il vizio leopardiano

Nevertheless, eighteen years after the publication of this book, I was dissatisfied with it. Some of its comments—especially on the Leopardi family and the Recanati background—seemed to me both glib and insufficiently informed; and the passages about his writings both thin and second-hand. So I decided to write the book all over again. One excuse, which I proffered in the introduction to this new version (which I called Leopardi, A Study in Solitude and which was published in 19536) was that, in the interval, two more volumes of the poet’s correspondence had been published, as well as some important Italian critical works and biographies. But the real reason was a different one: that, like a friend whose life one has shared for many years, I felt I had got to know him (and I might have added, his country) a little better.

In the particular case of Leopardi, moreover, I have not been the only biographer who has felt the need to retrace his footsteps. I remember telling the distinguished Leopardian scholar and critic, Giuseppe de Robertis, who was then engaged on the back-breaking task of compiling a subject-index of the Zibaldone, that after eighteen years, I was just beginning a second life of the poet. He began to laugh. “I see that you have caught it, too,” he said, “il vizio leopardiano. This won’t be your last book on the subject,” he foretold—and indeed he was right, since only two years ago, in collaboration with John Heath-Stubbs, I produced a volume of Leopardi’s Selected Prose and Poetry (John Heath-Stubbs translating the poetry and I the prose, with biographical notes). Here the main change in the prose section of the book, since its purpose was to serve as an introduction to Leopardi’s work in English and American universities, has been that I have only used my own words when they were indispensable, to state a fact, sketch in a background or frame a picture. The rest of the story is told by Leopardi himself.

For more and more, as I have gone on reading and writing about other people, it is the subject’s own voice that I want to hear. When a biographer can record what a man actually said, he awakens a degree of conviction denied to any other form of narrative. “I wonder why we hate the past so,” says Howell ruminatively to Mark Twain, and when the latter replies, “It’s so damned humiliating,” we know, without a doubt, that this is precisely what the great man did say. This is the kind of material, the small change of daily life, that I have always found irresistible, and that caused me to write, some time after Leopardi, two books about persons who (in their very different ways) would not otherwise have been my choice: Lord Byron, and the fourteenth-century merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini.

Iris Origo
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