Scholar, born in Piacenza, Emilia-Romagna, N Italy. He supported Napoleon and was harassed after the Restoration. He saw in classicism the only way to bring new life to literature, was a contributor to La Biblioteca Italiana, and an editor for L'Antologia. He supported the work of Giacomo Leopardi whom he greatly influenced. Of his work, collected in Opere (14 vols, 185463), notable is Istruzione a un giovane italiano per l'arte dello scrivere (1821).
Pietro Giordani (Piacenza, January 1, 1774 – Parma, September 2, 1848) was an Italian writer, classical literary scholar, and a close friend of, and influence on, Giacomo Leopardi.
Biography
Giordani originally set out to become a monk.
In 1816, he began his legendary epistolary exchange with Giacomo Leopardi to whom he eventually paid a visit in 1818, accompanying him, during his first travels outside of the small village of Recanati, to Macerata. Giordani encouraged and helped foster the intellectual development and the further acquisition of knowledge that led to Leopardi's eventual greatness by exposing him to different cultural environments which included the most important groups of writers and intellectuals of the times.
The inheritance left to him by his father in 1817 assured Giordani's economic independence and, as a consequence, also ensured him a great deal of intellectual independence. In the year 1825, he managed to get published, in this magazine, a letter to the Marchese Gino Capponi in which he proposed the idea of editing and publishing a collection (Scelta de' Prosatori Italiani) of all the works of the most important writers in Italian history, from Dante to contemporary writers of the time (including Leopardi), in volumes which did not cost more than 24 scudos.
After the suppression of the uprisings of 1821, there followed a period of retrenchment. The uprisings of 1831 would find the intellectuls absent altogether and even Giordani, as a consequence, found himself something of an outcast in Italian society.
In his final years, he lived in Parma, where he was incarcerated for three months in 1934 and where he died in 1848, ironically enough, precisely during the period of the (provisional) success of the anti-Austrian uprisings.
Works
Description of the Bonaparte Forum, 1806;
The Debate Between Classicism and Romanticism
On the first of January 1816, in the first issue of "La Biblioteca Italiana", Giordani published his own translation of an article of Madame de Stael with the title On the Manner and Utility of Translations, in which de Stael invited Italians to abandon the isolationism and provincialism of their native literary traditions, to abandon their continued reference to a worn and anachronistic mythology in order to move closer to modern foreign literature.
"An Italian" responds to De Stael was the title of the article in which Giordani, in the April edition of the magazine, formulated a strong rejection of de Stael's invitation. What possible help could a bunch of foreign authors offer to the resolution of the most urgent task of any literary Italian, which is, of course, the return to linguistic purity?, asked Giordani. De Stael's article offered him the opportunity to state the fundamental principle of classicism: the existence of a form of perfection in art which, once attained, could only be either lost in decadence or reattained by going back to the perfect works which had already been realized and discovering what it is in them that makes them the most outstanding creations and expressions of the human imagination and creative skill. Italian writers had already been imitating classical poets for centuries and the imitation of modern foreign writers would have resulted in the obfuscation of the Italianity of Italian literary expression.
"The sciences are capable of infinite progress and are able to find new truths every day which had been previously unknown," wrote Giordani.
Perfection, for Giordani, was reached by the Greek and Latin writers and, later, by the Italians. And it is precisely for this reason that Italian taste, offspring of Greco-Roman taste, is completely extraneous to that of, e.g., the English or the Germans.
"One can dispute endlessly about whether or not all of that which people admire in English and German poetry is truly beautiful; It is necessary to either cease being Italians, forget our own language, our history, transform our climate and our immagination, or, maintaining these things unchanged, accept that our poetry and our literature must be maintained Italian; but it cannot remain Italian if it is mixed with those northern ideas which have nothing in common and are incomptatible with ours....I am not saying that an Italian cannot reasonably desire to learn the poetry and the literature of the northerners, as he can easily do by personally visiting those countries;
All of these ideas were later to exercise a profound influence over Leopardi, who, notwithstanding his romanticism in style and tone, was, at heart, a deeply committed classicist in holding (and in stating in many parts of the Zilbaldone and elsewhere) that the arts, and indeed humanity itself, had systematically degenerated from a high-point in the Greco-Roman past to a point in the modern scientific world in which true beauty was no longer attainable because of the death of the primitive illusions associated with a natural, non-scientific and non-technological world.
A year later, however, Giordani would read for the first time the tragedies of Shakespeare and end up powerfully impressed. He wrote: "I am reading the works of Shakespeare, which appears to me to be a new world of drama and, like in any new world, I am finding all sorts of things: enormous beauty and substantial misery. And, in contradiction to his many previous affermations in writings, he added, "I think these works would be of enormous profit to Italian poets.!!"
Conclusions
In his writings, Pietro Giordani demonstrated a strict adherence to linguistic classicism, to an eloquence balanced and controlled in form. For this reason, the idea of literature in Giordani, in spite of the common classicist roots, is very different from that of Monti: the literary enterprise must consist in the affermation of virtue, the search for truth, and civil education.
In him, faith in the happiness of humanity, once liberated from prejudices and oppression, alternates with a desolate vision of inevitable human unhappiness without conceding anything to transcendental illusions.
There is, in Giordani, a contradiction between retorical education and the urgence of reneweal, as there is in his conviction that the only way to achieve cultural progress in Italian society is through finding a stimulus in the lessons of the ancients. But it was the contradiction of Italian history itself that was expressed in him: not finding any elements of progress within an economically backward and social stagnant society, he illuded himself that the indisputable value of Italian literary tradition could be, in and of itself, a pogressive factor.
He himself seems to have been conscious of a certain insuffiency of his work with respect to his capabilities and intellect when he wrote: "If they wish to put a stone over these poor bones, I recommend that they write: Pietro Giordani was never known."
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