Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  Paul-Louis Courier, “Lettre à M. Renouard, libraire, sur une tache faite à un manuscrit de Florence,” writing about Amyot’s Longus, corrected by him in the passages where the translation did not correspond with the text, and also supplemented with a new translation of the Florentine manuscript: “Mais ce n’est pas seulement le grec et le français qui m’ont servi à terminer cette belle copie” (Amyot’s translation), “après avoir si heureusement [4310] rétabli l’original” (i.e., completed the text with the discovery of the Florentine manuscript); “ce sont encore plus les bons auteurs italiens, d’où j’ai tiré” (for this work) “plus que des nôtres, et qui sont la vraie source des beautés d’Amyot; car il fallait, pour retoucher et finir le travail d’Amyot, la réunion assez rare des trois langues qu’il possédait et qui ont formé son style” [“But it is not only Greek and French which helped me to finish this fair copy, after I had so happily reestablished the original; it is even more the good Italian authors, on whom I drew more than on our own, and who are the true sources of the beauties in Amyot; for, in order to revise and finish Amyot’s work, it was necessary to realize the rather rare combination of the three languages which he possessed and which formed his style”]. (Florence, 30 June 1828.)1

  A woman of 20, 25, or 30 years has perhaps more attraits [attractions], more allure, and is more likely to inspire a lasting passion. Thus, at least, it always seemed to me, even in my earliest youth: thus also to others who understand such things (M. Merle).2 But in truth a young woman of 16 to 18 years has about her face, her gestures, the tones of her voice, her movements, etc., something of the divine which nothing can equal. Whatever her character, whatever her tastes, whether cheerful or melancholy, capricious or grave, vivacious or modest, that purest, intact, freshest flower of youth, that virgin unblemished hope which can be read in her face and in her demeanor, or which you conceive in her, and for her, as you look at her; that air of innocence, of complete ignorance of evil, of misfortune, of suffering; that flower, that very first flower of life; all of these things, even if they do not make you fall in love with her, even if they do not interest you, make so keen, so deep, so inexpressible an impression upon you that you can never tire of gazing upon that face; and I know of nothing which is more able to raise our spirit, to transport us into another world, to give us an idea of angels, of paradise, of divinity, of happiness. All [4311] this, I repeat, without making us fall in love, that is, without being moved by a desire to possess that object. The very divinity which we perceive in it in some way estranges us, makes us look on it as though it were from a different and higher sphere than our own, to which we cannot aspire. In those older women we find more humanity, a greater likeness to ourselves: we therefore have a greater inclination toward them and a greater courage to desire a relationship with them. Moreover, if we add to what I have said about seeing and contemplating a young woman of 16 or 18 years the thought of the suffering that awaits her, the misfortunes that will soon obscure and extinguish that pure joy, the vanity of those fervent hopes, the inexpressible transience of that flower, that state, that beauty;1 if we add our turning back upon ourselves; and therefore a feeling of compassion for that angel of happiness, for ourselves, for human destiny, for life (all things that cannot but come to mind), the effect is the most beautiful and the sublimest feeling that can be imagined. (Florence, 30 June 1828.)

  *“Danske Folkeeventyr. Popular tales of the Danes, collected by Monsieur Winther, 1st part, Copenhagen 1823. Monsieur Thiele has recently published 2 volumes of Danish popular traditions and beliefs. Monsieur Winther’s collection is more or less of the same kind. The author has collected stories which entertain countryfolk during the long winter evenings. It is rather noteworthy that the Danes appropriated the stories and [4312] the fables of the ancients at an early stage, transferring the scene to their own territory. So it is that the hero of Apuleius’s story The Golden Ass had become a bondekard, or young Danish countryman, under the name of Hans; the main character in the fable of Love and Psyche has been turned into Prince Hvidbjærn (ae) in whom the Greeks would be hard put to recognize their Love. The fairy tales, which have an almost entirely French character in Perrault, become equally Danish on the shores of the Baltic: Cinderella is turned into Kokketœs (oe), etc. D-G.”* (Depping). Bulletin Universel des sciences et de l’industrie, publié sous la direction de M. le Baron de Férussac, 7th Section, Bulletin des sciences historiques, antiquités, philologie, 1st year, 1824, April, tome 1, article 241, pp. 209–10.1 (Florence, 23 July 1828.)

