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

389 LETTERS 109. F. Algarotti to Tartini Venice 22 February 1754. It is indeed old news that what poets are greediest of is praise: a fine food which they are fed by Apollo, and which never generates satiety. 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 coramve quibuslibet , but rather to those few who can bring to things a founded judgement, and whose feeling is refined by reason. And now I must feel a great satisfaction, and I actually do feel it, for the sweet music of your praises. And it matters not, you will allow me to contradict you, that you are not a poet by profession; and that those verses of mine 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 many academies. To obtain their approval, I would have perhaps needed to thinly sew together some old centos; but instead I have tried in my verses to expand, to try some new paths, and to reason about things, to express which there is no nice ready-made poetic phrasebook. Quite wittily, Metastasio once said, comparing the seventeenth century to this century of ours, that no sooner had we escaped from the plague, we ran into famine. With an idle thought or two many sheets can be filled, just as poor people, with three chairs and a small table, have furnished a room. And may those thoughts concern their own reasoning, and may they present to the reader things similar to our customs, to the manners of our current living and thinking! There is no doubt that from the reading of the ancient poets, and especially of the Latins, infinite things are not conveyed that regard the customs they had at the time in religion, politics, military matters and their private life. Is it not already so with us? And let us suppose that in time our Italian language were to become extinct, as happened to Latin, and with it our customs and the system of things which presently reigns were abolished, what legacy, what sign of it would be found in our Italian poets by those who read their work to learn our language, just as we read the Romans to learn Latin? None, for sure. For so much do we, owing to a false concept which we have formed in our mind of imitation, speak with other people’s heads and mouths. Here one does not try to imitate the movement of the ancients so much as to copy, I’ll say it this way, their very same steps; the same things they said are repeated, which marvellously suited the system of their religion and politics, but are artificial and pedantic in ours. The fact of wanting to persuade the women of today by means of legends from Ovid or from Propertius, would it not be the same as wanting to encourage our soldiers using the examples from the days of Lake Regillus or Thermopylae? And from this stems, in my opinion, the boredom that poetry universally generates today, like that