Umberto Saba: Poetry and Prose, selected and translated, with notes, by Vincent Moleta. Introductory essay by Elvio Guagnini. (Aeolian Press, PO Box 606, Bridgetown, Western Australia 6255, Australia. 2004. 386pp, A$80.)

I recently spent six months living a kilometre or so west of the Franco-Italian border, observing the traffic between Northern Italy and the rest of Europe, and wondering what the boundary of a country amounts to these days. Some weeks earlier the major continental European currencies had quietly merged into the Euro; the steady transit of trains, cars, bicycles and pedestrians also seemed to suggest that borders no longer meant much. On the surface, anyway, language was the only remaining divide.

Overlooking the Italian border and pondering the trans-national traffic along the southern coast of Europe as well as across the pages of various bilingual collections of poetry, I found myself wondering whether in fact translators erase boundary lines between countries — or do they dig existent lines a little deeper? Do they accentuate the separateness of languages or somehow achieve a marriage or synthesis? Maybe translation could best be described as a kind of transplant? Does a good translation make you aware of the process of translation or does it mask it? What exactly does the catchphrase 'lost in translation' mean, and might it also be conceivable that something is, on occasion, gained through translation? The truism that poetry is that which is untranslatable is an omnipresent taunt to reader as well as translator. (There is still plenty of room for surprises and even a spot of heresy here: at various times I've heard it said that the prose of Scott Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past surpasses Proust's original, or that Alistair Reid's Neruda is at least the equal of the man himself.) 'Translation is resurrection,' Henry Gifford once stated, 'but not of the body'. He went on to note that the translator should preserve 'the movement of each poem: its flight, or track through the mind'. Observing the bustling real-life border traffic at Menton, the idea of the translator 'preserving movement' sounded about right, with the translator figuring as both long-haul driver and traffic conductor.

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Running to nearly 700 pages, Vincent Moleta's English language edition of Umberto Saba's writing is an act of homage. Working at the Fontecolombo Institute in a rural district of Western Australia reminiscent of provincial Italy, Moleta has produced this labour of long-distance love. As well as containing much poetry (with Italian en face), the book manages to encapsulate a lot of Saba's life by way of letters, notes and essays, achieving an almost biographical sweep.

Born in Trieste in 1883, Umberto Saba was owner and manager of an antiquarian bookshop in that city from 1919 until his death in 1957. It was there, Moleta writes, 'he wrote in a corner and where, during the regime, he found refuge from the loudspeakers.' Introducing this volume, Elvio Guagnini, of the University of Trieste, unapologetically stresses the 'marginality' of Saba's work, a quality he attributes to the 'marginality' of Trieste in relation to Italy. He equates the 'old-fashioned flavour' with the fact that Saba grew up 'in a "peripheral" city, and hence far away from current fashions (which would explain his strong attachment to the classical authors and works)... and his singularity and originality as an "outsider" who must construct his own poetic style alone, far away from the influences of the new wave'.

An editor/translator with a clear agenda, Moleta sums Saba up as 'a major poet in an early twentieth-century literary landscape otherwise taken up by writers with comparatively small outputs, with portentously elusive language and, by traditional standards, with limited technical finesse'. The book's footnotes, which run to an extraordinary 60,000 words, include some very serious dissection of the forms and construction of Saba's verse, and confirm the claims made regarding his technique (not surprisingly, this sophistication is impossible to gauge from the English versions). Much research is also incorporated into the notes, some of it based on first hand encounters with people who knew Saba. Not only do the footnotes function as critical commentary, they detail the poet's publishing history, milieu and the wider Italian literary culture of the time.

This volume contains, at the editor's estimation, about a sixth of Saba's poems and a tenth of his prose (excluding letters). As with so much translation from Italian into English, the staccato sounds and colour of the original poems become a restrained and at times prosaic in the English. There are moments of magic, however, in Moleta's versions. A case in point is one of the second world war poems, 'Theatre of Minor Craftsmen' which concludes:

This is the Theatre of Minor Craftsmen,
as the poet saw it in nineteen
forty-four, one September
day, when artillery
still rumbled fitfully, and Florence
was silent, absorbed in her ruins.

That final phrase—from 'assorta nelle sue rovine'—strikes me as perfect.

Interspersed among Saba's writings are colour reproductions of 25 paintings by relatively unknown Italian artists of the period. The inclusion of the paintings is an inspired touch, the images underlining certain tendencies in the writing: a painterliness and folk-art directness married to a modernism held at arms-length. Like the poems, the paintings are predominantly melancholy in mood, yet most often bathed in bright midday light. They also evoke an unease—'my weariness, my mortal longing' as Saba writes. In the poems we find both the debilitating blackness of depression (the poet suffered from endogenous depression) and the edifying darkness of the bookshop corner. Both blacknesses are suggested here:

Antiquarian Bookshop

The dead ask a dead man for dead books.

