Poets usually write about themselves, even when they are pretending not to.
But few can have put themselves forward quite so much as Umberto Saba, the
Triestine writer who has sometimes been rated one of Italy’s best poets of
the twentieth century and who, in his own opinion, was quite simply the
greatest since Leopardi. What is strange is that the more you read Saba, the
less the “autolatria” or self-worship, as Montale called it, seems
off-putting. Rather than self-aggrandizement, it comes over more as an
unstable, knowing series of self-projections, which the reader is implicitly
asked to recognize and empathize with and which, when everything goes well,
give rise to poetry. Saba freely acknowledged that it didn’t always go well,
but the one thing he was convinced about all his life was that great poetry,
including his own best work, provided a special kind of enjoyment that made
up for the misery and confusion from which it emerged, not just for himself
(he was a lifelong depressive) but for everyone. You don’t have to take him
at his word to feel that some of his poems combine wonderful qualities of
song with emotional density in a way that is rare in modern poetry and that
others subtly and often ironically recast traditional Italian poetry from
within rather than by taking it apart. “M’incantò la rima fiore / amore, /
la più antica difficile del mondo”, he wrote in a short late poem – “I was
enchanted by the rhyme June, / moon, the oldest and most stubborn in the
world”, in the version given here by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan who
find plausible English equivalents for the rhyme “fiore / amore” but distort
“difficile” with “stubborn”. Perhaps it was indeed a kind of lowest common
denominator of the Italian tradition that he worked with, though he added a
dose of Heine to give it a tart edge and a certain syntactic awkwardness
which stops the reader from being too carried away by the flow.
The beginnings, specially in Saba’s own heightened versions of events,
certainly look like a recipe for psychological chaos. He was born Umberto
Poli in 1883 in Trieste, then the principal Mediterranean port of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, though he was Italian by nationality through his
father. His mother was Jewish, and several years older than her husband,
whose difficulties with the law led to his leaving Trieste before his son
was born, not to reappear for twenty years. The infant was passed to a
Catholic wet nurse for his first three years, a period which he later looked
back to as one of infantile bliss. After that he grew up in a largely female
Jewish environment, though always aware that half of him was different.
Late nineteenth-century Trieste was largely un-Italian in its culture and
language. If anything it was an outpost of Mitteleuropa, as its early
openness to Freudian psychoanalysis indicates. The young Saba, an Italian
nationalist from the beginning, did military service in Salerno in southern
Italy, which led to a first autobiographical verse sequence, “Versi
militari”. These are traditional sonnets, untouched by the modernism
stirring in Florence and elsewhere in Italy – which Saba did have some
contact with. At the same time, they turn the provincialism of Triestine
Italian culture to advantage by playing off standard poetic machinery and
language against the drab existence of a young conscript with little to do
but mull over as yet unfulfilled poetic ambitions.
The approach produces more interesting results in the poems that follow,
leading up to Trieste e una donna of 1912. The subject matter now oscillates
between his wife and his native city, and quite often blurs them together,
as he finds things to say about both that he is pleased to feel conventional
poetry would have baulked at. The poems about low life round the port seem
mostly picturesque now. Those for his wife, Lina, still have force. She was
older and wholly Jewish and, though it somehow lasted, it was from the start
a difficult marriage. Saba the poet took the awkward emotions and conflicts
as the basis for a series of dialogue poems which have the air of exchanges
in realist opera libretti. He also wrote perhaps his most famous single
poem, the affectionate though disconcerting “A mia moglie” (To My Wife), in
which he compares his wife with one female animal after another – a young
hen, a pregnant heifer, a rangy bitch, a nervous rabbit, a swallow, an ant,
and a bee: “E così nella pecchia / ti ritrovo, ed in tutte / le femmine di
tutti / i sereni animali / che avvicinano a Dio; / e in nessun’altra donna”
– in Hochfield and Nathan’s translation: “And so I find you also / in the
bee and in all / the females of all / the peaceful animals / who are near to
God, / and in no other woman”. Later he apparently regularly referred to his
wife as an old hen, with no complimentary intent.
There is a good deal of transgressive pleasure here, which intensifies in the
poems that follow. After the First World War, Trieste became part of Italy,
and Saba, taking surprisingly adroit advantage of the new situation,
acquired an antiquarian bookstore, in which he liked to represent himself
buried away from human life. He actually seems to have been a canny
businessman, though he left much of the day-to-day running of the shop to
the “buon Carletto” who appears in various poems. There were also young girl
employees, who as Paola or Chiaretta turn up in the poetry as not altogether
unwilling objects of desire. They may represent the elusive,
catch-me-if-you-can object of poetry too, but with an erotic charge that is
at the antipodes to any of the notions of poetic purity that were coming to
dominate contemporary literary debates in Italy.
