Umberto Saba
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.
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Postcards
Handwritten postcard with old antiquarian bookshop stamp to Aldo Fortuna
Postcard
Handwritten postcard with old antiquarian bookshop stamp[Trieste, 19th July 1921].Dear Aldo. – In Sept.[ember] you will receive my Canzoniere (a Bodoni for printing) In (...) APRI
Saba and the Trieste Civic Library
Postcard
Umberto Saba, Della biblioteca civica ovvero della gloria, (“The Civic Library, or the Glory”), Milano, Henry Beyle, 2013The short fragment published here in a (...) APRI
“A pair of well-made gloves”
Postcard
Anita Pittoni, paper model, 1946In the winter of 1946, Anita Pittoni designed and knitted a pair of red and brown woollen gloves for the (...) APRI
Canzoniere Story
“You know it, friends, and I do too.
Poems also resemble soap bubbles:
one flies up, and another, no”
Credevo sia dolce sognare.
Ma il sogno è uno specchio, che intero
mi rende, che sa smascherare
l’intimo vero.
Umberto Saba, Il sogno