Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  Note on the Translation

  Linguistically, the Zibaldone presents distinct features, and poses distinct challenges to the translator. At the macro level, this is an encyclopedic, voracious text, buzzing with energy and ambition, using every ounce of its rhetorical power to seize an idea, a concept, a proposition, to embrace and enfold an argument and make it the writer’s own. To this end, Leopardi does not hesitate to add, to accumulate, to pile up argument upon argument, clause upon clause, to expand the language of his thought with near-synonyms and variations of a word, to echo or reiterate syntactical structures, to stretch his discourse—at times almost to the breaking point in sentences that run for several hundred words—by the simple expedient of anaphora, to extend and refine his meaning, picking from Italian’s rich store of prefixes and suffixes, among them the omnipresent absolute superlative (of which more below). But the diary is no product of a stream of consciousness, and there is nothing automatic about the writing. Against the potentially infinite expansion of the text, there is the countertension of constraint. The expanding Zibaldone is simultaneously an exercise in self-control and self-discipline. There is a sense of responsibility here, even if, perhaps especially, because it is a private diary. Leopardi’s deep attachment to symmetry and parallelism within the sentence or a longer passage can have the effect, as well as multiplying its components, of binding the whole together. The structure of the individual entry itself, what Leopardi often refers to as a “thought,” requires a conclusion, however provisional, and however much it may be qualified (or, more frequently, confirmed, added to again) in the future. Leopardi’s style, which is sensory and material (think of the attention that he gives to the materiality of words, their etymologies, their origins and changes, from epoch to epoch, tongue to tongue), interacts dialectically with the philosophical and existential questions he reflects upon, so that, however fast the horses gallop, and however exciting that is (“something like an idea of infinity”: Z 1999), a kind of virtual present—characteristically in the form of an actual date—brings temporary closure.

  The pattern outlined above—centrifugal and centripetal, expansive and cohesive, cumulative and controlled—has been observed and commented on by specialists and readers alike. Of itself, and in principle, it does not constitute an especially difficult problem for the translator, provided that he or she follows a cardinal rule: to respect Leopardi’s rhythms, at least as far as English syntax will allow. This last qualification is of course de rigueur: English does not have the luxury of inverting the order of subject, verb, and object to anything like the extent that Italian does; the preference of English for paratactic rather than hypotactic structures in the clause or sentence must be affected by the relative absence of endings designating gender or number that identify the grammatical relation between different lexical elements in the Latin languages. These are everyday challenges. But it is possible to retain the essential rhythm of Leopardi’s prose, and this we have tried to do, not without some pragmatic compromise along the way. In the case of anacoluthia—where Leopardi momentarily sets off on the wrong foot or loses track of his starting point and develops the sentence in an ungrammatical way—we have tended to “correct” silently in the simpler cases, e.g., Z 194–95: “E il più scellerato del mondo, se non ci avrà nociuto” translated as “And if the wickedest person in the world has not done us any harm,” putting “if” (se) in the “right” place in the sentence in light of its subsequent development (this and the examples that follow are based on the excellent analysis in Ricci 2001–2002 [Bibliography B12]; for our broader use of silent correction, see Editorial Criteria, §12.1). But in other cases, in order to render accurately the flow of Leopardi’s thought in a demanding passage, we consciously run the risk of sounding “un-English” by translating literally, as in the following example (our underlining): “Which [the brain], although it may be altered significantly by illnesses and the various circumstances and accidents that occur during the life of one man, one cannot also help but believe and adjudge that…” (Z 3203–304). Similar examples occur with what Ricci calls “anaphoric peninsulas,” which jut out at an angle, so to speak, from the referent, as in this case, which is a direct translation of the Italian: “French prose (the most unpoetic nation and language among the moderns, which are the most unpoetic in the world)…” (Z 2666), or in another example that is also at the limit of the ungrammatical, referring to the Roman encyclopedist Celsus: “entirely Celsian, in whom…” (Z 35).

  But it is not always possible for the English translation to adjust to all the syntactic linkages of which Leopardi avails himself to develop a thought. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not generally the length of the periods that is an obstacle: as David Gibbons has pointed out, Leopardi’s accumulations of subordinate clauses very often have a paratactic rather than a hypotactic structure (Gibbons 2011: 111), and we have generally respected the strategic role played by punctuation in the author’s writing practice in the Zibaldone, notably a use of the semicolon, often indicating a pause in the thought process as well as the transition to another lexical unit, that is greater than is common in modern English. But Leopardi can sometimes use causal and other connectives as a bridge between one part of the thought and another, and in these cases we have had to decide whether to maintain the structure or offer something more “readable” in English. A case in point would be the entry concerning Giacomo’s resentment of his younger brother, Pierfrancesco (Z 45), which is a single emotionally charged period of about three hundred words articulated by the conjunctions giacch’io…, siccome…, perciò … (since I…, as…, so…), which we have chosen to render as three separate sentences, only the last of which is introduced by “So”: in effect, producing a more narrative account than the original, but allowing the relationships of cause and effect to show through nonetheless. Where possible, we have retained the argumentative structure of Leopardi’s language in the Zibaldone also in those aspects that concern cohesion rather than augmentation of the text: the frequent use of correlatives to join two parts of a clause (some of which work better in English than others); the use of general nouns at the beginning of a relative clause—“a thing” or “something,” “a fact,” “a quality,” etc., followed by “that” or “which”—summoning up previous arguments that are now to be elaborated further; the very frequent use of the first person singular dico—variously translated, according to context, as “I say,” “I mean,” “I repeat,” “I maintain”—which serves to pick up and emphasize the thread of the argument after a more or less extended elaboration of subordinate matter (subordinate, that is, to the main clause and the main argument), usually with the repetition of the word or phrase in question.

