Giacomo Leopardi, the son of a count from a small town in the Marche, was nineteen years old when he met love for the first time. Or more precisely: a feeling that gradually intensifies and then, under remarkable circumstances such as insomnia and loss of appetite, subsides, which Leopardi gives the name “love”: “For more than a year” he had wished “to talk to well-shaped women and to chat as everyone does, and just when one smiled at me, which was very rare, it struck me as something incredibly strange, sweet beyond measure and flattering”.
However, what the young Leopardi does in three long diary entries from December 1817 and a poem entitled “Il primo amore” – “The first love” – is also sweet: he describes how he falls in love and with whom he falls in love , he carefully notes every event and every stirring of feeling. At the same time, he reports about himself with an indifferent reflexivity, which in love traces the will to love and recognizes the arbitrary in it, without giving it up to irony or even criticism.
The poem “Il primo amore” is the earliest of the “Canti” Leopardis, but was not included in the first edition of the “Gesänge”, published in 1824. It also never became as famous as the patriotic songs “All’Italia” (“To Italy”) and “Sopra il monumento di Dante” (“On Dante’s Monument”), written a little later, or the idyll “L’infinito” (” The Infinite”) from the autumn of 1819, the favorite poem of many Italians. However, the 34 three-line stanzas of “Il primo amore”, modeled on Petrarch, form an important work.
Giacomo Leopardi: Diary of First Love. Translated from the Italian by Marianne Schneider. With an afterword by Frank Witzel. Friedenauer Presse, Berlin 2023. 82 pages, 15 euros.
(Photo: Friedenauer Presse)
The translator has wisely dispensed with the rhymes and their scheme: “Because I always turned my eyes to the ground / and yet looked at her who to my heart / was the first to pave the way ignorantly…”. A diffuse passion seizes the young man. He doesn’t know what it means. She hasn’t found desire yet, isn’t clearly comfortable, and lingers somewhere in the atmosphere, so it’s almost a relief when the admired woman leaves after three days with only the memory of a strange intensity of feeling.
In the diary version the event reads like this: “Contemplating the feelings in my heart, I went to bed, they were basically: a vague restlessness, dissatisfaction, melancholy, a little sweetness and a desire, I didn’t and don’t know what for, and among the possible things I see nothing that could still it.” An older cousin had visited the family in their modest palace in Recanati, the young man had noticed the fine features, the black eyes and an alert intelligence, but nothing had happened.
It cannot have been easy to find a German translation for this intertwining of feeling and reason
Diaries and poems tell of such experiences, and what is remarkable about it is not only the innocence of the suitor, but also the absence of any fixed vocabulary. The extent to which everything that has to do with love has been framed in pre-determined images and progressive forms, in formulaic phrases and given feelings for at least two hundred years: one only grasps this when these routines break down and a sharp, but apparently melancholy tendency begins Intelligence bends over one’s own heart. It cannot have been easy to find a German translation for this intertwining of feeling and reason, especially since the Italian original comes with long, studied sentences and Latin prosody: Marianne Schneider succeeded.
And it was a fortunate idea on the part of the publisher to bring out the somewhat neglected poem and the accompanying texts and present them as an independent publication: there is more to be learned from it than literary history knows. The idea of entrusting the writer Frank Witzel with the afterword was also a happy one: he not only provides the positive knowledge that is needed to understand the “Canto”, but also develops the figure of a loud and sensitive enlightener who knows exactly what you ask for and why you have to rebel against what, but who in the end always already knows too much – which also applies to love. It is as if two kindred spirits had met in these circular movements.