A Life Lived at the Extreme

...Certainly the poem's sobriety and sublimity mitigate the darkness that Leopardi never disavowed and, while reminding us of all our deaths, give us back life...

...Yet a life also given to him in the extreme because of the nature of his parents and his own gifts...

...He noted so much, as we see in this collection...

...As well speak of a reasoning beast...

...My only diversion in Recanati is study, my only diversion is what is killing me...

...Later he defined in shade upon shade the various faces of that plague noia or ennui or tedium or the sense of emptiness in the self and the universe, or also "a craving for pure happiness —unsatisfied by pleasure...

...Did not Leopardi define one of his effects when he discussed the differences between the Romantics (this was in 1832) and the Ancients from Homer on: "The Romantics don't realize that if these feelings ["of pathos, that depth of feeling experienced by sensitive hearts through the impression made on their senses by any natural thing"] are awakened by naked nature, it is necssary, in order to reawaken them, to imitate nature's nakedness and to transpose into poetry those simple and innocent objects which by their strength alone, and unawares, produce that effect upon our spirit, just as they are, and neither more nor less...

...The bella figura was maintained at a cost the son meticulously noted...

...the library of 14,000 volumes his father had collected that lay waiting, as it were, for the young scholar to enter, master, and make his own...

...It is "those simple and innocent objects" that his poems are luminous with: the bells of Recanati, its grassy church steps, its hedges, its workmen singing some air late at night on the way home, its girls coming back from fields with swathes of grass, or singing at their looms...

...To list a few of his labors: By the age of 14 he had translated the first two books of Horace's Odes, a parody of the Ars Poetica, a poetic epistle dedicated "To his Dear Father, after two months' study of philosophy" and two tragedies...

...his loss of religious faith as well, Hellene though he was in spirit and by education...

...But the disfigured hero, with the bad nerves of excessive sensibility, was no chill and saturnine nature...

...In his prose, however, "this great ideal of our time, an intimate knowledge of our own heart," offers us insights of desolating accuracy as well as the airiest of heroic flights...

...Leopardi's own fantastical precocity...

...From then on the family lived under stringent economies, though not a horse was sold or a servant dismissed...

...Hunchback...

...An extraordinary life, first of all, lived at the extreme...

...Above all stood Leopardi's "mad and desperate studies" undertaken with unresting zeal from the age of 10 to 17 and, spurred on, he admits, by an immoderate and insolent desire for glory that ruined his health...

...Passages from his notes for an autobiography and "Diary of a First Love" contain the kind of analyzing of every "minute emotion" that he himself criticized in the poetry of his contemporaries ("the art of psychology destroys the very art of illusion without which poetry will be no more...

...he asks only that man learn to be clear-eyed in his suffering, that he not blame others nor boast, in this universe of so many stars and the silence of infinity, of his rights to joy and his claims to eternity...

...He seized upon it in the most expressive and vital way and thus rendered afresh and anew all our first but muted shocks...

...The Marchesa Iris Origo, who has written an excellent biography of Leopardi, combines biographical accounts with Leopardi's own records of his childhood and youth...

...John Heath-Stubbs' translations are set in too middle a language to be entirely satisfying...

...These actions (ordinary enough in his time, if "poetic" today), the life of his town, country customs, do seem to come to us with "nature's nakedness...

...But hedging in that childhood ecstasy was the family spirit, the terrible family pride...

...The call of poetry came almost at the moment he fully recognized what he had lost??not only the animal spirits of childhood, when he acted out Pompey to his brother Carlo's Caesar, but that marvelous ability to live in the imagination, with its conjoining sense of the infinite and the eternal...

...Yet "La Ginestra," addressed to the fragrant wild broom that grows on the burnt-out slopes of Vesuvius, reasons, all but argues, asking for a tragic stoicism and defining the hero, the magnanimo, as the one who like the broom accepts without hatred or complaint, rather with love, the pain of existence...

...But we must recognize also that they were beheld through the transubstantiating effects of memory, and that after some scene or its climate is created rich in its tranquility and mysterious in its power to move, a cry will break forth with almost the very opposite effect: "Ahi come,/ Come passata seiJCara campagna dell'eta mia nova,/ Mia lacrimata speme...

