Umberto Saba's prose - as though they were the honorable dead

Poetry is to many people an allergen, or even a toxin, but fortunately Umberto Saba also wrote prose, short fiction and memoir that grew shorter over time until he published them as “shortcuts” and “very short stories.”  There is also a late, unfinished novel, Ernesto, that I have not read.  What I have read is a book titled The Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba (1993), translated and assembled by Estelle Gilson.

The fiction is mostly about the poor and the Jews of Trieste.  “And at one and the same time, she felt both a certain compassion for him and a desire to grab him by the throat and throttle him” (“Valeriano Rode,” 54).  That is a wife describing her idiot husband, but the line could easily appear in a number of places, perhaps used by the reader.  High quality short fiction circa 1910 was populated by frustrating nitwits; this is not unique to Saba.  See “The Lottery Numbers” for a powerful example, where a husband;s refusal to let his wife play a set of lucky numbers turns out to be the tipping point of a series of resentments that destroy the marriage.

Or the best story, “The Hen,” in which a young man buys his mother the wrong gift.  He once had a pet hen:

…  the hours he spent with the hen were truly his own; whether he had her sit,  perch, really, next to him on the brick steps between the kitchen and the dining room, steps that turned a strange red in the setting sun and reminded him if the steps outside purgatory that he’d seen in a religious painting, or whether, hugging her so tightly to him that she shrieked, and happy in his belief that he had so much time ahead to live and enjoy the pleasures of the world (and thereafter, he’d have all eternity), he would talk to Có-có about daring deeds and journeys, and about future joys, in effect, about everything that went through his head.  (76-7)

Saba’s sentences do not usually roll on like that.  The story is a warning about the pain of trying to revive childhood pleasures and illusions.  This from a poet who is constantly returning to his childhood in his writing.

Saba has another subject – Trieste, the war and its aftermath.  Encounters with writers: his Triestine neighbor Italo Svevo who “used to drop in on me almost every evening” at the used bookshop, Curzio Malaparte who “tried to help me when I was in trouble,” and that maniac, “the Glorious One,” the “immaculately white-suited” Gabriele D’Annunzio, to whom Saba says he owes “three poems from his [Saba’s] Autobiographia” and “a recipe for preparing that superb pasta with tomatoes.”

Then there is the bookshop itself, an accidental career – “I bought it intending to throw all the old books in it into the Adriatic and to sell it empty at a higher price” – that became something else:

During all the years of fascism it was a refuge, sheltering me from loudspeakers.  It’s fairly hopeless for a poet to make a living in literature.  And during those years it seemed more hopeless than ever.  However, the antiquarian books, whose existence I’d just discovered, didn’t upset me or reflect the hateful face of the present, the way almost all of the new ones seemed to do.  What’s more they gave off a sense of peace, as though they were the honorable dead.  (“The Story of a Bookshop,” 141)

The poet has just so many days to live - Umberto Saba repeats himself

My unhappy youth was spent with
images of sadness and of pain; art
has made them pleasing to others
like a green and tranquil hillside.  (From Autobiography, sonnet 1, tr. Hochfield & Nathan)

Thinking about how to describe Umberto Saba, I keep returning to the 1924 Autobiografia, a sequence of fifteen sonnets which epitomize the autobiographical poems he had been writing for twenty years, and would write for another thirty.  His father abandons him (“My father had been ‘the assassin’ to me / until I was twenty, when I met him,” sonnet 3).  He is unhappy.  He falls in love with a boy – “I wrote / long letters to him, as if to a bride” – but “perhaps he wasn’t what he seemed to be” (sonnet 6).  He does his military service. He becomes a poet, meets Gabriele d’Annunzio (“all courtesy / to his guest, but otherwise no help to me” and the Florentine poets who “never liked me much” (sonnet 10).  He meets Lina, who he marries (“I loved her for the depth of her sadness,” sonnet 12).  He buys his bookshop.

All of this, however plain it is in English, in lovely, regular, rhyming verse:

With the war I was an infantryman again.
I was a rotten poet and a good soldier –
I wish I could say so!  But even as a child
I did not like to be untruthfully praised.

