The year was 2004. I was about to start off on a car-trip around Ireland with my elder brother Ken. The problem was we didn't have enough books with us to read along the way. So when we stopped at a secondhand bookshop in Belfast, I was determined to find something large and intense enough to occupy a good deal of time.
I'd already reread War and Peace and Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates on an earlier leg of the trip, in Prague, so I was looking for something equally weighty. But nothing in the shop was calling out to me. Finally, I decided on a bit of uplift, and went up to the desk with the following two hefty tomes:
Umberto Saba. Tutte le Poesie. Ed. Arrigo Stara. Introduction by Mario Lavagetto. I Meridiani. 1988. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2001.
Stendhal. Voyages en Italie. Ed. V. Del Litto. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 249. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.The bookseller wouldn't sell them to me. "Not until I'm convinced that you can actually read them," he said.
"But I really can," I protested shrilly. "I can speak French quite well, and I studied Italian at university."
"So you're genuinely intending to read them? Not just put them on the shelf and look at them?"
"He really can read them," my brother added encouragingly.
"Prove it," the shopkeeper continued.
So I picked up the Stendhal, and started to translate a few lines. Then repeated the experience with the Saba. At the end of all that, I felt I'd really earned those books. It does seem a curious way to conduct your business, though.
Despite my embarrassment at the time, I suppose even then I respected his zeal for the proper use of the books he was selling. It was as if he felt a deep responsibility for their future good fortune - and for their being properly read rather than treated as fetish objects.
And, you know, he had a point. They were too heavy and demanding for the road. We ended up buying some much lighter fiction a few stops further along. I've never got very far with Stendhal's Travels in Italy. Even his fiction can be a bit laborious at times.
As for Umberto Saba ... the problem was that I really knew nothing about him. Montale, Quasimodo, yes - even Cesare Pavese and Giuseppe Ungaretti, the other two Italians included in the Penguin Modern European Poets series. But Saba ... it was hard to get started without some kind of background to work from.
It's been twenty years, and it's only now that I'm really beginning my journey into his work. I have to say that I like very much what I've found so far.
I can only hope that I'm fulfilling - somewhat belatedly - that bookshop owner's hopes. And, if he's still in business - keep up the good work! Keep guilting your customers into thinking about what they're signing up for by buying each individual book.
Ulisse Nella mia giovinezza ho navigato lungo le coste dalmate. Isolotti a fior d'onda emergevano, ove raro un uccello sostava intento a prede, coperti d'alghe, scivolosi, al sole belli come smeraldi. Quando l'alta marea e la notte li annullava, vele sottovento sbandavano più al largo, per fuggirne l'insidia. Oggi il mio regno è quella terra di nessuno. Il porto accende ad altri i suoi lumi; me al largo sospinge ancora il non domato spirito, e della vita il doloroso amore. - Umberto Saba (1946)• When I was young I sailed down the Dalmatian coast rock-reefs stood out above the waves slick with algae emerald-green an occasional raptor hovering there intent on prey but when high tide and darkness swallowed them my leeward sails would steer us out to the open sea away from danger today my kingdom is that no-man’s land the harbour lights its lamps for others my love of life painful at times my perverse soul chase me out from every shelter
- trans. JR (2026)
This poem, "Ulysses", comes from Saba's postwar volume Mediterranee [Mediterranean]. While largely self-explanatory, it does probably benefit from a bit of context.
For a start, Saba remains strongly identified with the northern port city of Trieste, a debatable land between Italy and the Balkan states for much of its modern history. Though now firmly part of Italy, it's always had the atmosphere of a cosmopolitan, international space between Western and Eastern Europe. James Joyce lived there on and off between 1904 and 1915, and it has a strong artistic and literary tradition.
When I studied Italian at Auckland University many years ago, our lecturer, Meme Churton, came from Trieste, while our conversation teacher, Francesca, hailed from Naples, which had the effect of giving us an on-the-spot grounding in the radically different cultures making up the patchwork quilt which is modern Italy.
So it's natural enough that Saba's early memories should include sailing expeditions along what was then the Dalmatian coast, and is now the coast of Croatia.
But of course that's not really the point of the poem. And here it's probably beneficial to know a little more about Saba's own background. Umberto Poli, who would later adopt the pen-name "Saba", was born in 1883 to a Jewish mother and a Jewish-convert father in the Austro-Hungarian city of Trieste. He started to write poetry in 1900, and published his first book in 1911.
