Umberto Saba

• Born: March 9, 1883
• Birthplace: Trieste, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Italy)
• Died: August 26, 1957
• Place of death: Gorizia, Italy

Other literary forms

Although remembered primarily for his poetry, particularly as assembled in the monumental editions of Il canzoniere, Umberto Saba (SAH-bah) also wrote several significant prose works, most of which were collected by Saba’s daughter Linuccia in Prose (1964). Scorciatoie e raccontini (1946; shortcuts and vignettes) consists mainly of terse reflections on poetry and meditations on politics and postwar society. The collection Ricordi-racconti, 1910-1947 (1956; remembrances, stories) contains stories and sketches, some directly autobiographical. Saba’s prose style is usually rich and complex, though not particularly experimental. Like his poems, the prose works are reflective and benefit from a careful rereading. The pieces in Scorciatoie e raccontini are “shortcuts” because they cut through the twisting paths of conventional, logical thought to arrive at a conclusion which is often startling in its revelation and insight. In Storia e cronistoria del “Canzoniere” (1948; History and Chronicle of “The Songbook,” 1998), Saba turns his critical eye to his own works, explaining the biographical background of the poems in Il canzoniere and giving interpretations. This self-criticism not only recalls the commentary of Dante on his own poems in La vita nuova (c. 1292; Vita Nuova, 1861; better known as The New Life) but also exemplifies the influence of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis on Saba’s thought and technique. The incomplete novel Ernesto, published posthumously in 1975, is on the surface Saba’s least typical work; set in Trieste and vividly capturing the dialect of that Mediterranean city, Ernesto depicts the love of a young boy for an older man. Still, while more realistic and explicit than Saba’s other works, Ernesto develops the same themes—art, love, change, and loss—with an equal complexity and subtlety.

Achievements

Often considered one of the three great Italian poets of the twentieth century, along withGiuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, Umberto Saba is also one of the most important poets to combine traditional verse forms with a modern restraint and to treat universal themes with an analytical and self-conscious approach typical of the twentieth century.

The clarity and reflectiveness of Saba’s earlier poems reveal the influence of the nineteenth century poet Giacomo Leopardi, and the calm, melancholy atmosphere of many of Saba’s poems has its roots in the poetry of the crepuscolari (twilight) poets such as Guido Gozzano and Sergio Corazzini, who described everyday objects and settings with a wistful nostalgia. Saba’s later poems break more definitely with traditional meter and line length, reflecting the terse, ragged rhythms of Ungaretti.

Saba won several prizes and honors, including the Premio Viareggio in 1946 for Scorciatoie e raccontini, the Premio dell’Accademia dei Lincei in 1951, and the honorary degree in letters from the University of Rome in 1953; critics have generally appreciated Saba’s works, particularly since the 1960’s. While Saba’s poetical works have been generally well received and studied in Italy, however, his place in modern world literature has not yet been established, perhaps in large part because of a scarcity of translations. As critics continue to construct an account of Saba’s biography and his rich inner life, his significance should become increasingly apparent.

Biography

The life of Umberto Saba is reflected throughout his work, and this relationship is most evident in Saba’s structuring of Il canzoniere around the three periods of his development—youth, maturity, and old age. For Saba, all literature is in a sense autobiographical. Still, the richness and complexity of the poems and prose works give no indication of the relatively simple life of the poet.

Saba was born Umberto Poli on March 9, 1883, in Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Ugo Edoardo Poli, was the son of the contessa Teresa Arrivabene; Saba’s mother, Felicita Rachele Coen, was the daughter of Jewish parents who had a fairly successful business in the ghetto of Trieste. The marriage did not last long, and Ugo Poli, who had converted to Judaism, abandoned his wife as soon as Umberto was born. Saba refers to his parental background in sonnets 2 and 3 from the chapter “Autobiografia” in Il canzoniere. In the second, “Quando nacqui mia madre ne piangeva” (when I was born my mother cried), Saba describes both his and his mother’s sorrow at being abandoned by his father. The speaker’s happy memories of his relatives in the ghetto shopping for him and his mother are tempered by his loneliness: “But I soon became an expert at melancholy;/ the only son with a distant father.” The third sonnet, “Mio Padre è stato per me ’l’assassino’” (my father has been for me “the assassin”), recounts the meeting between Saba and his father when Saba was twenty, a meeting that surprises the speaker, for he realizes that he has much in common with his father, the man whom he had hated for so long: “His face had my azure stare,/ a smile, amid suffering, sweet and sly.” The speaker remembers his mother’s warning not to be like his father and then understands for himself what she meant, that “they were two races in an ancient strife.” With this awareness, the poet also sees in himself the unreconciled opposition of two forces, Jewish and Christian, old and new, victim and assassin.