  The suppleness of Leopardi’s syntax, and its essential role in both driving the argument forward and ensuring its cohesion, are two reasons that have led us to resist any excessive normalization of the Zibaldone in English. But an even more important reason for respecting as far as possible the syntactic rhythms of Leopardi’s prose is the constant reminder that the Zibaldone is a work in progress, written for private consumption (and rewriting). Leopardi always writes fluently—almost literally so, a penna corrente, as he puts it, “with the flow of the pen” (Z 95, and again on Z 2541)—and, with the training he had received in the schoolroom and his own self-imposed discipline, he would be hard put to write a bad sentence. But he could, and often does, write a sentence that, were it to be published, he would want to refine further. In translating, we have tried to retain this sense of the unfinished, or more exactly the still finishable, and have avoided, where possible, any attempt at paraphrase or “improvement.” When we come to the lexical dimension of the Zibaldone, however, we are obliged to make choices that may bear directly, and sometimes problematically, on the original. In one case we have to admit defeat. Leopardi makes very frequent use of the absolute superlative—the ending of adjectives in issimo and the ending of adverbs in issimamente (and these in turn in often abbreviated form
)—a constant device in the Zibaldone that is poorly rendered by English “equivalents” (“very,” “most,” “highly,” “extremely”), and is sometimes best not rendered with any qualifier at all. The absolute superlative is a part of Leopardi’s armory of affirmation, a kind of inflation that wants to populate the sentence without losing any specificity of meaning, but its English equivalents tend, alas, to weaken rather than strengthen that affirmation.

  This particular case apart, our approach to the translation of key words—lexical items whose frequency and/or resonance within the text command the reader’s attention—requires explanation. Here, too, the underlying structure of the text, its cohesiveness combined with its potential dispersiveness, works its way into the choices that are made. The four situations described below (they could be multiplied several times over) illustrate the point at the same time as throwing some light on our translation strategy.

  1. There are concepts that are signified with one word in Italian, for which there is a single translation in English: corpo is always “body,” cavallo is always “horse,” and mente is always “mind” (but see below). With rare exceptions, these produce one-for-one translations.

  2. There are families or constellations of words whose meanings overlap in Leopardi’s Italian and in modern English, but not in the same way. English “emotions,” “passions,” “feelings,” for example, correspond roughly to Italian affetti, passioni, sentimenti (emozioni is used only five times in the Zibaldone), though affetti can mean both “emotions” and “feelings” (and indeed “affects”), while English can also draw on “sentiments” for some part of this extended family. From a diachronic perspective Leopardi, in common with eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European usage such as that of Hume, makes more frequent use of the term “passions” than is the case in modern English usage. We do not for that reason exclude “passion,” with its very rich connotations, from the translation as a whole, but opt for “emotion” in recognition of the latter’s semantic equivalence to the earlier use of “passion” in certain key passages (Z 3713–15, for example). Another such constellation is formed by “mind,” “soul,” “spirit,” as translations of Italian animo, anima, spirito. All of these overlap in Italian, though spirito can also be the equivalent of the French esprit in Leopardi’s time and, as we have seen, he also uses mente for “mind.” This is another of those semantic areas (see, for example, Z 3922–27) where it is impossible to establish a fixed correspondence between words in the two languages, and where nuances of meaning change from one passage to another.

  3. There are concepts that are signified with one word in Italian, but which may have two or more possible translations in English that are synonymous or very nearly so. The Italian libertà, for example, may translate as both “liberty” and “freedom,” with very little difference of meaning, if any, between them, unless it be contextual: there might be a slight temptation to prefer “liberty” in the proximity of political discourse concerning the French or American revolutions, for example, given the transnational reach of the Latinate word at the time. Another, very tricky, example concerns the Italian male, mali, meaning either “ill(s)” or “evil(s)”: the translation tends to prefer the former in a broadly existential context, while the latter appears in religious or moral surroundings. But we have not attempted to make hard-and-fast rules about such incidences, leaving the decision to the discretion of the translators and ironing out any inconsistencies in the final revision.

