Passions

by Giacomo Leopardi, Tim Parks (Translator)

Selections from Leopardi’s prose masterwork, Zibaldone , one of the great intellectual diaries in European literature, expertly translated by Tim Parks

Revenge —Revenge is so sweet one often wishes to be insulted so as to be able to take revenge, and I don’t mean just by an old enemy, but anyone, or even (especially when in a really bad mood) by a friend . —from Passions
 
The extraordinary quality of Giacomo Leopardi’s writing and the innovative nature of his thought were never fully recognized in his lifetime. Zibaldone , his 4,500-page intellectual diary—a vast collection of thoughts on philosophy, civilization, literary criticism, linguistics, humankind and its vanities, and other varied topics—remained unpublished until more than a half-century after his death. But shortly before he died, Leopardi began to organize a small, thematic collection of his writings in an attempt to give structure and system to his philosophical musings. Now freshly translated into English by master translator, novelist, and critic Tim Parks, Leopardi’s Passions presents 164 entries reflecting the full breadth of human passion. The volume offers a fascinating introduction to Leopardi’s arguments and insights, as well as a glimpse of the concerns of thinkers to come, among them Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Wittgenstein, Gadda, and Beckett.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

232 pages, Hardcover

Published October 7, 2014

About the author

Italian scholar, poet, essayist and philosopher, one of the great writers of the 19th century.
Leopardi's love problems inspired some of his saddest lyrics. Despite having lived in a small town, Leopardi was in touch with the main ideas of the Enlightenment movement. His literary evolution turned him into one of the well known Romantic poets.
In his late years, when he lived in an ambiguous relationship with his friend Antonio Ranieri on the slopes of Vesuvius, Leopardi meditated upon the possibility of the total destruction of humankind.
Leopardi was a contemporary of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, with whom he shared a similarly pessimistic view of life. The latter praised Leopardi's philosophical thoughts on The World as Will and Representation.

Reviews

[Raphael Lysander · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading Marcus Aurelius's meditations, Montaigne's and Schopenhauer's essays and now Leopardi's works I started strongly to believe that the best philosophy that which is personal and written for the self, not the kind of philosophy to win an argument over other philosophers or proof some bewildering theory to gain praise

