A perfect introduction for anglophone readers to this amiable and under-read poet.
In Italy, Umberto Saba is a relatively big name. He is studied at school and, like most ‘great’ poets, he was able to write a few poems with which even the general public is familiar. (Of these my favourite is ‘To my wife’, in which Saba likens his spouse to a series of animals in such a way as recalls one of the earliest and most beautiful of Italian poems, St. Francis of Assisi’s ‘Canticle of the Creatures’. Apparently Saba’s wife, Carolina, or ‘Lina’, did not like being compared to ‘a stretched out dog’ or ‘a pregnant heifer’; but much great art is misunderstood when it first sees the light of day.)
Saba has not fared quite as well in the English-speaking world, where more overtly modern, modernist, and political poets of twentieth-century Italy—such D’Annunzio or Pasolini—have generated more interest. And curiously, such poets, despite their more overt modernism, seem to translate more easily than do Saba’s rounded and, to quote the translator, ‘sometimes almost Ciceronian’ sentences.
Leafing through this volume of Patrick Worsnip’s translations, however, I feel that we anglophone readers have been much the poorer for not knowing Saba better. His virtues are many. Upon reading this collection I sense that the most important are his refusal to go along with what was fashionable in poetic style at his time; his deep and capacious humanity; and his tendency to focus on tiny moments within quotidian life and experience rather than on supposedly grander things.
Perhaps an example here will give a clear idea of what I mean. Let’s take the sonnet titled here ‘After Lights-Out’. (Incidentally, a weakness of this volume is that neither the Italian texts nor their titles are given, making it highly awkward to find the original Italian for each translation.) Anyway, here are the last ten lines of the sonnet:
It’s no surprise if my mind is staying
alert, and sometimes is sleepless.
These are new people, snoring as they rest.
I am so old, so old it’s frightening.
I feel I’ve existed so many yearsperhaps I was on Abraham’s migration.
Perhaps I was Faust, and loved Margerete.
I tired my limbs today with conscripts here.But didn’t I live with other men and gods?
Did my eyes not see every period?
This is quite striking verse. In an ordinary situation in which some military men – privates – are sleeping, one remains sleepless and, in utterly ordinary language, depicts the sense of feeling almost preternaturally old and loaded with the weight of cultural memory – everything from the foundation myth of Judaeo-Christian culture (Abraham’s migration) to the medieval myth of Faust (and surely its Renaissance and Englightenment reinventions by Marlowe and Goethe respectively). It’s not exactly that it is humble poetry: rather, it is impressive how far it gets within the most modest of means.
Saba also seemed to like redeeming what was often dismissed in the twentieth century (and equally today) as passé. We can see his re-use of sonnet form above, and another of his famous poems among Italians meditates on the most clichéd of rhymes: ‘flower’ and ‘love’, or ‘fiore’ and ‘amore’:
I loved trite words that no one dared
to use. I was bewitched by the rhyme fiore/
amore,
the most ancient and difficult on earth.
Indeed, it is intriguing that, far from repudiating ‘difficulty’, such a watchword of modernist poets, he thought of it as residing in a different imaginative place from that of most of his poetic contemporaries. There is something of the gadfly in Saba’s cheeky upending of modernist orthodoxies.
This makes him—again as is the opposite case with many modernist poets—a most amiable person. But I suppose that it is his contradictions and complexities that serve to raise him from mere amiability to fascination. Living and working for most of his life in Trieste, he is, like Italo Svevo, somewhat synonymous with the place. This borderland helped him to keep one foot in Italy, with the other out. Trieste was, at the time of his birth, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was his father who, being born in Friuli, allowed his son to possess Italian citizenship. As a frontiersman, he is persistently interested in his Slavic neighbours and in the great port of the city bringing people and products in and out.
As well as being a borderer in terms of nation states, he was one in terms of religion, too. He was son to a Jewish mother and a father who left the Catholic church and converted to Judaism in order to marry. He abandoned wife, child, and religion shortly afterwards—apparently for political reasons, namely his involvement in the irredentist movement of the time. Saba himself considered several times and on at least one occasion wanted seriously to convert to Catholicism, but was dissuaded—a shame for a writer who is so ‘catholic’ in the more general sense of the word. One sees Catholic figures, especially Mary, surface quite frequently in his poems.
So much for the interesting figure and poetry of Saba himself. What about this particular volume? I would say that it makes an excellent introduction to the poet for interested anglophone readers. It includes all the famous poems, and a good number of lesser known but interesting pieces. After one hundred poems, one closes the book with the feeling that they are at least beginning to get a good sense of Saba and his work. This edition also has a brief but interesting introductory essay by Angela Leighton, and is rounded off by a much fuller essay by Patrick Worsnip, after which one finds his quite generous notes.
The book does have some flaws. There are some typos—though not as bad as those in Carcanet’s recent Collected Rowan Williams. It is also rather a shame to have left out Saba’s original Italian texts—something which I suppose was done for reasons of space. I’d much rather have the Italian, though, than all the notes, essays, and empty space on the poetic pages. I think we could at least have the titles so that we can go and look up the original. The notes at times add relatively little to my understanding, and sometimes they cover rather common knowledge that I cannot imagine Carcanet readers being in want of.
As for the translations themselves, I hesitate to say too much, not being greatly familiar with the original Italian. My general impression, however, is that they are clear, rhythmic, and musical, if only a bit staid and wooden in places, in a way that I imagine is not true of Saba’s originals. This is a common problem with translation—particularly of poetry and, in my opinion, a common problem in translating Italian into English. Strangely, though, English translates very well into Italian. But there is something about the roughness and directness of English that is peculiarly inept when it comes to translating the idiomatic warmth and unique sonorities of Italian.
English Dante translations often work well enough because Dante’s writing is so full of invention that even the non-poetic features, such as the narrative, translate without too much of a problem. A subtle and delicate writer like Saba, I think, demands the most refined touch possible. Worsnip has made an admirable attempt here, and made interesting modern English poems in so doing. He uses half-rhymes and freer metres where Saba had been strict with both, so it is very much a translation belonging to 2022, rather than, say, 1922.
But translation is a difficult business. If this is not a perfect book, it is a good one and it will certainly stay on my shelf for reference, even if I generally defer in the future to an Italian edition of Saba. Anyway—MR readers will know that I often like the poetry to have the last word, so I shall end by quoting my favourite poem from the volume. Saba imagines himself as Abraham in Genesis 17, when he and Sara are visited by three mysterious men—angels—or aspects of the Trinity. (Interpretations have varied.) This poem also happens to resonate interestingly with ‘After Lights-Out’, quoted above.
Evening
[…]
so good, so godly does the Earth appear
in this devout hour of the Ave Maria,
that a sweet illusion
holds my spirit and its senses in its power.
[…] I feel
I’m living at a time when, at the dawn
of peoples there were few men in the world;
that the austere
tranquillity of the old patriarch
descends over my heart
with evening’s rays.
Sitting at his pious home’s
doorway he looked upon the rising star,
the fat cattle, the fleecy lambs,
the countryside laden with fruit and flowers.
Now I feel that superhuman love,
that ecstatic calm,
and I too rest my head upon my palm,
almost await the messengers of the Lord.
Charles Eager
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