As a boy, Saba was sent to stay with a nursemaid, Giuseppina Sabaz, from whom he derived his pseudonym and whom he recalls as Peppa in the chapter “Il piccolo Berto” (little Berto) in Il canzoniere. In “Il figlio della Peppa” (the son of Peppa), Saba remembers the paradise of his stay with Peppa, who had found in Berto a replacement for her dead son. The speaker sees this time with his Catholic nurse as lighter and happier than the time with his mother; after three years, as Saba remembers, his mother took him away from Peppa.

Saba had formal schooling beyond high school, attending the Ginnasio Dante Alighieri in Trieste. Wanting to be a sailor, he took courses at a nautical academy but did not graduate, for his mother made him take a position as a clerk in a commercial firm. In 1902, he left this job, traveling in northern Italy and reading widely such poets as Leopardi, Giosuè Carducci, and Giovanni Pascoli, major influences on Saba’s first volume of poetry, which was originally published in a private edition as Il mio primo libro di poesie (my first book of poetry) in 1903 and republished in 1911 as Poesie.

In 1908, Saba was drafted into the infantry and was stationed at Salerno, an experience that he depicts in Il canzoniere in “Versi militari” (military verses) and an experience that gave him for the first time a sense of comradeship with others. The same year, after finishing his service, he married the seamstress Carolina Wölfler, the “Lina” of his love poetry, whom he had met in 1907. The couple settled near Trieste and had a daughter, Linuccia. Saba returned to the army during World War I as an airfield inspector but did not see combat. After the war, Saba opened an antiquarian bookstore in Trieste, which served as his chief source of income and acted as a meeting place for numerous writers and artists; from his bookstore, Saba published the first edition of Il canzoniere in 1921.

Much of the rest of Saba’s life was relatively uneventful, and he published little between the years 1934 and 1945. Just before World War II, the growing anti-Semitic atmosphere pressured Saba into fleeing to France; later, he returned to Italy, staying incognito in Rome and in Florence. After the Liberation, Saba returned to Trieste and published in 1944 the volume Ultime cose (last things). The title is somewhat misleading, though, for in 1945, Saba published the first definitive gathering and reworking of his poems in Il canzoniere. After this edition, Saba continued writing poetry and prose, including some of his most famous works, such as “Ulisse” (“Ulysses”). In 1956, Saba was confined to a clinic in Gorizia; his wife died in November, and nine months later, on August 25, 1957, Saba himself died.

Analysis

Although overshadowed by the monumental achievements of Ungaretti and Montale, Umberto Saba has, since just before his death in 1957, begun to acquire the critical acclaim that his life’s work in poetry and prose deserves. As critics begin to evaluate the subtle innovations of Saba’s style and the depth of his thematic development, Saba’s position as a major early modern poet should become increasingly secure.

Il canzoniere

The connection between Saba’s life and his poetry is nowhere more evident than in his organization of the 1945 edition of Il canzoniere, the collection and revision of all his previous poems. Il canzoniere consists of chronologically arranged chapters (some of which had been published separately) and is divided into three sections or volumes, each of which corresponds to a phase of Saba’s life—adolescence and youth (from 1900 to 1920), maturity (from 1921 to 1932), and old age (in the 1961 edition, this includes additional poems from 1933 to 1954). These three sections also correspond to stages of Saba’s poetic development, although certain themes and techniques persist throughout his career. The most salient characteristics of Saba’s poetry are his preoccupation with retrospection, his treatment of modern themes in traditional meter and form but with concrete, everyday language, and his development of the theme of love as a unifying force in a chaotic world.

The first section of Il canzoniere contains some very early verse, much of which is less interesting and innovative than later poems, but the section also contains several of Saba’s best-known lyrics, including “A mia moglie” (“To My Wife”) and “La capra” (“The Goat”). This section contains the chapters “Versi militari” (written during Saba’s experience as an infantryman in 1908) and “Casa e campagna” (home and countryside), from which come “To My Wife” and “The Goat,” “Trieste e una donna” (Trieste and a lady), which treats Saba’s love for his wife and for his native city, and “L’amorosa spina” (the amorous thorn), thirteen poems that analyze Saba’s passion for Chiarretta, a young assistant in his bookstore.