  *“Monsieur Bredsdorff (Om Rune skriften oprindelse, i.e., On the origin of Runic characters, by Jacob Hornemann Bredsdorff, 4°, 19 pp., Copenhagen 1822) thinks that the Runic alphabet is derived from the mœsogothic (oe) alphabet, whose invention is attributed to bishop Ulphilas, who used it to write his translation of the New Testament, in the 4th century.”* Bulletin de Férussac, place cited above, art. 243, 244, p. 211. (23 July 1828.) See p. 4362.2

  *“De invidia, diis ab Herodoto et aequalibus attributa, pauca commentatus est P. Möller [On the envy, attributed to the gods by Herodotus and his contemporaries, with a brief commentary by P. Möller] 31 pp., 4°, Copenhagen”* Bulletin de Férussac, loc. cit., § 279, p. 240.3 (24 July 1828.)

  To be applied to my reflections on Homer and the epic [→Z 3095–167]. [4313] *“Before going on to Homer’s works, the author (Ideen über Homer, etc. Ideas on Homer and his Age, by C. E. Schubarth, 8° of 364 pp., Breslau 1821) depicts (pp. 108–34) the character and customs of the two nations fighting before Troy. It emerges from this parallel that the Greeks possess all the vices of savage peoples; they give way to every impulse; violence, indiscipline, superstitious terrors reign in their camp. It is not among the Greeks, but among the Trojans that we find order, unity, love of country, and those generous feelings which suggest a civilization being born, or even one that is already advanced. It is from this point of view, which is consistent with what we read in Homer, that Monsieur Schubarth envisages the Odyssey and the Iliad. In the Iliad, Homer has sung of a war which must end with the destruction of Troy, but whose fateful outcome, skillfully set in a dim and faraway perspective, the author barely allows us to see. The Odyssey traces the unhappy repercussions of this struggle. For the reader, the Trojans are the focus of a tender compassion and that feeling of admiration which is occasioned by noble and generous actions, patriotism, and devotion; yet they must succumb after ten years of heroic defense, for they are fewer in number, and Destiny is against them. In contrast with this depiction, Homer shows the Greeks to be animated by a spirit of vengeance, vain, presumptuous, in prey to discord, always ready to abuse their strength. Fate wills the ruin of Troy, and the Trojans bear this misfortune, [4314] which they have not merited but which the gods visit upon them, in a spirit of resignation; while it is only to themselves, their own errors, the disgusting vices to which they abandon themselves, that the Greeks owe the just punishments which these same gods inflict upon them.

  “It is by similar inductions that Monsieur Schubarth (pp. 139–238), taking his distance from received opinion, seeks to demonstrate that the author of the two Greek epics was born on the soil of Troy” (that is, where Troy used to be). “It has to be agreed, in effect that the poet (for Monsieur Schubarth does not allow with Wolf that the Iliad and the Odyssey are productions attributable to several rhapsodes), if he had been Ionian, would have chosen a very strange subject for the first of his epics, one that was scarcely fit to flatter the Greeks to whom he attributes no greater advantages than those which are born of superior physical strength. As long as the war goes on, discord divides them, and the only virtue they deploy is their courage; but this courage is savage and vengeful. Once they have emerged from the struggle victorious, they signal this return to peace with new disorders and bloody quarrels.

  “It is very remarkable that the poet interrupted his song at the very moment when he could not have avoided talking about the capture of the city, and tracing the portrayal of its destruction. I
s it plausible that he would have stopped so suddenly, and neglected to celebrate an event that was favorable to the Greeks, if he had not been intent on making [4315] the Trojans, his compatriots, forget the unhappy moment of their fall? (So has Monsieur Schubarth not noticed that Homer only sings the anger of Achilles and not the whole Trojan war? Reviewer’s note). We see everywhere, in the Odyssey as in the Iliad, that the poet feels affection for the Trojans. Aeneas, the future king of Troy, the hero favored by the gods, is saved by Neptune, the Greeks’ most powerful god. Their most dangerous enemy, Hector, is always depicted in favorable colors. Hector has the sense of the justice of his cause; he is not even buoyed by the hope of success; but he is filled with his duties toward his country; he tears himself away from the most tender affections, and sacrifices himself without hesitation. His death is the voluntary expiation of one single moment of forgetfulness, of a fault which is not his. But the gods, who have rewarded him poorly in his lifetime, come themselves to be present at his funeral, while Achilles the victor is tormented by the anguish and foreboding of approaching death.

