Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Iris Origo’s Leopardi: A Study in Solitude:
His interest in his own language, which had begun during his philological studies in his boyhood, was perhaps the only passion of his youth that never failed him.
… Il cor di tutte
Cose alfin sente sazietà, del sonno,
Della danza, del canto e dell’ amore,
Piacer più cari che il parlar di lingua;
Ma sazietà di lingua il cor non sente.*Certainly the pages of the Zibaldone bear eloquent witness to the fact that, for Leopardi himself this statement was true! Some men have an addiction to drink, some to drugs, some to one particular human being: Leopardi had an addiction to words.¹²
* ‘The heart at last tires of all things: of sleep, dance, song, and even love—pleasures sweeter than the gift of words—but of words themselves, the heart is never tired.’ From Leopardi’s notes to the Canzoni, Poesie e Prose, vol. I, p. 152.
12. ‘The measure of a nation’s genius’, he affirmed, ‘is the richness of its language, and when a language is insufficient to render in translation the subtleties of another, it is a sure sign that it belongs to a less cultivated people.’ Zibaldone, I, pp. 730–1, 25 May 1821.
Works for me. (See the link for a comparison between the Leopardi quotation and a passage in Iliad 13.)
‘The measure of a nation’s genius’, he affirmed, ‘is the richness of its language, and when a language is insufficient to render in translation the subtleties of another, it is a sure sign that it belongs to a less cultivated people.’
I find this problematic. If a people in the Amazonian jungle speak a language that is unable to capture the “subtleties” of English, does that make them less “cultivated”? I know that this quote is from the 19th century, but it seems steeped in the European ethno-nationalism and a certain kind “ethnic culturism” of that era. It doesn’t work for me.
Yes, footnote 12 is silly and I probably should have left it out. (My “works for me” referred to the main passage about word addiction, as I hope was obvious.)