The second volume of Il canzoniere begins with a group of poems based on the failed love for Chiarretta, “Preludio e canzonette” (prelude and songs), but these poems, written a year or two after the affair, are more sober and reflective. In fact, the majority of the second volume is retrospective, including the fifteen sonnets that make up “Autobiografia”—poems describing events and perceptions from the poet’s birth to the opening of his bookstore and the development of his poetic career. The last section, “Il piccolo Berto,” is dedicated to Edoardo Weiss, an Italian psychoanalyst who introduced Saba to Freudian psychology and to an analysis of Saba’s past. These poems concentrate on Saba’s relationship with his mother and the various mother figures of his childhood.

The third volume begins with “Parole” (“Words”), which, written after Saba’s experience with psychoanalysis, marks a new direction in his poetic diction and form. The dense, often elliptical poems in this chapter recall the Hermetic style of Montale, but Saba’s sparse style often suggests a richness of emotion rather than a dryness; the purifying of language and avoidance of traditional forms and rhymes, as well as the minimalization of narrative, allow the reader to concentrate on and appreciate anew the sharpness of the images and the resonance of the sounds. The chapter “Mediterranee” (Mediterranean) contains Saba’s most famous poem and perhaps his most successful synthesis of form and content—the poem “Ulysses,” which parallels the wandering of the Greek hero with the poet’s sense of his own age and homelessness.

The evolution of a poetic idiom should not obscure the unchanging features of Saba’s artistry. Since Il canzoniere itself is not only a collection but also a reworking of previous poems, this anthology presents the reader with a consistent, retrospective view of the poet’s career. This retrospection is clear, for example, in the inclusion of the autobiographical poems of “Il piccolo Berto” in the second volume—the volume of Saba’s middle age; these poems of childhood reflect not so much the child’s perspective as that of the adult looking backward and seeking to understand or assimilate the past.

Trite rhymes and everyday words

To an extent, the poet’s use of traditional versification parallels his concern for the past. The poem “Amai” (“I Loved”), from “Mediterranee,” shows that Saba views poetic tradition not as a series of principles to be slavishly venerated or as a confining set of prescriptions but as a source of inspiration for innovation: “I loved the trite words that no one/ dared to use. I was enchanted by the rhyme ’flower—love’ [fiore-amore],/ the oldest and most difficult in the world.” The trite rhymes and everyday words are the most difficult because they have been used for so long, and yet, the poet implies, these words and forms have a beauty and a truthfulness that endures. The innovative use of tradition provides the poet with a common ground for communicating truth to the reader, and at the same time, it requires that the poet find a new and personal way of perceiving and shaping this truth.

Suffering and love

For Saba, in fact, the role of the poet is to perceive the world—the world of the everyday—as it is, not as custom or habit deforms it, and to convey this childlike rediscovery to the reader. Since, however, the poet is also aware of the individual’s ability to overlook or forget this primal joy and to fall prey to despair, he does not represent this rediscovery as a panacea for human suffering. This suffering, in fact, becomes as integral a part of the poem as is the joy, and in many of Saba’s poems, the speaker’s confrontation with pain is more significant than his apprehension of happiness. This awareness links the speaker with others who have suffered; it is the highest form of love. The poem “The Goat” illustrates this perception. At first, the speaker is intrigued by a tethered goat, as if for a joke, but then the speaker hears in the goat’s bleating the eternal nature of suffering and sees in the goat’s Semitic face “the complaint of every other being at every other evil.”

This love—the yearning that binds all living beings—is perhaps the central theme of Saba’s poetry. Love may be erotic, as in the love poems to Lina; or it may be filial, as in the poem “A mia figlia” (“To My Daughter”); it may be a love of one’s city or society, as in “Città vecchia” (“Old Town”) and other poems in “Trieste e una donna,” or the poem “Ulysses”; or it may be a longing for the past, whether the past of childhood or the tradition of poetry.

One of Saba’s most frequent attempts to make contact through love is to find a sense of community with his fellow humans. In “Old Town,” the speaker discovers in the humblest, most squalid section of Trieste a kinship, a feeling of belonging, since in this section, one finds the most characteristically human people (the most human because they suffer most). Still, as the poem “Il borgo” (the hamlet) shows, Saba does not expect this love to bring universal happiness or harmony. The poet laments the fact that his goal to become one with the ordinary people can never be fully realized, since the poet, in his very yearning to unite with the people, places himself on a higher level, an unchanging intellectual unable to become part of a changing society.

The poet finds more success in his amatory relationships, especially that with Lina. The poem “La brama” (hunger, desire) reveals the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis. Desire, or the libido, impels people, often with painful or destructive results, yet it is still a positive and necessary force in the world; in fact, eros is the quintessential motive for human beings.