In 1919 he bought a second-hand bookshop, and thereafter supported himself and his family as an antiquarian bookseller. He continued to publish poetry along with some short prose pieces throughout the 1920s and 1930s, though the promulgation of the anti-Jewish laws of 1939 made his life increasingly difficult. He refused to convert to Catholicism, and was forced to go into hiding after the 1943 armistice and the German occupation of Northern Italy.
There's presumably something of all this, too, in the poem "Ulysses". The safe harbour of conformity is not for him - he, unfortunately, has been forced by circumstances as well as choice to occupy that "No-man's-land" of the open sea.
The poem is a subtle blend of autobiography and allegory - typical of so much Italian poetry just after the war, when the need to self-censor had largely gone, but the legacy of those decades of Fascism still weighed heavy. Saba even wrote for Benito Mussolini's Il Popolo d'Italia newspaper during the First World War - though certainly not afterwards. Like his younger contemporary Ungaretti, he was drafted into the army in 1915, but unlike Ungaretti, Saba "saw no active service and was hospitalised due to depression."
La capra Ho parlato a una capra Era sola sul prato, era legata. Sazia d'erba, bagnata alla pioggia, belava. Quell'uguale belato era fraterno al mio dolore. Ed io risposi, prima per celia, poi perchè il dolore è eterno, ha una voce e non varia. Questa voce sentiva gemere in una capra solitaria. In una capra dal viso semita sentiva querelarsi ogni altro male, ogni altra vita. - Umberto Saba (1909-10)• I talked to a goat she was tied up alone on the lawn sick of grass wet with rain she baa’d that baa matched exactly how I felt so I replied first as a joke then because pain’s endless it has a voice and never shuts up I heard it in that lonely goat in a goat with a long semitic face I heard the moan of every pain in every life
- trans. JR (2026)
"The Goat" is one of Saba's most celebrated anthology pieces. As you can see, that tone of sardonic, world-weary irony began early in his work, and never really left him. There's something of the atmosphere of an Italian Thomas Hardy about him, though of course Saba had the added benefit of the long, brutal tradition of European anti-semitism to add to the mixture.
The poem, even so, is quite delightful. That image of Saba dutifully baa-ing to his long-faced interlocutor is irresistible, and this sense of an untainted, childish vision of the world as it is rather than as we talk it up to be is pervasive in his work overall.
His one, unfinished novel, Ernesto, prepared for posthumous publication by his daughter Linuccia, adds to this mélange the forbidden theme of adolescent homosexual love. He wrote: "I knew as soon as I'd written the first sentence that this wouldn't be for publication." The book is described as being:
largely autobiographical, including details about the title character's friendship and love for a violinist, and his attachment to his native Trieste. As one critic says: "he revisited not only the scenes but also the moods of his puberty".Another critic, Aidan Higgins, has "classed its treatment of adolescent sexuality with the work of an earlier generation of writers, E. M. Forster's Maurice and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice."
Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) is one of the most influential and widely read Italian poets of the twentieth century. Probably only Nobel-Prize-winner Eugenio Montale could be said to rival his celebrity. Together with Saba, they constitute the "big three" major modernists in modern Italian poetry.
So why didn't he win the Nobel prize, rather than the far less famous Salvatore Quasimodo? The answer is simple: Fascism.
You'll find it distinctly downplayed in the bio-notes printed on most of his books, but Ungaretti was - at least for a time - a convinced follower of Mussolini. Like Saba, he wrote for Il Popolo d'Italia, but after the war his brief flirtations with Dadaism and other anti-establishment movements culminated in support for Mussolini's 1922 March on Rome.
Ungaretti joined the National Fascist Party, signing the pro-fascist Manifesto of the Italian Writers in 1925. In his essays of 1926–1929 ... he repeatedly called on the Duce to direct cultural development in Italy and reorganize the Italian Academy on fascist lines. He argued: "The first task of the Academy will be to reestablish a certain connection between men of letters, between writers, teachers, publicists. This people hungers for poetry. If it had not been for the miracle of Blackshirts, we would never have leaped this far." In his private letters to a French critic, Ungaretti also claimed that fascist rule did not imply censorship.
Mussolini even wrote a preface for the 1923 reprint of his 1916 book of free-verse war poems, Il porto sepolto [The Buried Port], "thus politicizing its message". While appalled by the realities of war, Ungaretti was not entirely - in his poems, at least - convinced of its futility, and preferred to emphasise the spirit of comradeship among the men.
As you can see from the example below - one of the most famous italian poems of the twentieth century - he had a lot in common poetically with his friend Guillaume Apollinaire. Perhaps the main difference is that he survived the war and Apollinaire didn't.
