At Least After Childhood

Telluride, Colorado, September 1983. Andrei Tarkovsky is being honoured at the film festival, and Jonathan Cott, in New York, is writing an article about Nostalghia. The interview takes place by phone, through a go-between: Cott puts his questions to the Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi, who translates them into Russian and relays Tarkovsky's answers back in English. Zanussi remembered the two of them standing behind the front desk of a small hotel, people coming and going, a stream and "an enormous mountain vista" beyond the doorway, "and here we were talking about poetry and fire and air and earth and water. The whole thing was so strange, and strangely beautiful."

At one point Cott quotes Leopardi: "certain ideas and images of things that are fantastic and impossible and strange delight us in our imagination because they recall to us our most remote memories—those of our childhood." Tarkovsky agrees; all poets have that feeling, he says, "It's something very basic to them." Then Cott sums up: "Leopardi stated that childhood means poetry." Tarkovsky: "No. The loss of childhood is the beginning of poetry."

First, what exactly we are holding. Tarkovsky's words reach us in Zanussi's on-the-spot English, as Cott transcribed it, published forty years later, in February 2024, by Hauser & Wirth's magazine Ursula, which introduces it as never published before. Yet the line about the loss of childhood was already circulating in quotation collections in the early 2000s, so it had appeared in print somewhere; we have not been able to find where. There is no Russian text and, as far as we know, no recording. What we have is a "no" that passed through three people and two languages.

The Leopardi quotation, though, can be checked. It comes from the Zibaldone, his vast notebook, page 4513, in an entry dated 21 May 1829, written at Recanati. Cott's English is faithful but stops halfway. In full, Leopardi says that certain ideas and images of things "supremely vague, fantastic, chimerical, impossible" delight us greatly, "either in poetry or in our own imagining," because they call back "the most remote remembrances, those of our childhood," when such ideas, images and beliefs were familiar and ordinary to us. And straight after: "Analyse well your most poetic sensations and imaginings, those that most uplift you, that draw you out of yourself and out of the real world; you will find that they, and the pleasure born of them, (at least after childhood), consist wholly or chiefly in remembrance."

The parenthesis is the point. Leopardi does not say that childhood is poetry. He says that, at least once childhood is over, poetry is made of memory. Shortly afterwards, in an addition to the same entry, he goes further. Many images and readings move us not in themselves but because they renew impressions first made on us "above all in childhood or in early youth"; and "I dare say that almost all the poetic impressions we feel now are of this kind, although we do not notice it, because we do not reflect on them, and we take them for primitive impressions, direct and not reflected."

Tarkovsky's "no", in other words, contradicts Cott's summary, not the page Cott was quoting.

The summary was not made up, either. Nine years earlier, in July 1820, Leopardi had noted in the same notebook that "strictly speaking, the only poets were the ancients, and the only poets now are children or the very young, and the moderns who bear the name are nothing but philosophers." That is the Leopardi for whom childhood means poetry. By 1829 the claim has changed: poetry belongs not to children but to those who remember having been children. Three months after that entry, between 26 August and 12 September, still at Recanati, he wrote Le ricordanze ("Remembrances"), in which nothing he sees or hears fails to bring back an image and "a sweet remembering", sweet in itself, until the thought of the present creeps in, "a vain desire / for the past, still sad, and the saying: I was."

Whether he knew it or not, Tarkovsky sides with the Leopardi of 1829 against the Leopardi of 1820.

It is worth being exact about what connects them. No document we know of says Tarkovsky had read these pages. Cott staged the meeting, with one sentence in English in hand, and we have extended it by turning a few lines further in the Zibaldone. There is no evidence of influence: this is an independent similarity, between a poet reasoning about his own memory and a filmmaker correcting an interviewer. That is exactly what makes it worth noticing: two people reach the same point by roads that never touch.

One more detail from the same call. Shortly before, Cott had remarked that the first image of Nostalghia, a hill and a horse, is also the last thing one sees in the film. Tarkovsky replied: "At its conclusion, you become aware that the film begins with the ending—the image belongs to the end." Put that way, it has the same shape as his "no". A beginning can only be seen from the place where it is already lost, and what seems a first glimpse comes from afterwards.

This is where Leopardi's addition turns unsettling. If nearly all poetic impressions are renewed ones, and we mistake them for "primitive, direct" ones, then the feeling of a first time, before a landscape or a line of verse, would often be a memory that does not recognise itself as memory. Leopardi does not say where the first impression, the one later renewed, came from. Tarkovsky's "no" seems to suggest there is no need to know: poetry begins at the moment that origin can no longer be reached.

So what are we seeing, when we seem to see something for the first time?