Friends, contemporaries, kindred in attitude and artistic sensibility, Umberto Saba and the Gorizia painter Vittorio Bolaffio (1883-1931) paid homage to each other with portraits. The one sketched in prose by Saba, which appeared in the “Corriere della Sera” in 1946, takes us onto the deck of the ship docked at the harbor painted by Bolaffio: “His most striking pictures reproduce men, especially men of the port, intent on hard labor, bent and twisted under heavy loads.” And “The Morning Song” captures the snapshot of a sailor’s departure, a figure that ties Saba’s poetry to Bolaffio’s painting.
“On a sunlit beach –
I don’t know whether in dream or waking –
I saw a sailor, still almost a youth.
He was loosing a rope from the landing
post, and the nervous boat rocked i
n the water ready to set sail […]”
