100 Poems

Umberto Saba, Patrick Worsnip

• Publisher: Carcanet Classics
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781800171930
• eBook ISBN: 9781800171947
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Italian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Umberto Saba (1883–1957) is one of the great Italian poets of the twentieth century, as closely associated with his native city Trieste as Joyce is with Dublin. He received a sparse education but was writing distinctive poetry before he was twenty, ignoring the modernist groups which dominated the day. He came at personal themes in unexpected ways, using an unapologetically contemporary idiom. He acquired an antiquarian bookshop which prospered for a time, but his Jewish background placed him at risk with the rise of Fascism. When the Germans took northern Italy in 1943, he and his family went into hiding in Florence where they escaped detection until the Allied liberation.

National fame came late in his life. 100 Poems is the most extensive selection of his work so far published in Great Britain. He emerges as one of the great European writers of his time. The book features writing from every period of his writing life. Patrick Worsnip's translations honour the poet's use of traditional Italian forms while using appropriately colloquial diction.

85

GIRLS (1)

Standing nude, behind her back her wrists,

as though you’d tied

them there with cords. Upright

breasts calling for a bite as well as kisses.

Sturdy girl, a shadowy bush shrouding

her amorous zone,

the vague discretion

of nature. Nothing,

there’s nothing else to her. Two undulant

globes gracefully pressed

together seem like a request

for gentle childhood punishment.

How many men crave the flash of delight

promised my eyes,

that’s often paradise,

and is more often hell with no way out!

86

PARADISE SONNET

There comes to me in dreams a small white house,

on a steep hill, in an air of perfect

tranquillity; the hill’s greenery is compact

and solitary; it’s the hour of blessedness.

There comes to me in dreams a goat that glances

up at me, nearby, small and sweet – an act

of calm humanity, as though a silent pact

bound us. Then she goes on eating grass.

The sun dips towards its setting; it draws a sparkle,

a gilded splendour from the windowed front

of that solitary house up on the height.

And all the sweetness that life has in it

was concentrated in that single point,

that single flare, that ultimate farewell.

87

THE SIDEBOARD

I’m in bed, ill. I swivel my eyes

around my room. Through its gleaming panes

an old piece of furniture invites them

to the things standing inside on display.

White crockery, with ships painted

in blue, a harbour, busy people

around them. There are other things,

once in my mother’s house, that I look at

with remorse and painfulness today,

and looked at with such joy before

that I desired to buy some more of them.

Each of them calls me back into a time

that was so sweet, but that was not

my time, I was not born yet and did not

yet have to die. And also in part I was

already born, there was in my forebears

my misery today. And one strange thought

afflicts me: I tell myself: Ah, how much peace

existed in the world before I was born;

I alone disturbed it. And it’s a lying

dream; this is delirium, friendly things.

How I loved you once, beautiful things,

now there in the sideboard, and elsewhere,

in sunshine and in shadow, and oh what

nostalgia I have to leave you! To the dark,

to go back to the dark of my mother’s womb,

to the hard sleep, where nothing more will stir,

not even love, a sweet torment, yes, but

unbearable for me. This is the bed

in which I came out of that blessed dark, 88

weeping bitterly, into the light, the things

that gladdened my eyes. And I know of no one

who more disparages that d...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface by Angela Leighton
• Warning
• My Nurse’s House
• From a Hill
• Glauco
• Evening
• To Mamma
• Meditation
• A Conscript’s Dream
• Random Order
• Target
• After Lights-out
• The Sapling
• To My Wife
• The Nanny Goat
• To My Daughter
• Autumn
• The Stream
• Trieste
• Old City
• The Cat
• After Sadness
• Three Streets
• Our Time of Day
• The Poet
• The Wife
• New Verses to the Moon
• Erotic Melancholy
• The Pier
• After a Stroll
• New Verses to Lina (8)
• The Errand-boy with the Wheelbarrow
• A Memory
• Guido
• The Patriarch
• Caffè Tergeste
• The Cobbler
• Bedtime Story for My Little Girl
• Portrait of My Little Girl
• Winter Noon
• Envoi
• The Thorn of Love (7)
• The Thorn of Love (12)
• By the Seashore
• Morning Song
• Finale
• Autobiography (3)
• Autobiography (10)
• Autobiography (12)
• Autobiography (15)
• The Lustful Man
• Girls (1)
• Paradise Sonnet
• The Sideboard
• Eros
• The Love Song
• Prayer for a Poor Girl
• Prayer to His Mother
• First Fugue
• Bargain Eatery
• The Ice Cream Cart
• Heroics
• Words
• Snow
• Ashes
• Spring
• Ulysses
• Five Poems for the Game of Football (3): Thirteenth Match
• Five Poems for the Game of Football (5): Goal
• Winter
• Happiness
• Three Cities
• ‘Fruit & Veg’
• Woman
• Mouth
• Beginning of Summer
• Since
• When the Thought
• February Evening
• The Broken Window
• Last Verses to Lina
• Portrait
• Phaedra
• Harbour
• Men’s Swimming Champion
• I Had
• Teatro degli Artigianelli
• Two Madrigals for the Duchess of Aosta
• The Visit
• I Loved
• Mediterranea
• Drunken Songs
• Three Poems to Telemachus
• Ulysses
• Opicina 1947
• Epigraph
• Blackbird
• Nietzsche
• Divertimento
• Man and the Animals
• Last
• Afterword
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• Copyright