I first learnt of Leopardi while reading the following passage out of the “Exactitude” lecture in Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which is itself so good that I will quote it at full length, beginning with the translation of the poem Calvino is talking about:

L’Infinito

This lonely hill was always dear to me,
and this hedgerow, which cuts off the view
of so much of the last horizon.
But sitting here and gazing, I can see
beyond, in my mind’s eye, unending spaces,
and superhuman silences, and depthless calm,
till what I feel
is almost fear. And when I hear
the wind stir in these branches,
I begin comparing that endless stillness with this noise:
and the eternal comes to mind,
and the dead seasons, and the present
living one, and how it sounds.
So my mind sinks in this immensity:
and foundering is sweet in such a sea.

Calvino:

‘Here we touch on one of the nerve centers of Leopardi’s poetics, as embodied in his most famous and beautiful lyric, “L’infinito”. Protected by a hedge, on the far side of which he sees only the sky, the poet imagines infinite space and feels pleasure and fear together. The poem dates from 1819. The notes I read from the Zibaldone date from two years later and show that Leopardi went on thinking about the problem aroused by the composition of “L’infinito.” In his reflections, two terms are constantly compared: the “indefinite” and the “infinite.” For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and consolation are the only compensations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end. But since the human mind cannot conceive the infinite, and in fact falls back aghast at the very idea of it, it has to make do with what is indefinite, with sensations as they mingle together and create an impression of infinite space, illusory but pleasurable all the same: “E il naufragar m’è in questo mare” (And sweet to me is foundering in this sea). It is not only in the famous ending of “L’infinito” that gentleness prevails over fear, for what the lines communicate by the music of the words is, throughout, a sense of gentleness, even when these words express anguish.

I realize that I am interpreting Leopardi purely in terms of sensations, as if I accepted the image he wants to give of himself as a disciple of 18th century Sensism. In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes to Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time. Leopardi therefore starts with the rigorous abstraction of a mathematical notion of space and time, and compares this to the vague, undefined flux of sensations.’ (p. 55-56)

The emotional response, visceral and immediate, when I read this passage is so great that I’ll leave it standing on its own as a justification for my spending $46.00 on this book.

The Zibaldone is itself Leopardi’s creative journal, entirely composed of notes on intellectual matters that interested him, subjects as diverse as philosophy (Heidegger and Wittgenstein used his work), natural sciences, linguistics (Nietzsche recommended Leopardi’ s work to philologists), and political science.

At a towering 4, 526 pages (written in a 15 year period from 1817-1832) in the original Italian, this is a masterpiece that deserves a wider audience.