  4. There are concepts very similar to the previous category, in which different translations of a single Italian word are possible, but where we have decided on a default translation among various possible options in order to ensure coherence in the text, even in some cases where a slightly different translation might have appeared preferable in the context. A simple case is that of assuefazione, always translated as “habituation”: here we have preferred the more familiar term over its technical English equivalent (“assuefaction”), precisely because the frequent use of assuefazione in Leopardi’s text is both strategic and non-technical. In the case of uomo and principe, which we have translated as “man” and “prince” respectively, we are recognizing the resonance of both terms within the public discourse of Leopardi’s day, after having experimented with modernizations such as “humanity,” “humankind,” “people,” “ruler,” “leader,” which in the end, across the whole expanse of the text, sounded far more anachronistic than the faintly dated “man” or the potentially misleading “prince.” (Tim Parks has made a strong case for the use of a more modern term in his translation of Machiavelli’s treatise, even while retaining the canonical title: Penguin 2009). Our two final examples follow contrary paths. Translating noia by “boredom” is a kind of reverse anachronism. A recognized English translation for noia in the early nineteenth century was ennui. But this is now a foreign, faintly exotic, term, whereas Leopardi’s noia was a familiar word in contemporary usage, with powerful connotations: listlessness, emptiness, apathy, tedium, depression, as well as boredom as we understand it today. The concept is addressed continuously in the Zibaldone, and to avoid confusion can only be translated by a single word, even if noia and “boredom” are not exactly the same thing. If the problem with noia is that it has a number of connotations, none of which produces an exact equivalent in English, the challenge of our last example, convenienza and its adjective conveniente, is that it has any number of equivalents in English, all meaning more or less the same thing. There is a sense of convenienza that has to do with wholeness, or the perceived relation between the whole and the parts, or the parts with each other (proportion, harmony, agreement), and another that has to do with belonging (appropriateness, fitness, rightness, suitability, becomingness, and so on). In the end, the English “propriety” and “proper” seem to fit both semantic areas best, as well as having a certain gravitas about them, and in spite of their linkage to “proper behavior,” which is not usually the issue in the Zibaldone. The crucial decision here is to establish a beacon for this word that would cast its light through the entire text as convenienza does in the original.

  Leopardi famously observed: “A perfect translation consists in this, that the translated author is not, e.g., Greek in Italian, Greek or French in German, but the same in Italian or German as he is in Greek or in French.” And he adds helpfully: “This is the difficulty, this is what is not possible in all languages” (Z 2134–35). The same in English as in Italian? Not entirely, as our resistance to out-and-out normalization makes clear. But we have always been aware of a salient fact: the advantage that translators have over the readers of the text they translate is that the translator knows the original work, the reader—in principle—does not. Among the many responsibilities placed on translation, this is paramount: that when you, the translator, come across a word or a phrase or a whole sentence that is perfectly clear within the system of the Italian language, but for which—the dread phrase—“there is no exact equivalent,” and which, however much you turn it around, or stretch it to fit with English syntax or vocabulary, remains recalcitrant to the translator’s touch, you do not have the luxury of fudging. Then it must be “readable in English.” So throughout the translation process we have kept this principle in mind: even if they can, the readers of the English text should not have to refer back to Leopardi’s Italian to try and figure out what a sentence means. And vice versa, if they choose to do so, they should not be disconcerted by what they find: the translation, though different, must be accurate.

  Zibaldone

  [1] Palazzo Bello.1 Dog in the night from the farmhouse, as the wayfarer goes by.—

  Era la luna nel cortile, un lato

  Tutto ne illuminava, e discendea

  Sopra il contiguo lato obliquo un raggio …

  Nella (dalla) maestra via s’udiva il carro

  Del passegger, che stritolando i sassi,

  Mandava un suon, cui precedea da lungi

  Il tintinnio de’ mobili sonagli.
/>
  [The moon shone in the yard, one side

  In its full light, and a moonbeam

  Slanting obliquely down the next …

  On (from) the highway you could hear

  The traveler’s carriage crunching on the stones,

  And before that, from a long way off,

  The jingling of harness bells.]

  And so Avianus tells a story about a country woman who threatened her crying child that if he didn’t quieten down she would feed him to a wolf. And by chance a wolf was passing by and heard her. He thought she meant what she said, so he sat down in front of the door of the house and stayed there all day waiting for the woman to bring him his food. How he stayed there all that time without the woman noticing him, or being afraid, or chasing him off with a stone or anything, only Avianus can explain. And he adds that the wolf didn’t get anything because the child fell asleep, and even if he had not, he wouldn’t have come to any harm. And when it got late, and the wolf went back to his wife without any prey, because he had wasted the whole day waiting, he said what you can read in the story.2 (July or August 1817.)3

  An elderly Lady asked a young man if she could read some of his poems, which had many old words in them. A little later, having read them, she handed them back and told him she hadn’t understood them because those were not words that were used in her day. The young man replied: “But I was sure they were used, because they are very old.”

  Tutta la notte piove

  E ritornan le feste a la dimane:

  Fan del regno a metà Cesare e Giove.

  [All night it rains

  And the festivities return tomorrow:

  Caesar and Jove share the realm between them.]4

  In literature, one passes from nothing to the middle and to truth, then to refinement. There is no example of a return from refinement to truth. The Greeks. Italians writing in Latin. Fine taste among the generality of men of letters can exist only while it is still uncorrupted. For example, the only fault of sixteenth-century writers in Italian was insufficiency rather than excess, and they were therefore well suited to judge of the right amount, that is of true beauty, as indeed they did.5