The Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba: New & Selected Poems, 1948-1998 - Softcover

With Stories and Recollection, the short prose works of the great Italian poet Umberto Saba, 1883-1957, make their first appearance in English. Here are the stories, memoirs and reflections of a poet who spent much of his life in his small antiquarian bookshop. This work largely overlooked but for friends such as Svevo, Montale, Pavese, Ungaretti and Carlo Levi, who found Saba's 'rich and complex prose of such scrupulous realism that it recalls Goethe or Thomas Mann, but is so much more brilliant, modern, and nervous.' The Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba is a revelation: In its apparent simplicity, moral sense, its understanding, and, most of all, its quiet beauty, it is a true companion piece to the work of his fellow Triestan Italo Svevo, who one would have thought sui generis. Estelle Gilson's distinguished translation of the Italian prose stylist won the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award for 1992 and the Italo Calvino Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University in 1991.

Umberto Saba was born Umbeto Poli in 1883; by the time of his birth his father had deserted the family. He studied the violin and began writing poetry when he was about seventeen. He attended Dante A'Lighieri in Trieste, then, briefly, its Academy of Commerce and Nautical Science, and later worked for a commercial firm in the city. He was conscripted to the Italian army's infantry in 1908. The next year he marries Carolina Wolfler. Recalled to the army in 1915, he suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized. When he returned to Trieste in 1919 he purchased the bookshop where he was to spend the greater part of his life. His friends included Svevo, Ungaretti, Giacomo Debenedetti and Carlo Levi. Saba was sixty-three when he won his first national literary award, the Viareggio Prize. He died in Gorizia in 1957.