  “The limits of this journal do not allow us to extend this analysis further. We can only ask our readers to read what Monsieur Schubarth says in the work itself in support of a hypothesis which seems admissible to us, and which he develops with remarkable ability.”* (Taken and translated from the Jenaische allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Jena Literary Gazette, September 1823), Bulletin de Férussac, etc., loc. cit. above, July, tome 2, art. 54, pp. 45–47.1

  From my reflections on Homer [→Z 3095–167], etc., it can be seen how wrong it is to conclude [4316] from the fierce and brutal customs, from the spirit of vengeance, from the purely physical advantages which Homer attributes to the Greeks, and from the sympathy attached to the destiny of the Trojans, that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed in a Trojan rather than a Greek spirit, and were therefore apparently for the Trojans, or those born on Trojan soil, and not for the Greeks of Ionia. Indeed it can be seen from these very same things that the opposite conclusion must be reached. (24–26 July 1828.) See p. 4447.

  Also to be applied to my reflections on Homer and the epic. *“Homerische Vorschule, etc. Introduction to the study of the Iliad and the Odyssey, by W. Müller, 192 pp., 8°, Leipzig 1824. A pupil of the philologist Wolf, Monsieur Müller states in the preface that he is intimately persuaded of the truth and solidity of the opinions developed by his teacher in the latter’s famous Prolegomena to the Iliad, and that having meditated on this topic after having followed Wolf’s courses, he believes that he should put forward a number of considerations suggested to him by this subject. In passing, he warns the public to be wary of the overly adventurous hypotheses to which some scholars are seeking to give credence. He recalls in particular the opinions of Payne Knight, an English scholar, recently deceased, and Bernard Thiersch, who is not the author of the Greek Grammar published by Monsieur Thiersch in Munich. Monsieur Müller is astonished that the new literary society of London1 has recently awarded a prize to a paper in which Homer appears as the copyist of Moses. (Dissertation on the age of Homer, his writings and his genius, London 1823.)

  [4317]*“In order fully to understand the way in which the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed, it is necessary to enter into the spirit and customs of the Ionian people. These Greek colonists, friends of the arts and poetry, had a lively, active spirit and were interested in events with the candor of children. In their communities, a poet was the constant companion of every pleasure. Wherever people gathered together, in banquets as in public assemblies, the poet’s lyre was part of the celebrations. The poet, like the minstrel in the middle ages, exercised a calling that was generally honored, and was welcomed with hospitality wherever he made his lyre sound. He undoubtedly sang only his own particular inspirations, which were often improvisations.”*1 (The minstrels did actually sing pieces by others, and not only by others, but expressly written by the learned of the time, in verse, to be sung or recited by them. See Perticari’s article about the poem on the Passion of Christ attributed to Boccaccio).2 *“These pieces were probably not very long, for in ancient usage there is no evidence of the poet’s songs except as interludes.”* (When the poet or the singer sang in piazzas, etc., among the people—as still happens today, as when in Naples one of the people reads the Orlando furioso or the Ricciardetto, etc., to the crowd, etc., and explains it in Neapolitan—the songs were not intermezzos at that time; they were entertainments and acroamata).3 See p. 4388. *“The Trojan war, in every respect a subject proper to poetry, had scarcely finished but in the cities of Ionia the lyre was already accompanying verses composed about this national [4318] event. Homer stood out among them, but it is clear that the use of lyrical songs about public events existed before this poet, and that he was by no means the the first national singer.” (Phemius, Demodocus, etc.) “The rhythm of his poetry proves that his verses were sung and accompanied on the lyre, perhaps also by dance, or at least rhythmic movements.”* (The name ἔπη, epic, epopea, ἐποποιὸς [epic poet] applied in particular to narrative verses, poems, and poets, proves, in my view, by reason of its etymology, or original meaning—word (ἔπος), to say (ἔπω, εἴπω), etc.—as well as by reason of the distinction from μέλη [lyric poetry], μελικὸς [lyrical], μελοποιὸς [lyric poet], etc., that narrative poems had no melody, were not sung but recited, or at most sung as recitative, like the nonlyrical verses of dramas, and in the way our free hendecasyllables would be sung. Epic (as if to say spoken) verse was the prose of those times, when all composition was in verse. Homer, as Courier states very well in the preface to his specimen translation from Herodotus,1 was a historian, during those times when they were unaccustomed, and unable, to narrate histories in prose. I do not therefore think it is right to describe his poems as lyric, even if they were perhaps accompanied by some instrument, like recitatives in dramas. See p. 4328, paragraph 1, and p. 4390, end). *“It is ridiculous to search for learned allegories and profound meaning in the Homeric poems. The poets of Ionia rendered in a natural way the impressions made on their imagination by the actions of heroes, they were not looking for sophisticated connections; it is the public and private life of their times which they recount and nothing more. They did not write, they sang, and their inspirations [4319] were transmitted by tradition as they are among modern, semibarbarous peoples. (Court councilor Thiersch later read—in the public session of the class of philology and history of the Munich Academy of Sciences, 14 August 1824—a paper on the oral transmission of epic poems by the people. What gave rise to this paper was a publication by Professor Vater in Halle, on the recently published long Serbian heroic poems which have been compared with those of Homer and Ossian.”* Bulletin de Férussac, etc., November 1824, tome 2, art. 302, p. 321.)1 (See p. 4336, end.)