Poetic purity went with obscurity, with the hermeticism that was associated at
the time with Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale and then, a little later,
Salvatore Quasimodo. Saba would have none of that, preferring to keep to an
ostensible clarity and familiarity. Though he pooh-poohed the idea, a good
many of the poems of the 1920s echo the procedures of Metastasio, the all
too cantabile eighteenth-century tragedian, who has been anathema to Italian
poets since Romanticism. The results become truly remarkable in the often
undervalued Preludio e fughe of 1929, the “fugues” of which fluently
interweave different voices celebrating the transformation of pain into
erotic and artistic pleasure. They now seem peculiarly modern.
In 1921 Saba gathered together the considerable body of work he had already
published as his Canzoniere, literally perhaps Songbook as Hochfield and
Nathan have it, but suggesting in Italian an organized collected poems on
the Petrarchan model with strong autobiographical overtones. The final
version would not come out until 1948, but the drive to autobiographical
poetry became steadily more intense in the 1920s and 30s, taking on a new
twist with two years of psychoanalysis with Edoardo Weiss, the Triestine
Freudian who had had such a liberating effect on the novelist Italo Svevo.
Saba, like Svevo, kept a rational, often ironic eye on all things
unconscious, but felt he had begun to discover the child in himself, though
Il piccolo Berto of 1931 is one of his weaker volumes. More successful was
an unexpected shift into a more prosaic and compressed manner, in a way a
more modern one, from which he could still coax affecting music when he
wanted to, but which allowed him to enter more into everyday life. Or at
least to give more concrete representations of his emotional needs, as
happens, for instance, in “Sobborgo” (Suburb), most of which centres on
suburban squalor, but which ends with the corrective image of a barman (or
poet), cheerfully different from the environment he has emerged from and
serving a coffee, “come un trionfo” (like a triumph).
Saba had first published as Umberto da Montereale, but in 1910 took up the
much more striking Saba, that is, the biblical Sheba, which he eventually
adopted as his legal name. Apparently it had been used occasionally as a
pseudonym by one of his relatives. But there seems to have been no religious
impulse. Apart from the scapegoat allegory of “La capra” (“The Goat”) and a
few other early poems and stories, Saba tended to hold Jewishness at a
distance. But having a Jewish mother was enough to put him at risk when
northern Italy became a rump Fascist state under German control in late
1943. He found refuge in Florence (where he was helped by Montale among
others), and, though he was understandably incapable of poetry, he did
manage some prose, including the beginnings of one of the stranger
self-commentaries by a modern poet. This is the Storia e cronistoria del
Canzoniere, which eventually covered all his work up to 1947. Adopting the
persona of an unnamed critic (though excerpts were published under the name
of Giuseppe Carimandrei), he writes throughout about Saba as if he were
someone else, whose weak points should be dispassionately pointed out but
whose strengths and riches as a poet must be redeemed from critical
misunderstanding and neglect. He was delighted when a friend said it read
like a novel and that he had found himself unable to put it down.
Saba was both wrong and right about his reputation. He had been considered a
significant poet since at least the 1920s, but the praise was often
qualified and couched (as it continued to be) in terms of giving overdue
recognition to a poet outside the main line of modern poetry. In his last
years, spent largely in Milan, new poems became little more than five-finger
exercises turning sparrows and other city birds into allegories of the poet
and poetry. His main work now was Ernesto, a novel of youthful homosexual
love, which he left unfinished and which was not published until eighteen
years after his death in 1957. Untouched by this last transgressive foray
(which Saba himself regretted), his reputation grew enormously, in part
because his readability and his apparent everydayness could be made to fit
with the populist tenor of post-war Italian culture. Like almost all other
Italian writers, he had a Communist moment. In the 1960s and 70s Montale,
Ungaretti and Saba (usually in that order) were Italy’s three great modern
poets. Saba is now scrupulously edited, and ritually admired, but, I think,
little read or discussed beyond a few anthology pieces.
This welcome selection gives English-language readers a chance to engage with
about a third of the Canzoniere, especially if they can navigate from the
sober and generally serviceable translations back to the Italian. In any
event, the anthology is substantial enough and well enough supported in its
notes to allow entry into Saba’s complexities. Hochfield and Nathan have a
helpful introduction, in which they discuss a short essay from 1911 entitled
“What remains for poets to do”, which they include as an appendix. It opens
with a straightforward statement of its thesis: “It remains for poets to
write honest poetry”. Quite what that programme might mean with regard to
his own self-constructions is one of Saba’s fascinations.
George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan, translators
SONGBOOK
The selected poems of Umberto Saba
562pp. Yale University Press. £20 (US $35).
978 0 300 13603 6
Peter Hainsworth is co-editor (with David Robey) of The Oxford
Companion to Italian Literature, 2002. He is a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall,
Oxford.