Another source of inspiration for Saba is the animal world, as in the poem “The Goat.” In his most famous love poem, “To My Wife,” Saba combines both the erotic and the animal, comparing his wife to various animals—a hen, a heifer, a dog, a rabbit, a swallow, an ant. The simple joy that Lina gives Saba parallels the beauty and contentment of the domestic and wild animals; unlike poets in the courtly love tradition, elevating the beloved above the physical world, the poet elevates the potential for human love by appreciating fully the bond between the animal and the human world. In an earlier poem to his wife, “A Lina” (“To Lina”), Saba describes how the hooting of an owl reminds him of his sorrows with Lina, sorrows that he had wanted to forget. The animal world, then, often acts as a stimulus, a reminder of the need to go beyond one’s narrow view of the world.

The experience of fatherhood, described in “To My Daughter,” provided Saba with another opportunity for going outside himself, as well as a way of understanding the natural process of growth and change: “I don’t love you because you bloom again from my stock,/ but because you are so vulnerable/ and love has given you to me.

“Ashes” and “Winter Noon”

In his later poetry, Saba contemplates the processes of change and aging with a sense of resignation, but not with despair or cynicism. The early poem “Mezzogiorno d’inverno” (“Winter Noon”), published in 1920, hints at such a mood. The speaker describes a sudden fit of sadness amid a great happiness. The source of this melancholy is not a beautiful girl passing by but a turquoise balloon floating in the azure sky, the loss of which must be causing a boy to grieve. The boy’s pain is in contrast, however, to the beauty of the balloon, subtly contrasted against the sky, passing gracefully over the city of Trieste. In the later poem “Ceneri” (“Ashes”), from “Words,” the poet strips away all unessential adornment and rhetoric from his description of an approaching death: “your bright/ flames engulf me as/ from care to care I near the sill/ of sleep.” The speaker feels no anxiety, but instead sees death as a natural stage: “And to sleep,/ with those impassioned and tender bonds/ that bind the baby and the mother, and with you, ashes, I merge.” The tone is reserved but not pessimistic: “Mute/ I leave the shadows for the immense empire.”

“Ulysses”

The poem that sums up Saba’s poetic development is his “Ulysses,” a compendium of his themes and a hallmark of the use of restrained, concrete language to convey a deep understanding of the eternal themes of isolation and community, love and loss. Actually, the second poem of this title, the “Ulysses” of “Mediterranee,” conveys the poet’s sense of age and decline, his feeling of displacement from his society, his love for his home, and his sadness after the events of World War II. Assuming the persona of the wanderer Ulysses (as many have noted, the Ulysses of canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno (in La divina commedia, c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802), the Ulysses who, imprisoned in Hell, had left behind home and family to sail in search of further knowledge of the world), Saba describes vividly and with nostalgia his past experiences and his present loneliness and sorrow. “In my youth I sailed/ along the Dalmatian coast. Islets/ emerged from the waves’ surface, where rarely/ a bird intent on prey alit,/ algae-covered, skidding, sparkling in the sun like emeralds.” The speaker recalls his present exile, in an allusion to Ulysses’ tricking of Polyphemus: “Today my kingdom/ is No-man’s land.” In his old age, the speaker has become a no-man, cut off from the comforts of home; the harbor lights are for others now. “Again to the open sea/ I am impelled by my unconquered spirit/ and the sorrowful love of life.” The journey of Ulysses and his indomitable spirit echo Saba’s lifelong devotion to his artistry, his sense of never reaching a final destination, of never making a human contact free of pain, of feeling more sharply the sense of isolation caused by the very wish to know others, and yet at the same time of feeling the joy in recapturing through memory and poetry the bright images of the world.

Bibliography

Cary, Joseph. Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Focusing on Saba, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Eugenio Montale, Cary presents striking biographical portraits as he facilitates understanding of their poetry and guides readers through the first decades of twentieth century Italy.

Parussa, Sergio. Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony: Four Italian Writers and Judaism. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008. Parussa looks at Saba, Natalia Ginzburg, Giorgio Bassani, and Primo Levi. His chapter on Saba is called “The Maternal Borders of the Soul: Identity, Judaism, and Writing in the Works of Umberto Saba.”

Renzi, Lorenzo. “A Reading of Saba’s ’A mia moglie.’” Modern Language Review 68 (1973): 77-83. A critical reading of one of Saba’s poems.

Saba, Umberto. Songbook: The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba. Translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Hochfield provides an informative introduction, notes, and commentary for his joint parallel-text translation of poetry by Saba. Contains a translation of an early Saba essay, “What Remains for Poets to Do?”

Singh, G. “The Poetry of Umberto Saba.” Italian Studies 23 (1968): 114-137. A critical analysis of Saba’s poetic works.