A Poet Explains: Giacomo Leopardi on Memory and the Present ("L'Infinito" and Canti)

The disconnect between what artists express through their work and how they explain their art through regular discourse is often startling, if not disappointing. There have been many visionaries and creative minds who seem easily able to highlight their opinions and methods to curious admirers, helping place their work in the proper context, and even dissecting deeper, more obscure meanings not obvious to the outsider. However, I can think of just as many examples of great artists who have little or nothing to say about their work and the process by which it reveals itself. Some choose to take a contrarian position and refuse to take apart their work, while others seem simply incapable of standing outside themselves and honestly reflecting on their talents or ideas.

So it always comes as a welcome surprise when a great artistic mind allows him or herself the opportunity to welcome the reader or observer into their closed circle, and a recent essay by Robert Pogue Harrison on the sad life and astonishing output of Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798 - 1837) offers a stellar example. The name Leopardi may not resonate with non-Italian readers in the same manner as other early-nineteenth century poets, and this is no doubt partly due to the original and idiosyncratic approach to the Italian language Leopardi chose - a method which resulted in unique poetry that has proven difficult to translate even by the tough standards of verse.

A large part of Leopardi's legend (and he remains legendary in his native Italy to this day) is due to the tragic circumstances surrounding his short life - a life impacted from youth onward with countless health complications, including asthma, dropsy, scoliosis and chronic insomnia. From his late teens, he was aware that he would die young and in pain. While this morbid realization certainly shaped his worldview and notably modern outlook on life (ie, the non-existence of God, the random character of life, and the unredemptive qualities of the human condition), some readers and critics place far too much emphasis on the role played by his own suffering in helping to create the visionary mind and critical thinker behind his poetry. Leopardi's acceptance of the chaos of a non-spiritual world is one he arrived at through intellectual means, not simply as a result of his own misfortune. And this worldview is notable because it shades and indeed drives nearly all of Leopardi's writings, especially his insistence that progress was a myth and that his contemporaries looked unhesitatingly and enthusiastically towards the future at their peril. The past, in his mind and work, weighs heavily.

But Leopardi explains in a journal entry that his concern with the past and memory is much more than the backwards glance of the sentimentalist. By insisting on the need for memory and experience to influence observation, Leopardi is arguing that one can view the immediate landscape and world through a much richer prism than so many of his (and our) hurrying and distracted contemporaries. He writes :

To the sensitive and imaginative man, who lives, as I have lived for a long time, feeling and imagining continuously, the world and its objects are in a certain sense double. He will see with his eyes a tower, a countryside; he will hear with his ears the sound of a bell; and at the same time he will see another tower, another countryside, he will hear another sound. In this second sort of object lies all the beauty and pleasure of things. Sad is the life (and yet such is life for the most part) that sees, hears, senses only simple objects, namely those of which eyes, ears, and the other senses receive a mere sensation.

To move from this journal entry to Leopardi's poem "L'Infinito," as Harrison points out, is to see his beliefs put into poetic action - a poem celebrating the ability of the mind to gaze upon an inert landscape and travel freely in both time and space, an ability sorely lacking in the many rushing hordes around him.

This lonely hill was always dear

to me,

and this hedgerow, which cuts off

the view

of so much of the last horizon.

But sitting here and gazing, I can

see

beyond, in my mind's eye,

unending spaces,

and superhuman silences, and

depthless calm,

till what I feel

is almost fear. And when I hear

the wind stir in these branches, I

begin

comparing that endless stillness

with this noise:

and the eternal comes to mind,

and the dead seasons, and the

present

living one, and how it sounds.

So my mind sinks in this

immensity:

and foundering is sweet in such

a sea.

(translation taken from the new Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, translated by Jonathan Galassi)