Umberto Saba totally identified life with poetry. The notion of literature as a path of self-discovery leading to self-representation is deeply embedded in all of his poems. The Canzoniere is a sort of mirror in which Saba scrutinized and envisaged himself. It is a self-portrait made of words, written over time and rearranged on paper. Each poem may be considered a self-portrait reflecting the poet’s unceasing need to revise his countless self-images, by adding new details and deleting old ones. Given his familiarity with psychoanalysis, Saba kept varying the lens of his poetic camera, so that new details came to the fore while old ones faded into the background.

For him, the representation of the self was an amalgama of many disparate elements: his city, his partner, the people he loved, the books he read. The fragmented vibration of his poetic voice is unmistakable.
Scoperta la psicanalisi, Saba cambia l’obiettivo della sua sensibilissima fotocamera. Il ritratto muta ancora: dettagli prima secondari vengono posti in primo piano, altri sfumano nell’indistinto dello sfondo. Una poetica di puro rispecchiamento? Non proprio. La rappresentazione del sé sabiano è fatta di molti elementi: la sua città, la sua donna, i suoi affetti, le sue letture, il suo pensiero. Tutto entra nel quadro frammentato, mobilissimo e sonoro che ci è restituito dalla sua voce inconfondibile.