The Centre is undertaking the first complete, annotated, English edition of Leopardi's notebooks, the Zibaldone di pensieri, with initial funding support from the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani and substantial additional funding in aid of the translation from private cultural foundations and individuals. The preparation of the critical edition is supported by the AHRC.
The Zibaldone is one of the most significant documents of the Romantic period which is still unavailable in English.This major project, directed jointly by Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino, is now nearing completion, having run for five years (2005-10). Publication is expected in 2012-2013.
First complete English edition of the Zibaldone
Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is Italy's greatest poet after Dante. Like Dante's, his poetry is underpinned by a complex and wide-ranging system of thought whose contours are clearly visible in his verse and in the prose works he published or prepared during his lifetime. But it was not until more than sixty years after his death that the full extent of Leopardi's philosophical reflections became apparent with the publication of the four-and-a-half thousand pages of his notebooks, known in Italian as the Zibaldone di pensieri.
The scope and importance of these notebooks make them comparable to Coleridge's Biographia litteraria or Valéry's Cahiers. Steeped in his reading of classical and Christian texts, Leopardi draws extensively also on the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment to piece together a wholly original materialist view of language, personal relations, the structures of human societies, the interaction between culture and nature, and the ultimate destiny of humanity.
Consisting of entries of a few lines or several pages, written in an unfalteringly lucid prose which is reminiscent of the scientific pages of Galileo, the Zibaldone can also be read as a kind of hypertext, any of whose observations can point in several directions at once and make links with others for which Leopardi himself supplied a partial index. Net, mine or labyrinth, whichever metaphor one prefers, the Zibaldone is one of the richest and most stimulating works to come to us from the nineteenth century.
This wonderful resource has never been translated in its entirety into English. Instead, readers have had to rely on anthologised selections which, while serving an immediately useful purpose, have given little sense of the impact of the original and, more seriously, have necessarily reflected the personal choices, and exclusions, of their distinguished editors. Now the Leopardi Centre at Birmingham has undertaken the translation of the complete text of the Zibaldone, based on the existing Italian editions and the manuscript (held in Naples).
The translation has been entrusted to a team of highly professional expert translators; the final outcome will be the product of continuous dialogue between the translators and the editors. The English-language edition will be supplied with all the apparatus (bibliographical and textual notes) needed for a clear and critical understanding of the text.The Zibaldone Project also entails research into two theoretically rich areas connected with the notebooks: Leopardi’s use of quotation, and the Zibaldone’s status as a fragmentary work within the Romantic and post-Romantic aesthetics of the fragment. These research streams, the symposium and conference which will follow from them (to be announced on this website), and the preparation of the critical apparatus for the edition are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The AHRC Research Fellow working on the project is Dr Martin Thom.
New initiative