Ernesto Read online

  UMBERTO SABA (1883–1957) was born Umberto Poli in the city of Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and continued to live in Trieste for the greater part of his life. The child of a broken family—his father, who had converted to Judaism to marry, soon abandoned his wife—Saba attended the Imperial Academy of Commerce and Navigation in Trieste, and then moved for some years to Pisa, where he studied classical languages and archaeology. In 1909 he married Carolina Wölfler, also Jewish, and the subsequent year she gave birth to a daughter; a first book of poems, published under the name of Umberto Saba, also appeared that year. Saba’s marriage was at first troubled—his wife’s affair with a painter led to a brief separation—and the couple was poor, and for a few years they moved around Italy in the hopes of improving their fortunes. After the end of World War I, however, Saba bought a secondhand bookshop in Trieste—he called it La Libreria Antica e Moderna—and in the next decades he made a comfortable living as a bookdealer while working on Il Canzoniere, the book of poems he published in 1921 and would go on adding to for the rest of his life. During World War II, Saba and his family were forced to flee Trieste and go into hiding in Florence to avoid deportation by the Nazis. Though the postwar years brought him many prizes and widespread recognition as one of modern Italy’s greatest poets, Saba suffered from depression, which had plagued him all his life, and opium addiction and was repeatedly institutionalized. He died at seventy-four, within a year of his wife.

  ESTELLE GILSON is a writer, translator, and poet. Among her translations are works by Stendhal, Gabriel Preil, Natalia Ginzburg, Massimo Bontempelli, and Giacomo Debenedetti. Her translation of Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba was awarded the MLA’s first Scaglione Prize for the best literary translation of the previous two years.

  ERNESTO

  UMBERTO SABA

  Translated from the Italian by

  ESTELLE GILSON

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1975, 1978, 1995, 2015 by Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Turin Translation, introduction, and “On Translating Ernesto” copyright © 2017 by Estelle Gilson

  “The History of Saba’s Ernesto” copyright © 2017 by Maria Antonietta Grignani All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Mario Sironi, Brother Ettore, 1910; courtesy of Archive Mario Sironi di Romana; © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Saba, Umberto, 1883–1957, author. | Gilson, Estelle, translator, writer of introduction.

  Title: Ernesto / Umberto Saba ; translated and with an introduction by Estelle Gilson.

  Other titles: Ernesto. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016026804 (print) | LCCN 2016033094 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681370828 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681370835 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Gay men—Fiction. | Violinists—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Gay. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PQ4841.A18 E713 2017 (print) | LCC PQ4841.A18 (ebook) | DDC 853/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026804

  ISBN 978-1-68137-083-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  ERNESTO

  Dedication

  First Episode

  Second Episode

  Third Episode

  Fourth Episode

  Almost a Conclusion

  Fifth Episode

  On Translating Ernesto

  Ernesto’s Letter to Tullio Mogno

  The History of Saba’s Ernesto

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  UMBERTO Saba, one of Italy’s most esteemed poets, was seventy and living in a Roman sanatorium for the mentally ill in 1953 when he began working on an as yet unnamed novel. In a letter to his wife, Lina, in the spring of that year, he wrote that he’d felt “as if a dike had broken . . . and everything poured out all at once.” What had poured out by the time he wrote to Lina was a work in whose first episode Ernesto, its eponymous sixteen-year-old protagonist, is seduced by the laborer he supervises at work. Although Saba considered the early episodes of the work to be some of his best writing and read them aloud to a chosen few at the sanatorium, he had no intention of publishing his work. What he was writing was for himself alone—his adolescent experiences in Trieste as they suddenly welled up within him and demanded release. The urgency he felt to relieve himself of this material is evident again in a letter to his friend Bruno Pincherle: “I . . . had the distinct feeling of being pregnant while I was writing it.”

  The old poet found himself charmed—literally enchanted—by the teenage boy he had created. He wrote a lengthy letter to a friend in Ernesto’s voice, describing his relationship with old Signor Saba. He told another friend that Ernesto had written such a letter and that the boy couldn’t understand not having received a reply. He suppressed the urge to address the academic assembly as Ernesto at the major award ceremony of his life: bestowal of an honoris causa degree by the University of Rome. And he declared, to those who knew about the book, that he would take the rascally boy through his adolescence to his discoveries of love and poetry. Yet, despite Saba’s overwhelming joy in Ernesto, he repeatedly admonished his daughter, Linuccia, who was editing the novel, and the writer Carlo Levi, who had the only manuscript, never to let the work out of their hands.

  However, soon after having written the first three episodes, Saba began having premonitions that he would never complete the book. By June his fading joys in Ernesto were replaced by depression and the fear that when he left Rome and the sanatorium to return to Trieste, he would never again find the time, energy, or proper atmosphere in which to tell the rest of Ernesto’s story. Depression was not new to Saba. “My only ailment,” he once wrote, “is that of being unhappy.” Saba had suffered breakdowns since the age of twenty and was given to retreats to mental hospitals. He was self-injecting morphine by the time he began Ernesto.

