Giuseppe Tartini - Lettere e documenti / Pisma in dokumenti / Letters and Documents - Volume / Knjiga / Volume II

385 LETTERS 108. F. Algarotti to Tartini To Signor Giuseppe Tartini in Padua Venice 12. February 1754 The thing that men, and above all poets, are usually greediest of, is praise. And most of them are more concerned with gathering it than deserving it. I, who must have learned to weigh and not to count votes, non recito cuiquam - non ubivis, coram quibuslibet. 58 Such great pleasure I have received from the sweet music of your praises. The whole of my study has been to create a style suited to the modifications in my heart and in my imagination, Flacci animos, non res et verba sequutus ; 59 in the words of that poet of man, in whom everybody finds his own story, and whose character and tenor of life is suited in a certain way to mine. My goal then was to be liked by those whose taste, as yours is, is almost the flower of reason. And it means nothing (you must allow me to contradict you) that you are not a professional poet and that those verses have only caused in you, according to what you yourself say, that motion which is of nature and not of study. I pay more attention to your natural response than to the study of very many who even boast the title of men of letters. To have their vote it would maybe have been necessary to thinly sew together old centos; instead I have rather tried in my verses to expand and reason on things, to express which there is no nice ready-made poetic phrasebook. With great wit Metastasio once said, comparing this century of ours to the seventeenth, that we have passed from the plague to famine. I have worked on and greatly modified these little things of mine, having in mind above all else the tenui deducta poemata filo : 60 and this is why you find some of the writings different from those which you saw some time ago. It was necessary to trim back, as you have taught me, the excesses and the youthfulness; you who, to reach the peak of excellence in your art, have made many attempts and reattempts: vario nunc est, impetus ante fuit . 61 That passage of which you wrote to me in the Letter to Manfredi seemed to me to form an episode which was too long, and to be of too high a register if compared to the rest. Here it is , as you wish for them; 58 "nec recito cuiquam nisi amicis, idque coactus / non ubivis coramve quibuslibet" Horace, Satires, I 4, 73-74. See BSGRT. 59 "Flacci animos, non res et verba sequutus" freely based on Quintiliano, Institutes of Oratory, book IX. See BSGRT. 60 "tenui deducta poemata filo" Horace, Epistles, II 1, 225. See BSGRT. 61 "et, quod nunc ratio est, impetus ante fuit" Ovid, Remedia Amoris, 10. See BSGRT.