Ritornai con la guerra fantaccino.
Fui cattivo poeta e buon soldato:
vorrei ben dirlo!  Ma non pur bambino
amavo contro il vero esser lodato.  (Sonnet 14)

Saba benefits greatly, in translation, from being read in quantity.  If here is not poetry, there is a story that is created by the poet’s obsessions.  Somehow he understood this aspect of his art early on.  In 1911, just as he began publishing his poems, he wrote “What Remains for Poets To Do,” a personal manifesto calling for “honest poetry,” which no one had written for a hundred years, but more interestingly for repetition, since “a man cannot go outside of his real self, the feeling and expression will repeat themselves obsessively”:

The Songbook of Petrarch and that of Leopardi are full of repetitions, as well as the most sublime part of the Divine Comedy, “Paradise,” because these poets were trying to give voice to their great passions, and not to astonish like jugglers, who are finished if they repeat the same number twice.  (pp. 527-8)

Saba is arguing against the “make it new” ethos of his jittery peers in Italy and elsewhere, but what is most curious to me is that he had only published one book at this point (at age 28), meaning he had not been especially repetitive yet.  But he would be.  He already knew it.

The poet has just so may days
to live,
like every one of us, yet so many ways
to live them!

Il poeta ha le sue giornate
contate,
come tutti gli uomini; ma quanto,
quanto variate!  (from “The Poet,” 1912, tr. Sartarelli) 

A poet lives serenely in this atmosphere - Umberto Saba, poet of used bookstores

The conventional history of Italian poetry that I have pieced together has a 19th century dominated by Leopardi and neo-Classicism, then a fast-moving  turn of the century full of churning movements – Decadence, Futurism – sucking up foreign influences, reacting to technological changes, and philosophical challenges.  Like poetry everywhere.  Suddenly the point of poetry is for it to be new.  Luckily, there are many kinds of newness.

Umberto Saba (1883-1957) wrote confessional poetry.  On the margins of Italian literature – on the margins of Italy, in fact – he did not write in a way that was formally innovative but rather new in the way he wrote about himself.  When I was writing about Saba’s contemporary Dino Campana, I noted that he often seemed like an American Beat writing forty years too early.  Saba sometimes seemed like he belonged with Robert Lowell and John Berryman, except, again, forty years earlier.  Is that all American poets were doing in the 1950s, looting Italian poetry?

Saba spent most of his life before World War II in Trieste, where he was born, meaning that he was by birth Austrian, not Italian.  His mother was Jewish, so Saba spent the war in hiding, mostly in Florence.  For twenty years he ran an antiquarian bookstore in Trieste.  The store is still operating.  Why there are not more famous poets who were used book dealers is a mystery.

A curious antiquarian shop
is open on an obscure street in Trieste.
Various golden hues of antique bindings
delight the eye that wanders across its shelves.

A poet lives serenely in this atmosphere.
In this living memorial of the dead
he does his work, honest and content,
brooding on Love, unknown and solitary.

He would like to die one day, undone
by his secret passion, the eyes that have seen so much
closing on his beloved manuscripts.

And what remained beyond his time and place,
art painted for him still more beautifully,
and poetry made it all the sweeter.  (Autobiography, Sonnet 15, 1924)

In Italian this sonnet rhymes and is sonorous and all of the usual stuff:

Vive in quell’aria tranquillo un poeta.
Dei morti in quel vivente lapidario
la sua opera compie, onesta e lieta,
d’Amor pensoso, ignoto e solitario.

He kept returning in his poetry to the same subjects – his beloved wet nurse Peppa, a Slovenian who was in effect his foster mother; his absent father; the neighborhoods of Trieste; a homosexual crush when he was a teen.  New events join the story – the happiness of meeting Lina, his wife; troubles in the marriage; the destruction and disruptions of the war.  In 1921 Saba first thought to organize his life’s work into a Canzoniere or Songbook.  Subsequent poems were incorporated into the Songbook, much like what Walt Whitman did with the later editions of Leaves of Grass, although Saba’s inspiration was a fellow secularized Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine.

Saba also wrote fiction and memoirs, mostly on the same matter as the poetry, also quite good.  For the prose, I read The Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba (Sheep Meadow Press, 1993, tr. Estelle Gilson).  For the poems, I tried two collections, both titled  Songbook, the 1998 Stephen Sartarelli translations published by Sheep Meadow Press  -Sartarelli is now raking in the big translation bucks as the translator of Andrea Camilleri – and the 2008 George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan versions published by Yale.  The sonnet above is from the latter.  Both books are prosy, but both include the Italian.  The Hochfield and Nathan has more poems, about half of the Italian Canzoniere, which with Saba is a plus.  The translators disagree to a certain extent about which poems are good, which is interesting.

So, a couple more days rummaging through Saba.