Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone (selections)

Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone is one of the greatest intellectual notebooks of the 19th Century and has 2500 pages of encyclopedic entries on language, philosophy, poetry, politics, history, in a powerful testament to Italian literature. We will not be reading the entirety of the notebook, but a generous selection of passages will be chosen for discussion as this Meetup will serve as a general introduction and an attempt to raise awareness about this incredibly underrated work of Italian literature.

The selections to be read will be posted closer to the Meetup date.

Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers from Nietzsche to Beckett as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. To many, he is the finest Italian poet after Dante.

He was also a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy, and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career, he kept an immense notebook, known as the Zibaldone, or "hodge-podge," as Harold Bloom has called it, in which Leopardi put down his original, wide-ranging, radically modern responses to his reading. His comments about religion, philosophy, language, history, anthropology, astronomy, literature, poetry, and love are unprecedented in their brilliance and suggestiveness, and the Zibaldone, which was only published at the turn of the twentieth century, has been recognized as one of the foundational books of modern culture. Its 4,500-plus pages have never been fully translated into English until now, when a team under the auspices of Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino of the Leopardi Centre in Birmingham, England, have spent years producing a lively, accurate version. This essential book will change our understanding of nineteenth-century culture. This is an extraordinary, epochal publication.

Amazon Purchase Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Zibaldone-Giacomo-Leopardi-ebook/dp/B00ANI9GJA