Umberto Saba
Trieste e una Donna

Poetry is a grand bar overflowing with dubious characters as envious as teenagers, touchy as dwarves, and rambling like old sailors.

But there is a little corner, a small table in a dusty nook between the service door and the broom closet. And it's barely illuminated by the waning light of illusions.

Saba always felt like an outsider, a stateless person even among those who might have welcomed him as a brother. Half Jewish, absent father, and a mother embittered by life, the key to understanding all his poetry lies in some fragments of his youthful verses which, amidst a "not a poet I was, but a lost soul" and a "I imagine my cradle carved in strange wood", will be the deepest—and never disowned—roots of that great organic composition "Il Canzoniere".

A kind of novel in verses of "a life, poor in external events; rich, sometimes to the point of anguish, with inner motions and resonances" in which Saba narrates, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, his experience as a man using a sober and nuanced language, bordering on the colloquial.

And if "Il Canzoniere" is a novel, "Trieste e una Donna" represents its most thrilling and passionate chapter.

I could speak about the novelty that our Poet brought to Italian poetry of that time, with his clear and precise language that contrasted the dannunziane poses, the noisy manifestos of the Futurists, and the vague melancholies of the Crepuscolari who were expressing their first cries.

I could dwell on his indomitable wanderlust in Trieste, in that city with its "sullen grace", in that melting pot of ethnicities and races that Saba crossed and recrossed, never satisfied and always in search of that "corner made for me, for my thoughtful and introspective life".

I could emphasize his relationship with that woman, with Lina, the poet's beloved-hated wife guilty of a betrayal as unexpected as it was painful, a sort of double—but much more carnal!—of the Laura who permeated the petrarchan "Canzoniere" and was sung by Saba in tones sometimes conciliatory, sometimes resentful.

But I would rather you go directly to that little corner of the bar. Ignore the drunkards' shouts and sit down with him without hesitation.

More than a poet, you will find a friend. A friend who, with a candid voice, clear gaze, and a jug of water in hand, will tell you his story.

And you will have the impression that he never lies, ever.