  *“Some have looked for sophisticated art in the different dialects which are found in Homer. This supposed mixing of dialects is not the work of the singer. In his time the Ionians spoke like this, and it is only later that the Greek language underwent change, and that different provinces such as Aeolia, Ionia, and Doris preserved remnants of the old language, remnants which were then regarded as so many different dialects.

  “It appears that Homer lived in the 2nd century after the destruction of Troy. The brilliance of his genius has caused the names of the other poets who sang as he did of the great deeds of the Greeks to be forgotten. But without doubt, like them, he sang separate lyric songs, and probably never thought of composing an epic poem, and still less of writing one. Hence what is said about his blindness and his poverty; he will have seemed blind afterward because he did not write anything, poor because he went from one town to another. After his death, the reputation of his songs grew all the time; [4320] the poets, who anyway were losing their inventive genius, sang Homer’s poems; then came the Homeridae. In order to flatter the cities in which they sang, they would interpolate praises of cities and peoples in their predecessor’s verses. It is claimed that L
ycurgus was the first to collect and edit Homer’s poems. But how could a lawgiver who did not have his own laws written down concern himself with having verses written down in an impoverished and uncultured place like Sparta? Solon regulated the order in which singers in public festivals” (in which such poems were not, apparemment [apparently], intermezzos, all the more since they were sung in order) “were to sing the different Homeric poems, and Peisistratus then had them divided into two large poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Aristarchus subdivided them into 24 books, following the number of letters in the Greek alphabet. Then there appeared a class of men, the diaskeuasts,1 kinds of censors or critics who tried to put harmony and agreement into the songs which had thus been united and coordinated; they linked the separate parts, took out contradictions, suppressed lines and passages that had been interpolated, etc. But this work was not carried out so skillfully that traces of their joins cannot be uncovered; and their judgment was not always sufficiently sound for them to be able to distinguish between what belonged to Homer and what were interpolations by his successors. Following Wolf’s example, Monsieur Müller signals several passages which seem to prove that the Iliad and the Odyssey [4321] did not have anything like the unity which the poems present today, and that originally they were nothing but separate lyric songs. Aristotle, however, only considered them in the form which they had been given in Athens, and celebrated Homer as an epic poet. Afterward, the Iliad and the Odyssey were thought of only as two epic poems. Certainly, there is a sort of unity in each of these two poems, but it is the same which is found, for example, in the Spanish romances of the Cid, when one reads them as a sequence. In the Odyssey it would be possible to take away the first 4 books and half of the 15th without causing any damage at all to the progress of the action. The fact is, the poet had never put them together and had never thought of creating a large poem. On the other hand, the Iliad and the Odyssey have lacunae which the diaskeuasts were unable to conceal. In the Iliad the 1st and 5th books begin with the same stories; in the 5th the events are told as though the poet had never spoken about them. The beginnings of the two poems seem to have been added by the diaskeuasts. Following the custom of ancient times, the Homeridae prefaced their songs with a religious invocation. These are the so-called Homeric hymns which have nothing in common with the great poet except that they were sung for the beginning of his lyric pieces. D-G.”* (Depping) Bulletin de Férussac, loc. cit. p. 4312, October 1824, tome 2, article 239, pp. 231–34.