Leopardi’s Disaster

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores an idea of ‘disaster’ (‘sciagura’) that figures prominently in Leopardi’s early Canzoni (1818–22). While English versions have generally rendered this word as ‘unhappiness’, ‘woes’, ‘ills’ etc., the emphasis on lyric melancholy misses Leopardi’s sense of a universal ‘calamity’ that is closely bound up with the acquisition of language and with humanity’s increasing separation from nature. The article finds suggestive analogies between Leopardi’s handling of this nexus of ideas and Maurice Blanchot’s much later concept of disaster which is similarly geared to a perception of language as something ‘neutral’ and ‘external’. The article goes on to examine the elevated style and ‘unnatural’ syntax of the Canzoni as a means by which Leopardi cultivates his own version of an impersonal sublime.