Umberto Saba cultivated poetic individuality to such a
paradoxical extreme that his poems often read as though written
by an anonymous author. Aspiring to be simply
“a man among men,”
he yet found himself lapped in continual ripples of singularity.
Perhaps this was one reason why, in Stephen Sartarelli’s new
translation,[1]
he could speak of

a sudden yearning to be outside

of myself, to live the life

of everyone,

to be like every

everyday

man.

In actuality, Saba was a Jew married to
an “Aryan” wife in a
Catholic country; menaced by both fascists and Nazis, he remained
in Italy, often in hiding, through-
out the war years. He was a
homosexual who reveled in and celebrated conventional married
life. A city dweller to his fingertips, he loved the country and
barnyard creatures, especially chickens, pigs, and goats, and
eulogized them in verse. By profession he was an antiquarian
book dealer and yet seems utterly unbookish and not in the
least
“literary.”

Born Umberto Poli in 1883, he took the pen name
“Saba,” the origin of which is obscure. (For years the
inexplicable legend circulated that he chose “saba” because it
was the Hebrew word for “bread.” It is not
—“bread” is lechem in
Hebrew—and Sartarelli gets it right in his introduction). Saba
was a native of Trieste, polyglot and exotic, as much Slav as
Latin; nevertheless, in his bored view, it was nothing more than “a city