Mattina M'illumino d'immenso - Giuseppe Ungaretti (1917)• enlighten me immensity
- trans. JR (2026)
Should we class him as a "lost generation" writer, then? The very diverse stances of the various writers of this era would would seem to make it plausible, but his politics remained less anti-establishment than most of theirs. The poem below is another case in point:
Soldati Si sta come d'autunno sugli alberi le foglie - Giuseppe Ungaretti (1917)• like leaves on autumn trees
- trans. JR (2026)
It clearly has much in common with Ezra Pound's imagist poem "In a Station of the Metro".
But then, perhaps it's even more reminiscent of Cumming's late masterpiece "l(a". Or, for that matter, those lines of Eliot's from The Waste Land:
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leafLike them but - at the same time - not so very much like them. The directness and originality of Ungaretti's vision is apparent, but his work lacks the melancholic sense of "a botched civilisation" so prevalent in that of these Anglo-American modernists.
Clutch and sink into the wet bank
Veglia Un'intera nottata buttato vicino a un compagno massacrato con la sua bocca digrignata volta al plenilunio con la congestione delle sue mani penetrata nel mio silenzio ho scritto lettere piene d'amore Non sono mai stato tanto attaccato alla vita - Giuseppe Ungaretti (1917)• a whole night laid beside a battered comrade fish mouth gaping at the moon with the touch of his hands upon my silence I scribbled letters full of love I’ve never felt so close to life
- trans. JR (2026)
TUTTI EROI! O IL PIAVE O TUTTI ACCOPPATI !All heroes! The River Piave or everyone killed !
Luigi Marzocchi: Church of Sant'Andrea di Barbarana (24/6/1918)
Ungaretti travelled widely in the 1930s, eventually settling in Brazil, where he became a Professor of Italian at São Paulo University in 1936. However:
In 1942, three years after the start of World War II, Ungaretti returned to Axis-allied Italy, where he was received with honors by the officials. The same year, he was made a Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Rome. ... At the close of the war, following Mussolini's downfall, Ungaretti was expelled from the faculty owing to his fascist connections, but reinstated when his colleagues voted in favor of his return.It's certainly a very different trajectory to that of Ezra Pound, who broadcast Fascist propaganda on Italian radio during the war, and was arrested for treason against his country in 1945.
However Pound was, too - if not forgiven, at least released from the psychiatric ward in which he'd been confined, in 1958. In the meantime he'd won the 1948 Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos.
So what are we to conclude from all this? That political judgements have nothing to do with poetry? Not really, I think. I find that I do have a better feeling about Saba as a poet and as a man than I do about Ungaretti - despite the huge and continuing popularity of the latter - because of the times they lived through and the very different accommodations they made to those times.
It would be ridiculous to say that Ungaretti was undeserving of his fame, or that other poets were wrong to see him as a revivifying force in Italian poetry. The three pieces translated above revolutionised the literary scene in a way that few poems ever have. He's unignorable: far too lively to have to hang his head in shame for having supported Mussolini.
On the other hand his life-work doesn't (for me, at least) have quite the same lustre as Montale's or Quasimodo's - partly because they retained the courage to call out the evils of this totalitarian regime.
I don't doubt that Ungaretti was sincere in his beliefs - and he was clearly protean in the artistic stances he adopted - but, as in the case of Pound, there's a shadow there which can't profitably be ignored. I can read people without having to agree with them, but it does have an influence on my appreciation of their work. How could it not?
But then, we're all morally compromised in one way or another. Pound's statement on his political convictions made when he was arrested in 1945 may sound absurd to us now, but then we have the benefit of knowing far more about the Final Solution (not to mention the inner workings of Hitler's regime):
I am not anti-Semitic, and I distinguish between the Jewish usurer and the Jew who does an honest day's work for a living.
Hitler and Mussolini were simple men from the country. I think that Hitler was a Saint, and wanted nothing for himself. I think that he was fooled into anti-Semitism and it ruined him. That was his mistake. When you see the "mess" that Italy gets into by bumping off Mussolini, you will see why someone could believe in some of his efforts.
Books I own are marked in bold:
-
Poetry:
- Poesie (1911)
- Coi miei occhi (1912)
- A Gesu' bambino (1912)
- La serena disperazione (1920)
- Cose leggere e vaganti (1920)
- Il Canzoniere (1900-1921) (1921)
- Preludio e canzonette (1922)
- Figure e canti (1926)
- Preludio e fughe (1928)
- Tre poesie alla mia balia (1929)
- Ammonizione ed altre poesie. 1900-1910 (1932)
- Tre composizioni (1933)
- Parole (1934)
- Ultime cose 1900-1945 (1944)
- Il canzoniere (1900-1945) (1945)
- Mediterranee (1946)
- Il canzoniere (1900-1947) (1948)
- Uccelli (1950)
- Il canzoniere (1900-1954) (1961)
- Il piccolo Berto. 1929-1931 (1961)
- Il canzoniere del 1921. Ed. Giordano Castellani (1981)
- Tutte le poesie. Ed. Arrigo Stara (1988)
- Tutte le Poesie. Ed. Arrigo Stara. Introduction by Mario Lavagetto. I Meridiani. 1988. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2001.