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I approach middle age I only rarely find myself reading poetry. Oh, Rilke is always close by, Wallace Stevens often hovers during a moonlit idyll, and I have come to be convinced that John Ashbery has mysterious lessons to teach me. These are the exceptions, marked as such. But as a teenager! As a teenager I read and wrote poetry with industrious zeal! Giacomo Leopardi made a massive impression on me in those bygone days. For a poet of the early 19th century he struck me as insanely modern. A seer in those terms. Glorious frontiersman of the spirit. I responded in his work to an élan of yearning primarily metaphysical, a God-sized yearning that would accept no God for succor, a yearning that was amorous only at its most rudimentary layer. I still think about that poetry from time to time. I still think about youth, malodorous abomination though it generally was. PASSIONS collects a sample of diaristic prose meditations of an essentially philosophical nature written by this noted poet I once revered, this poet who lived an abbreviated, notably infirm life, persistently unlucky and slumped over with scoliosis. These samples are taken from ZIBALDONE, a “bundle," per translator/editor Tim Parks, of 4,500 "loose pages,” two-thirds written between ages twenty-three and twenty-five, not to see any form of publication until many, many years after Leopardi's death. We might hold it as a strike against PASSIONS that it is merely a kind of aperitif, but I suspect many like myself will, having read it, conclude that the entirety of the massive ZIBALDONE would seem best left to the specialists, bless their dear hearts. ZIBALDONE was complicatedly indexed by theme, most entries preceded by a list of a number of the applicable subheadings. Parks’ selection is comprised of entries that, whatever other subheadings are attached to them, correspond to “Treatise on the Passions, Human Qualities, etc.” A worthy subject, to be sure. Leopardi was a son of the very minor aristocracy, born in Recanti, something of a middle-of-nowhere. The upshot of his father's being irresponsible with money was that Leopardi spent the bulk of his youth in a resplendent family library, an eminently rare dispensation in his place and time. Has mastered Latin, Greek, German, and French by age ten. He would go on to master Hebrew and English. In his introduction, Tim Parks gets to the bottom of Leopardi's situation and would seem to unconsciously betray the nature of the liabilities evident in the text at hand: Giacomo was “widely read but entirely untravelled and socially inexperienced.” The various casually essayistic fragments on display in PASSIONS speak to the dubiousness of fashioning axiomatic declarations out of general observations, especially should you happen to be "entirely untravelled and socially inexperienced." On account of this I feel it my obligation to declare that the book is of interest as a fascinating curiosity rather than as a vehicle presenting thinking of some actual use to me. You will note that Leopardi was but twenty-eight years younger than Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, from whom he (mercifully) could hardly be more different. In Hegel (and German Idealism) we have berserk but admirably prodigious ontological world-modelling. You may feel free to call it pure abstraction if it so pleases you. Leopardi is not only mildly conversational in comparison, but he is only interested in wisdom applicable to lived experience. He goes to Cicero and Virgil etc. to glean what they tell us about the lived human experience. Leopardi sees self-regard as the precondition for all that is human. At first self-regard and egoism are conflated, but as his thought develops over time, self-regard takes the form of necessary precondition and egoism as its coarse perversion. Envy is central in Leopardi, even when not addressed explicitly. There is bitterness about civilization and progress, the supplanting of the natural by the rational. Though Leopardi is a thinker in touch with malaise--embedded student, though he doesn't address it in these terms, of Spinoza's "sad passions"--he is also a thinker grounded in no small amount of bitterness and active resentment. He does anything but unleash a dormant potency in his work, so it is my contention that he only barely looks forward to Nietzsche, who I was recently amused to read Vilém Flusser declare “personifies the absurdity of pride.” No, indeed he has much more in common with the odious Schopenhauer, that German personification of reactive, impotent resentment. Social and amorous incapacities have been known to incubate nasty fellows. Please let is be noted that I do not think Leopardi is nearly so odious as is Schopenhauer. He also looks forward to existential thought. He would seem to share with Heidegger (and, you know, the Nazis), Mr. Dasein's romantic swoon over past epochs when compared to manifold abominations contemporaneous. You may sense that I find such selectively-cultivated attitudes puerile. I will take Kierkegaard over Leopardi any day. If Kierkegaard does a glorious job of cataloguing species of torment, he is actively engaged in active overcoming. When we are young and pleased about how despondent we are (should we happen to be of that type), it may be convenient for us to overlook the extraordinary value of Kierkegaard's engagement with faith. With any luck we eventually smarten up. I am not talking about church and deity. I am talking about something far more fundamental. I am talking about thinking that is useful to you. Leoardi writes about hope. Fleeting, conditional hope. Ebb and flow of fear and hope. It would not appear to have ever struck him that a human being might be well served by developing some efficacious architecture of thought serving his, her, or what-have-you's relationship with their horizon. It was easier for Leopardi to consider suicide, a thing he appears to have been fond of doing. I would argue that suicide is eminently reasonable when the situation is cataclysmically fucked, less so when considered as a solution to low-grade blue-hued despond. Trust me: there is personal work available to you and it is worth considering with some seriousness. As has been said, Leopardi is definitely a bit like Dostoevsky's man from underground avant la lettre. The man from underground, of course, was a symptom, and a dispiriting one, not any kind of ideal. Marx and Engels and Dostoevsky appear to many to have diagnosed the condition of modern alienation. Leopardi is definitely a precursor in those terms. PASSIONS contains some pretty terrific stuff. It is best when you sense it is most deeply personal. I think I was struck most by a passage in which Leopardi writes of a timidity that is more afraid of shame than of death. I felt in reading this that the man had revealed something very powerful about himself and a particular mode of experience. There are all sorts of 'particular modes of experience' that are nicely encapsulated in PASSIONS. I think he has a special understanding of personal liabilities and human failings. One might says he also looks forward to Balzac, whose ridiculously many novels are at least in part a massive encyclopedia of defects of character. However, Leopardi uniformly errs when he wishes to draw broad conclusions. PASSIONS subjects us to many extremely specious lines of argumentation such as that which precedes from the supposition that looking forward to or reflecting on pleasure are preferable to experiencing pleasure to the baffling conclusion that “the worst time of our lives is the moment of pleasure and enjoyment.” This is a deeply perverse line of reasoning that would seem to circumvent any pleasure worth looking forward to or reflecting upon, a sleight of hand perhaps all too convenient for the congenitally maudlin Leopardi. His assertion that “there’s no doubt that good-looking people are for the most part mean” is emblematic, suggesting as it does bitter personal experience rather than general rule (which is what it presents itself as). That we find people enjoying themselves hateful unless we have procured for them that which they are enjoying (self-regard)? Speak for yourself, my poor dear man. That the ZIBALDONE was compiled over an expanse of years means that their author's thinking would alter in some regards, as well should be the case. Predictably, his perspective has a tendency to become more downcast over time. Early on Leopardi extols the extreme importance of virtue to all children. Well, uh, dubious. Later he tells us that children exult more than other human beings in pointless destruction. What can I say? Heh heh. I have certainly seen more evidence in support of the latter viewpoint. That the universal truths Leopardi presumes to be imparting are very personal projections becomes nowhere more self-evident than when he attributes certain subjective experiences of enmity to animals. There can be no denying that Leopardi makes for an utterly fascinating case study. He was ahead of and outside of his time. He was also clearly a monumentally important poet. I don't even find it egregious that Italian school children are made to read some of the amusing malarkey I have just read with what I presume is supposed to be a studious absence of irony. Maybe I even glory in it a little. But, really, PASSIONS is not going to convert you to anything you ought to be converted to. It is often outright fatuous. I liked very much Tim Parks' introduction but most especially the twenty page "Translator's Note" with which the volume terminates. It turns out that Leopardi's language itself had a determinedly Brian Wilson I-Just-Wasn't-Made-for-These-Times quality.

[poslyn rosen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read full sections of the zibaldone, and somehow these are all the worst, least interesting things leopardi has ever said. However the worst things leopardi ever said are still pretty good, but nothing that special in this. Would recommend reading parts of the whole thing, instead of this seemingly popular section of it.

[Zoë]

Loved the translation!

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5