Giacomo Leopardi had just turned 18 in July 1816. In Recanati, in his father’s library, he read the classical authors, translated from Greek and Latin and wrote his first important poems. Not only that: although from a great distance, he followed with interest the debate between classicists and romantics that was taking place through articles on the pages of the main literary magazines of Lombardy and Piedmont.
Translating the Romantics to Rejuvenate Italian Poetry
sThe clash between the two factions was triggered by the appearance in the first issue of the «Biblioteca italiana» of an article by Madame de Staël , De l’esprit des tradutions , translated into Italian by Pietro Giordani with the title Sulla maniera e l’utile delle traduzioni (On the manner and utility of translations ).
lIt was January 1816 and Madame de Staël , one of the most important European intellectual figures, urged Italian literary figures to “diligently” translate the most recent English and German poems : only in this way – she wrote – could they modernise Italian literature, freeing it from the conventional re-proposal of “ancient mythology”, and re-establish the theatre , making it “more perfect and more useful for public education”, that is, making it a tool for educating the public, for transmitting the values and ideals of modern civilisation. In practice, for Baroness de Staël it was a question of bringing Italian literature up to speed with the times, up to speed with European modernity.
The Letter to the Compilers of the Italian Library
It is in this lively controversy that Giacomo , very young, intends to intervene: thus in the month of July 1816 he sends to the editorial staff of the «Biblioteca italiana» the Letter to the compilers of the «Biblioteca italiana» in response to that of Mad. the Baroness of Staël Holstein to the same .
To renew means to return to the ancientsIn the Letter Giacomo Leopardi brands as «vain advice», that is, as a useless and wrong suggestion, de Staël’s invitation to translate and study foreign poetry: in his opinion, to promote an authentic renewal of Italian literature it is necessary instead to rediscover the value of originality and inspiration . The unsurpassed model of these creative capacities are the ancients : it is to them, to their purity, that we must refer to in order to revive the fortunes of national literature.
Freeing yourself from the habit of imitatingThe first objective that a man of letters must set himself is therefore that of freeing himself from the vice of imitation : “almost all our writings – Leopardi denounces – are copies of other copies, and this is why there are so few original writers, and this is why we are inundated with a flood of common ideas and phrases, and this is why our soil has become sterile and no longer produces anything new”.
In essence, the diagnosis that Leopardi gives of the present of Italian literature is similar to that of de Staël; however, the therapy that he proposes is quite different: the conformism that afflicts Italian literature can be overcome only if its authors rediscover the “celestial spark” , the “superhuman impulse”, the “ardour” that makes a man a true poet . In this, the ancients were masters and, more than anyone, the Greeks , who created masterpieces because “they had no models, or did not use them”, and could thus establish an immediate and fruitful relationship with nature .
Still against Romanticism
In March 1818 Leopardi sent the Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica to the publisher Stella in Milan : with this essay he intended to take a new position against Romanticism , developing some of the theses that he had already expressed in the Lettera ai sig. compilers of the «Biblioteca italiana» . Stella preferred not to publish the Discorso : this work was thus given the same fate that had befallen the Lettera two years earlier.
Leopardi ‘s reflections are based on a fundamental opposition: that between nature and civilization. The bond with nature is a guarantee, for man, of fullness of life : the ancients enjoyed the benefits deriving from this immediate relationship, which even every individual in childhood was able to experience. In the direct relationship with nature, the ancients and the child had totalizing experiences and knew existential completeness.
The Romantics , Leopardi accuses again , wanted to bring poetry “from the visible to the invisible and from things to ideas”, transforming it “from the material and fantastic and corporeal that it was, into the metaphysical and reasonable and spiritual”: nothing could be more wrong for someone like him who believes that poetry should strike man in his imagination, allowing him to recover an immediate relationship with nature and, in essence, with himself.
