This essay examines Giacomo Leopardi’s reflections on the future in the Zibaldone, his encyclopedic miscellany of notes and thoughts. Leopardi (1798-1837) is one of Europe’s greatest poets and ...thinkers, yet his reception outside of Italy has been relatively limited. The article aims to situate Leopardi’s ideas in the context of modern European thought and to frame his vision of futurity by examining a series of interconnected issues: the question of the modern individual’s experience of time and relationship with the future; the nature of society’s responsibility toward the generations to come; and the question of literature’s engagement with future readers. It shows how Leopardi’s philosophy of the future provided both a critique of European modernity and a response to its challenges. It also draws out the parallel issue of an author’s contemporaneity, that is her capacity to belong to her period and, at the same time, to transcend it. Thus, while resituating Leopardi’s temporal reflection within the epochal changes that took place between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the article also attempts to decouple the texts and their message from their historical period, in order to investigate Leopardi’s relevance beyond the limits of his present.
Pain is a central and recurring theme in Leopardi's theory. The poet analyzes its causes, dynamisms and remedys. In order to face pain, Leopardi suggests patience, habit, passing of time and, in ...particular, illusions. Leopardi's theory of pain is closely connected with his pedagogy of savoir vivre.
This article explores the so-far uncharted filiation of Leopardi’s understanding of language from Locke’s linguistic theory outlined in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In following ...Kristeva’s belief that language theories are predicated upon theories of the subject and Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the communicative power of the body, the article looks at the reverberations that Leopardi’s teoria del piacere (understood as an anthropological system) exerts on his theory of language and builds a neck-to-neck comparison with Locke’s linguistic functionalism. In underlining Locke’s important role for Leopardi’s theory of language, this work shows how the latter distances himself from the functionalism of Locke’s Essay by theorizing a language built on semantic vagueness and indefiniteness. This language is based on the epistemological conviction that ideas do not exist as immaterial products of the mind but rather are always incarnate in the physicality of language. In defining this kind of language as analogical, the article argues that for Leopardi the linguistic act takes the shape of a bodily gesture: language, then, is not just the concrete translation of a mental process but the movement of an embodied mind. In this sense, rather than expressing the mathematical coincidence of signifier and signified of a langue des calculs, Leopardi’s language voices the leftovers of expression, the semantic excess that Locke’s functionalism generally considers to be an error of an unsuccessful communicative act.
This paper will discuss the possibility of attributing authorship to translations by carrying out a comparative stylometric analysis of an author's poems and their translations of other writers' ...works. The paper puts forward two hypotheses. Firstly, its aim is to test whether an author's poems and translations share stylistic patterns. Secondly, it will test whether these shared patterns can be used to attribute authorship of translations. The complete works of Antonio Colinas and Eloy Sánchez Rosillo, together with their respective translations of Giacomo Leopardi's Cantos, will be used. Based on these texts, we will build computational representations that correspond to the stylistic profiles of each author, using various style cues related to metrics, grammar, and lexicon. These representations will serve as input for the calculation of similarity. Its result will allow us to determine to what extent characteristics of an author's own verses remain in the translated poems and whether there is more closeness between the two translations or between each author's poetry and their translation.
There is an eighteenth century collection of letters among sources of Leopardi's pedagogy. In March 1827 Leopardi reads Letters to His Son, composed by Lord Chesterfield, an English writer and ...politician, for his son Philip, in order to educate him to live in society and to make his own way in the world. This pedagogic lecture influences some of Leopardi's one hundred and eleven Pensieri. Also Leopardi's Pensieri is a practical pedagogic work, written to educate youth to savoir-vivre.
Leopardi ascribes great importance to youth, of which he points out the enthusiasm, the intense wish to live that finds, however, an outlet with difficulty, rising unhappiness. Leopardi's sad, ...personal life is very evident inside his theory. Leopardi exhorts Italian young people to national redemption by his poetry and, moreover, he theorizes a social education for real life of the naive, inexpert young man.
Nelle riflessioni degli anni 1823 e 1824, Giacomo Leopardi abbandona per sempre la giustificazione del male secondo quella critica della perfettibilità ‒ operata nella summa di cinquanta pagine dello ...Zibaldone ‒ che vedeva nel peccato di cognizione di Adamo l’origine della Caduta del genere umano e la conseguente fiducia nella «società stretta». Già nella prima operetta ci troviamo di fronte a una situazione molto diversa rispetto alla riscrittura filosofica della Genesi : l’infelicità, che ugualmente si specchia in un esilio archetipico, non viene più ricondotta a una volontaria corruzione dell’uomo, bensì a uno squilibrio fondamentale iscritto nella natura umana e nell’essere delle cose, che non trova più ragione né in un passato edenico né in una alterità possibile e incontaminata nel presente. In un tempo che ha escluso ogni redenzione ‒ per questo non si può parlare nemmeno di crisi ‒ , la Scommessa di Prometeo fallisce miseramente: l’individuo, in qualunque dimensione esso sia, non può fare altro che esercitare la sua morfologica arroganza, contemplata in un sistema di male necessario e indipendente che, alla fine, negherà la natura e la storia dell’uomo.
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