- Il Canzoniere (1945) - Oltre il Canzoniere (1946-1957). Ed. Giuseppe Emiliano Bonura (2019)
- Autobiografia. I Prigioni (1923)
- Autobiografia. L'uomo [limited edition of 25 copies] (1926)
- Scorciatoie e raccontini (1946)
- Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere (1948)
- Ricordi, racconti. 1910-1947 (1956)
- Epigrafe; Ultime prose. Ed. Giacomo Debenedetti (1959)
- Quello che resta da fare ai poeti (1959)
- Ernesto (1975)
- Tutte le opere. 9 vols (1949-59)
- Poesie dell'adolescenza e giovanili. 1900-1910 (1949)
- Trieste e una donna. 1910-1912 (1950)
- La serena disperazione. 1913-1915 (1951)
- Cose leggere e vaganti. 1920. L'amorosa spina. 1920 (1952)
- Preludio e canzonette. 1922-1923 (1955)
- Autobiografia; I prigioni; Fanciulle; Cuor morituro; L'uomo. 1924-1930 (1959)
- Mediterranee (1957)
- Uccelli e Quasi un racconto. 1948-1951 (1951)
- Ricordi, racconti. 1910-1947 (1956)
- Il vecchio e il giovane. Carteggio 1930-1957, con Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini. Ed. Linuccia Saba (1965)
- Lettere ad una amica. Settantacinque lettere a Nora Baldi (1966)
- Saba, Svevo, Comisso. (Lettere inedite), con Italo Svevo e Giovanni Comisso. Ed. Mario Sutor (1968)
- L'adolescenza del Canzoniere e undici lettere, introduction by Sergio Miniussi. Notes by Folco Portinari (1975)
- Amicizia. Storia di un vecchio poeta e di un giovane canarino. (Quasi un racconto) 1951. [letters, facsimiles of manuscripts & typescripts]. Ed. Carlo Levi (1976)
- Lettere a un amico vescovo. Ed. Rienzo Colla. Introduction by Giovanni Fallani (1980)
- La spada d'amore. Lettere scelte 1902-1957. Ed. Aldo Marcovecchio (1983)
- Atroce paese che amo. lettere famigliari, 1945-1953. Ed. Gianfranca Lavezzi & Rossana Saccani (1987)
- Lettere sulla psicoanalisi. Carteggio con Joachim Flescher 1946-1949, con gli scritti di Saba sulla psicoanalisi, le lettere di Saba a Edoardo Weiss, due lettere di Weiss a Linuccia Saba. Ed. Arrigo Stara (1991)
- Lettere a Sandro Penna, 1929-1940. Ed. Roberto Deidier (1997)
- Quante rose a nascondere un abisso. Carteggio con la moglie (1905-1956), Album fotografico. Ed. Raffaella Acetoso (2004)
- Quanto hai lavorato per me, caro Fortuna! Lettere e amicizia fra Umberto Saba e Aldo Fortuna (1912-1944). Ed. Riccardo Cepach (2007)
- Il cerchio imperfetto. Lettere 1946-1954, con Vittorio Sereni. Ed. Cecilia Gibellini (2010)
Prose:
Works:
Letters:
Books I own are marked in bold:
-
Poetry:
- Il porto sepolto (1916)
- Il porto sepolto: Poesie. Presentate da Benito Mussolini. Con fregi di Francesco Gamba (1923)
- Natale (1916)
- La guerre. Une poésie (1919)
- Allegria di naufragi (1919)
- L'allegria (1931)
- Sentimento del tempo (1933)
- Poesie disperse [1915-1927] (1945)
- La guerra (1947)
- Il dolore. 1937-1946 (1947)
- Derniers Jours. 1919 (1947)
- La terra promessa. Frammenti (1950)
- Gridasti soffoco ... (1951)
- Un grido e paesaggi (1952)
- Les cinq livres: texte français établi par l'Auteur et Jean Lescure (1953)
- Il taccuino del vecchio (1960)
- Vita d’un uomo: 106 poesie 1914-1960 (1966)
- Vita d’un uomo: 106 poesie 1914-1960. Introduzione di Giovanni Raboni. 1966. Gli Oscar. Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1970.
