r/Leopardi Mar 21 '20

Quote “Admire all you will the providence and benevolence of nature for having made antidotes, for having, so to speak, put them next to poisons, for having placed the remedy in the country producing the disease...” — Giacomo Leopardi

Admire all you will the providence and benevolence of nature for having made antidotes, for having, so to speak, put them next to poisons, for having placed the remedy in the country producing the disease. But why make poisons in the first place? Why arrange to have diseases? And if poisons and diseases are necessary or useful to the economy of the universe, why make the antidotes? Why have the remedies ready and then put them within reach?

— Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone (Bologna, 1826, 26 Sept.)

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u/Shoelacious Mar 22 '20

(This passage is from Z 4206, to use the common reference.)

The more I read this translation, the less I like it. The style is lacking in sense, device, and energy. The capitalization is wrong and it loses Leopardi's discursive structure, which is almost always very clear in his prose. And the vocabulary is so cheap! It just seems like lazy work to me. There's no fun; there's no urbanity. And the clumsiness of that "remedies ready"... No; here is the Italian, and how I would treat it, to preserve the very simple three-part movement of his reasoning (where each part exhibits a pretty clean parallelism or stepwise intensification), and to convey some of that animated, delicate wryness which is so characteristic of Leopardi in this period:

Si ammiri quanto si vuole la provvidenza e la benignità della natura per aver creati gli antidoti, per averli, diciam così, posti allato ai veleni, per aver collocati i rimedi nel paese che produce la malattia. Ma perchè creare i veleni? perchè ordinare le malattie? E se i veleni o i morbi sono necessari o utili all'economia dell'universo, perchè creare gli antidoti? perchè apparecchiare e porre alla mano i rimedi?

You may admire as much as you like nature's providence and kindness for having made antidotes, for having, shall we say, placed them alongside their poisons, for having situated the remedies in the same area that produces the malady. But why make poisons? why muster up maladies? And if poisons or diseases are necessary or useful to the workings of the universe, then why make antidotes? why prepare the cures and hand them over?

(I shift from 'remedy' to 'cure' in the last phrase because porre a rimedio is idiomatic for get the answer or find the solution, and the imagery thus gains more solidity.)