Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America Fellowship (Columbia University)

My project concerns Giacomo Leopardi’s moral prose translations from Greek, which date from the end of 1822 to the beginning of 1827. My main objective here was to complete the critical edition of this whole set of translations: part of a famous hagiographic narrative by Nilus Monachus, to which Leopardi gave the title Martirio de’ SS. Padri; four orations by Isocrates (Ad Demonicum, Ad Nicoclem, Nicocles, Areopagiticus); the Encheiridion by Epictetus; the fragment “The choice of Herakles” attributed to Prodicus, as reported in Xenophon’s Memorabilia; the funeral oration for Helena Paleologina by Georgios Gemistus Plethon; and some fragments from other works (by Xenophon, Theophrastus, Isaeus, Isocrates). At the Italian Academy I have taken advantage of the library facilities in order to reconstruct the entire literary and philosophical context in which Leopardi worked. First of all, I have taken into account not only what he actually translated, but also the whole list of authors and texts that Leopardi intended to translate, i.e. his failed projects: an anthology of Plato, the whole Gorgias, the Gero and the Memorabilia by Xenophon, Thucydides, Eschines socraticus, Marcus Aurelius, Dion Chrisostomus, and Maximus Tirius. In these months, I have read (and taken notes from) all these authors and many recent scholarly works on them (textual philology, history of the reception, citical essays, translations in other languages). Secondly, I have tried to understand why and in which perspective Leopardi chose to translate these texts rather than others, and, more generally, what significance these authors and texts had in his literary career. Finally, I have written an introduction to each of the translations and to the important prefaces in which Leopardi gave the reasons for his choices and made interesting remarks on the works and on his translation methods.