- [con Bruna Bianco] Dialogo (1968)
- Selected Poems. Trans. Patrick Creagh. Penguin Modern European Poets (1971)
- Selected Poems. Trans. Patrick Creagh. Penguin Modern European Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
- Il povero nella città (1949)
- Il deserto e dopo (1961)
- Saggi e interventi (1974)
- Invenzione della poesia moderna. Lezioni brasiliane di letteratura (1937-1942). Ed. Paola Montefoschi (1984)
- Traduzioni. Saint-John Perse, William Blake, Gongora, Esenin, Jean Paulhan, Affrica (1936)
- 22 sonetti di Shakespeare (1944)
- 40 sonetti di Shakespeare (1946)
- Da Góngora e da Mallarmé (1948)
- Jean Racine: Fedra (1950)
- Visioni di William Blake (1965)
- Vita d'un uomo. 12 vols. Milano, A. Mondadori, 1942-65.
- L'allegria. 1914-1919 (1942)
- Sentimento del tempo. 1919-1935 (1943)
- Poesie disperse (1945)
- 40 sonetti di Shakespeare (1946)
- Il dolore. 1937-1946 (1947)
- Da Gongora e da Mallarmé (1948)
- Fedra di Jean Racine (1950)
- La Terra promessa. Frammenti (1954)
- Un grido e paesaggi (1954)
- Il taccuino del vecchio (1960)
- Il deserto e dopo. 1931-1946 (1961)
- Visioni di William Blake (1965)
- Tutte le poesie. Ed. Leone Piccioni. 1969 (Rev. ed. 2009)
- Album Ungaretti. Ed. Leone Piccioni (1989)
- Vita d'un uomo. Saggi e interventi. Ed. Mario Diacono e Luciano Rebay (1974)
- Vita d'un uomo. Viaggi e lezioni. Ed. Paola Montefoschi (2000)
- Vita d'un uomo. Traduzioni poetiche. Ed. Carlo Ossola & G. Radin (2010)
- Lettere dal fronte a Gherardo Marone (1916-1918). Ed. Armando Marone, Introduction by Leone Piccioni (1978)
- Lettere a Soffici, 1917-1930. Ed. Paola Montefoschi e Leone Piccioni (1981)
- Lettere a Enrico Pea. Ed. Jole Soldateschi. Introduction by Giorgio Luti (1983)
- G. Ungaretti - Giuseppe De Robertis, Carteggio 1931-1962, con un'Appendice di redazioni inedite di poesie di Ungaretti. Ed. Domenico De Robertis (1984)
- Lettere a Giovanni Papini. 1915-1948. Ed. Maria Antonietta Terzoli. Introduction by Leone Piccioni (1988)
- Correspondance Jean Paulhan, Giuseppe Ungaretti, 1921-1968. Ed. Jacqueline Paulhan, Luciano Rebay & Jean-Charles Vegliante. Preface by Luciano Rebay (1989)
- Vincenzo Cardarelli - G. Ungaretti, Lettere a Corrado Pavolini. Ed. F. Bernardini Napoletano & M. Mascia Galateria (1989)
- G. Ungaretti - Piero Bigongiari, Carteggio (1992)
- Lettere a Giuseppe Prezzolini 1911-1969,. Ed. Maria Antonietta Terzoli (2001)
- Piero Bigongiari - G. Ungaretti, «La certezza della poesia». Lettere (1942-1970). Ed. T. Spignoli (2008)
- Carlo Betocchi - G. Ungaretti, Lettere 1946-1970. Ed. E. Lima (2012)
- L'allegria è il mio elemento. Trecento lettere con Leone Piccioni, con una testimonianza di L. Piccioni. Ed. Silvia Zoppi Garampi (2013)
- Vittorio Sereni - G. Ungaretti, Un filo d'acqua per dissetarsi. Lettere 1949-1969. Ed. G. Palli Baroni (2013)
- Lettere dal fronte a Mario Puccini. Ed. F. De Nicola (2015)
- Luigi Nono - G. Ungaretti, Per un sospeso fuoco. Lettere 1950-1969. Ed. Paolo Dal Molin & Maria Carla Papini (2016)
- Lettere a Bruna [Bruna Angela Bianco]. Ed. Silvio Ramat (2017)
- Giuseppe Ungaretti in Borromeo, carteggio tra Cesare Angelini e Giuseppe Ungaretti. Ed. Fabio Maggi (2017)
- Le lettere di una vita 1909-1970. Ed. Francesca Bernardini Napoletano (2022)
Prose:
Translations:
Works:
Letters:
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