Poetry
Songbook
Il Canzoniere
Umberto Saba · 1921
Synopsis
The book of a lifetime: some four hundred poems, written over about fifty years and constantly revised, which the author gathered into a single collection. It brings back Trieste, his city, with its people, its shops, its streets, its port and its hills, the Slovene nurse of his childhood, the beloved wife, Lina, and the war, in what the author called a “serene despair”.
Context
The author published the first edition at his own expense in 1921, through his own bookshop, then never stopped expanding and revising the collection: the definitive edition appeared in 1961, after his death. In France, L'Âge d'Homme published it under its Italian title; in English, George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan translated a selection of two hundred poems, published in 2008 by Yale University Press under the title “Songbook”.
Who it is for
Short poems, to be taken one at a time; the collection follows the order of a life and can be read at one's own pace.
Prizes and reception
According to the Treccani, a new edition of the collection appeared with Einaudi in 1945, and the author received the Viareggio prize in 1946.