At the initiative of the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin and with the sponsorship of the Italian Embassy, the ‘’Laboratorio Leopardi’’ was opened at the University of Potsdam with the aim of making the first unabridged translation of the ‘’Zibaldone’’, supplemented with a critical comment on the relationship between Leopardi’s work and German culture.
The project – developed at the initiative of Luigi Reitani, the former director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin who died recently – is headed by Cornelia Klettke, full professor of Romance Studies at the University of Potsdam, in collaboration with Franco D’Intino, full professor at Rome’s University La Sapienza and director of the University’s “Laboratorio Leopardi’’. Italian researcher Carlo Mathieu was appointed scientific coordinator.
“Today we celebrate the start of a fascinating project that the Italian Embassy is proud to sponsor,” said Ambassador Varricchio in his address. Up to now, we were missing an unabridged translation of the “Zibaldone” into German, and the “Laboratorio Leopardi” intends to compensate this shortcoming but also to represent a cultural bridge between Italy and Germany by supplementing the translation with a critical comment highlighting the close link between Leopardi’s work – with its classical roots – and the German culture at Leopardi’s time: spanning from the poetry of Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, and Novalis, to the thought of the Schlegel brothers, of Kant, Leibnitz and Wilhelm von Humboldt. “This project thus contributes to further highlight – Ambassador Varricchio added – the European dimension of the intellectual figure of Giacomo Leopardi.”