...It is the most personal of cries and the most impersonal, and the outrightness of the grief can seem startling to us in a century where the hopes were never so high, where cynicism is but one step from that safeguarding necessity, irony...

...And more than an introduction...

...The days passed without my knowing it, and all their hours seemed short...

...the rigid codes and proprieties exerted upon and lived up to by members of a provincial aristocracy in a small hill-town near the Adriatic, far out of the way of the world??all these elements seemed to combine to create a life that became, in the famous words of Keats, its own allegory...

...But the original sits opposite, and those readers (I am one) with only a shadowy knowledge of Italian can begin to hear the effects of that fastidious and scrupulous style...

...How easily, at that time," Leopardi wrote in his notebook, "one's imagination took fire, how it enlarged small things and adorned bare ones and lit up darkness...

...that classical restraint, neither nervous nor dry, with the quietude of velvet about it...

...Entering his father's library as a straight-backed child, he emerged from it with a crooked spine and was to be called thereafter by his deformity: "// gobbo...

...that pure line...

...Again and again in his poems we meet his pain for the great prospects cut off: his susceptibility, his sensitivity to the false note that ruins the harmony, his overwhelming sense of loss once youth with its vision of the infiinite potential had left him...

...His mother's ferocious Catholic pietism and coldness...

...It has been said that in this poem Leopardi shows the modern temper by his willingness to discuss, refute, observe life and still thirst after a greater intensity, a vaster dimension...

...that man is alone...

...This dark night of the soul he underwent in his 21st year, the same year he woke up to see what had been consumed by those "fatal studies...

...A poetry that reasons...

...One can learn, too, how sound and image seem to be one, how these long flowing invocations make their sudden changes of key or are cut short by broken rhythms...

...Fatal studies," Leopardi wrote later, but he also said that those years in his father's library were his happiest...

...Leopardi asked what we no longer ask...

...At 15 he taught himself Greek and incidentally Hebrew, and from that time on he lived surrounded by lexicons and grammars...

...his father's inflexible determination not to let his children out of his sight even long after they had come of age...

...Leopardi does not say this...

...the rest is noia...

...His case was so impossible as he described it in a letter to Giordani, the first of Italy's writers to recognize and hail him (for his translation of the second book of the Aeneid): "How can you speak of diversions...

...He might have been content to go on annotating, dissertating, translating??but "by the grace of God, certainly no man," he underwent a conversion...

...what living images . . . what stuff for poetry, what richness, vigor, strength, emotion and delight...

...That severity of serenity is interrupted by the cry that tells us this is all in passing, or this was and is not now, or that against this luminous finiteness stands the infinite...

...Is it news to anyone today that nature is indifferent and that, in spite of the way we think we can control it and/or destroy it, nature can still crush us...

...Pascal wrote: "If the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies...

...His mother considered the world and the flesh nothing but the devil, and beauty a true misfortune...

...paperback, $1.25) edited and translated by Iris Origo and the English poet, John Heath-Stubbs, will serve as an engrossing introduction...

...She gives so many selections from the Zibaldone, the notebook of some 4,000 pages that Leopardi kept for 15 years, and offers so many letters together with the dialogues entitled Operette Morali and the 17 poems, that we are led far into the life and thought of this pessimist and great poet who was born in 1798 and died at the age of 39...

...I myself remember hearing in fancy in my childhod strains sweeter than can be heard in our real world...

...Leopardi wrote in his notebook...

...The Iliad, the Aeneid, an ode of Anacreon's began to arouse in him, he wrote, "a crowd of phantasies that people both my mind and heart...

...But this realization, figured forth by the blow that came upon him as from a hating God— his own deformity, sudden near-blindness, that great fall he had because he had climbed so high??was his own discovery...

...Her husband's near bankruptcy gave this pietism more power, for she took over the management of the house and lands...

...Constantly and arduously I tried to find a way of making mine, if it were at all possible, that divine beauty...

...Seeing her children ugly or deformed, she gave thanks to God," wrote her son...

...A piece of sky seen through a shutter...

...He had a most vivid awareness of death and an even more annihilating one of truth: that our illusions are deceptions and that we live from deception to deception...