ARTICOLI / 8 / Giovanni Lombardo /
Leopardi’s attempt to establish a parallelism between sense and syntax in the first stanza of Ultimo canto di Saffo reminds the longinian technique that Erich Auerbach had recognised in Dante’s Inferno (9.65-72). In both texts, the sublime spectacle of ‘catastrophic’ nature is described by a ‘chaotic’ word-order, mirroring the reported phenomena. The sentence-structure (especially hyperbaton and léxis katestramméne, the ‘rounded style’) is indeed meant as an iconic illustration of the point.