I have no illusion to comfort me
in this black hole that I love and that good Carletto
has put up with. Once it seemed a place of refuge for
my thoughts, and from the horrors of the time.
But now that time has passed, and with it
the life I loved. And I weep to feel myself
defenceless, outcaste, just as you wept
when you were still a child and you lost
your mother in the crowd at the market.

Like the work of the poet's painter-friend Vittorio Bolaffio (1883-1931), who has six canvases reproduced in this volume, the poetry constantly returns to simple things: 'Sky with white clouds here and there, / the windows of the houses flashing in the sun.' So begins 'Winter's Noon', a poem which then evokes a balloon slipped from the grip of a child and lost

          between the Stock
Exchange and the Caffe where, sitting
behind the glass, I was watching with moist
eyes his precious possession now soaring, now dipping.

Saba often writes of Bolaffio and his work. One poem, 'For Vittorio Bolaffio when he painted my portrait', refers to the painting which appropriately graces the cover of this book:

Behind me you have put a sea, and a sail
on the point of departure; now that sail is there all alone,
and the sea is the sea of a far-off time.

Saba was concerned—and seems often to have been disappointed--with his allotted place in the literary scheme of things. The reader certainly becomes acquainted with his temperament: the book is a veritable encyclopaedia of the man's moods. In the course of a sequence of sparky aphorisms, 'Short Cuts and Brief Tales' (Scorciatoie e Raccontini), he offers the following summation of himself and his two greatest contemporaries:

THREE POETS / Ungaretti—as a girl said—is a stream, Montale a river, Saba a sea.

It's a cryptic comment but nonetheless revealing. While early Ungaretti, in particular, is short-lined and fragmentary—'stream-like' as well as streamlined, you could say—there is a breadth and fullness to Saba's poetry (his love of hendecasyllabic lines is the formal manifestation of this). With its crisp, far-off horizon, Bolaffio's cover portrait of the poet is strikingly apt: the oceanic poet stands before his ocean, the blue of his eyes lifted from his beloved Mediterranean. Alongside a moving prose-memoir about Bolaffio, some of Saba's best poems take their cue from the painter:

Night falls on the paintings by Bolaffio,
two men sitting on a park bench (they're talking
politics), falls on that immense magnolia
behind them, on the little girl who runs
along a pathway, knocking her hoop. Once
it was my painting, and it lit up
the whole of my house. I have found it again,
my friend, in your house, and you out of your goodness
have saved it from blind disregard.

'What remains for poets to do is to write honest poetry,' wrote Saba. He also believed that 'the world has more need of clarity than it does of obscurity'. The poetry plays out this position. While the poetry is a clear-headed account of the poet's world, there is also a sense of a literary past aswim with symbols and metaphors going back as far as folk tradition:

DIALOGUE

HE
When I'm dead, that is what they'll say about me.
Poor old wretch, desperate, all alone.
And once he used to sing like a nightingale.

SHE
You're not a nightingale; you're a blackbird.
You whistle all the more loudly as evening draws in; and no one
can pluck the pine seed out of your beak.

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Poetry and Prose strikes me as an important book. While Saba was included alongside Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale in Joseph Cary's 1993 anthology, Three Modern Italian Poets (University of Chicago Press), his reputation is less secure than that of the other two. The current volume certainly holds its own in the company of Andrew Frisardi's bilingual edition of Ungaretti (which appeared last year from Carcanet (UK) and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (USA)) and Jonathan Galassi's mammoth edition of Montale's Collected Poems 1920-54 (also published by FSG). Without the restlessness and virtuosic tendencies of Ungaretti, Saba is closer to Montale poetically and temperamentally. (In fact, during eleven months spent hiding in Florence prior to the liberation in August 1944, Saba was visited daily by Montale. Such was the bond between them.) If Saba's Poetry and Prose suggests anything it is that the great 'triad' of Italian poetry could reasonably be described as an equilateral triangle. As is the case with the poetry of Ungaretti and Montale, there is something quintessentially and alluringly Italian about Saba's writing. His work also conjures a sense of Italian culture reminiscent of the novels of Carlo Levi and the paintings of Carlo Carra or Giorgio Morandi (all figures who appear in the poems or in Moleta's accompanying notes).

Looking back across the gutter of the page from the English version to Saba's original, the Italian border returns to mind. While there will always be something of Saba's lost balloon about the poem-in-translation, the successful transit of a poem from one language to another effects a kind of transport in both directions. In bringing Saba's Italy to us, we are brought into the poet's world—a universe of bookshops and Triestean vistas, of cherished memories and sounds.

Like the trainloads of shoppers we would watch returning across the Italian border to France late each morning, bags crammed with pasta, cheeses, cheap, pungent cigarettes and exotic alcohols, we have been granted, in the case of the present book, a generous consignment of goods, delivered to us in pristine, sparkling condition.

Gregory O'Brien, Summer 2004.

Copyright © Gregory O'Brien, 2004. All quotes remain the copyright of the original author / translator.