inheritance. It was first published in 1899. So a century after Leopardi's birth (1798).

Even after it was published it was not studied sufficiently in the twentieth century.

The fascist minister of education, the idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, considered Leopardi only a good poet of idylls.

Ironically, even one of the greatest anti-fascist intellectuals, the idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce, who was in charge of fixing Italian education (Italians still study in school today according to his subject programs) considered Leopardi only a poet.

Leopardi was used by both fascists (they admired his passion for the Italian nation, saw his pessimism as dissatisfaction with the disastrous situation of disunited Italy in the 19th century) and communists (they saw his pessimism as a denunciation of society and insisted with the idea that human beings should protect and support each other against great threats)

Today in Italy Leopardi is widely recognized as a great poet (everyone knows his poems, they have been studied since elementary school) but not as a great philosopher. Progress has been made in recent years. For example, a Leopardi Center has been founded at the University of Birmingham.

>If everything is evil, life is necessarily flawed.
>Everything is evil. That is to say everything that is, is evil; that each thing exists is an evil; each thing exists only for an evil end; existence is an evil and made for evil; the end of the universe is evil; the order and the state, the laws, the natural development of the universe are nothing but evil, and they are directed to nothing but evil. There is no other good except nonbeing; there is nothing good except what is not; things that are not things: all things are bad. All existence; the complex of so many worlds that exist; the universe; is only a spot, a speck in metaphysics.
>Existence, by its nature and essence and generally, is an imperfection, an irregularity, a monstrosity.
>There is no other good except nonbeing.
>Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone
He's beyond-blackpilled. Holy shit...

>>22633355
Sounds like he was an agent of Satan