  Reluctantly back in Trieste, where his wife was seriously ill, Saba’s fears and depression intensified. “The atmosphere here is death to my soul,” he wrote to Linuccia, and went on to complain that no one, not even Lina, wanted to hear talk of Ernesto. He sent the early pages of the fourth episode to Linuccia, who was still in Rome, including with it paranoid instructions on how to safeguard and return the work. Coddled and urged on by Linuccia, Saba continued to work, though fitfully and with increasing agitation. By August, Linuccia was in Trieste. “Aggressive, overwhelming, and nasty,” she wrote to Levi. The pivotal issue was always the same: Could he finish Ernesto?

  On August 28 she wrote, “L’impasse is serious. [He] doesn’t work anymore and I’m afraid that he won’t begin again.”

  On August 31 Saba wrote and dated a single page titled “Quasi una conclusione” (“Almost a Conclusion”). It states that the author regrets not being able to tell the rest of Ernesto’s story. To do so would have required another hundred pages, which the author now found himself too old and too tired to write. The page is inserted between the fourth and fifth episodes. In August, Saba ordered the entire manuscript destroyed. He died in 1957 at the age of seventy-four in a dingy room in
yet another sanatorium. The manuscript was sealed and kept hidden until Linuccia Saba published it in 1975.

  There is no formal biography of Saba. There is a narrative account by a friend and various print and Internet accounts of his life in English and Italian, some accurate, some not. None, however, offers information or insights into Saba’s painful struggle to complete Ernesto’s story. What we do have are Umberto Saba’s own words—his poetry, prose, and letters.

  A reader exposed to Saba’s poetic output, his Canzoniere (Songbook) and his Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere (History and Chronicle of the Songbook), would have a fairly clear idea of the salient factors in this troubled poet’s life. “The poet of himself,” fellow poet Giuseppe Ungaretti called him.

  Saba was born Umberto Poli in the city of Trieste in 1883. He viewed his father as the cause of his unhappiness and psychic woes, and his birthplace as an impediment to the literary recognition he believed he merited. He was the only child of an arranged marriage between a non-Jew, a widower named Ugo Edoardo Poli, son of a Venetian countess (Theresa Arrivabene), and Felicita Rachele Coen, the niece of Samuel David Luzzatto, so distinguished a Jewish scholar that he is known by the acronym Shadal. However, well before the child’s birth on March 9, 1883, Poli deserted his wife and was thereafter referred to by Saba’s mother as l’assassino. “When I was born it made my mother cry. . . . I became an expert at melancholy; the only son with a distant father.” The father’s desertion still scalded Saba when he was seventy and writing Ernesto. “When the man was about forty years old,” he told a friend, “a marriage broker . . . proposed him as a match for my mother. . . . For four thousand fiorini, the wretch had himself circumcised, changed his name to Abraham (one can imagine with what hidden anger), and married my mother.”

  Rachele Poli, who lived with and worked in a store owned by her wealthy sister Regina Luzzatto (Saba’s beloved Aunt Regina), left her son in the care of a Slovenian Catholic nursemaid, Giuseppina Sabaz, who had just lost her own child and who became a second mother to the boy. One of Saba’s earliest memories was of crying in the nursemaid’s arms while his mother berated her for having taken the child to church though forbidden to do so. Instead of saying the Hebrew prayer the Shema Yisrael at bedtime, young Berto had learned the Catholic paternoster in Slovenian. Subsequently Saba attended a Talmud Torah (Jewish school) and turned out to be bright enough for his family to hope that he would one day become a chochem (Hebrew sage). Saba used the Hebrew words in describing these events. The deep affection between Berto and the woman he called Peppina is celebrated throughout Saba’s poetry and relived in Ernesto. When her son was fifteen, Saba’s mother cut his education short and apprenticed him to a commercial firm with a commitment to continued employment.

  At the turn of the century Saba left Trieste in search of literary studies and the company of other young artists. His earliest poems date from this time and were often published under somewhat grandiose surnames, among them Umberto Chopin Poli and Umberto da Montereale. He finally rejected his father’s name and chose the name Saba in homage to the nursemaid he loved. It is said that when a friend forgetfully addressed him as Poli he cut the man off completely, not even responding to his greeting on the street. Saba became his legal name in 1928.

  Saba was studying literature in Pisa in 1903 when he suffered his first breakdown, possibly as a result of a painful quarrel with his closest friend, the violinist Ugo Chiesa, whose fiancée Saba also loved. Chiesa appears as Ilio in Ernesto: an attractive golden-haired younger boy Ernesto notices at a violin recital and whom he finally meets in the very last pages of the novel.

  On recovering from the breakdown Saba returned to his mother and aunt in Trieste. He was drafted into the Italian army in 1908. In 1909 he married Carolina (Lina) Wölfler in a Jewish ceremony—and almost immediately produced one of his best-known poems, “A mia moglie” (“To My Wife”), in which he compares Lina to small female creatures one would find around a barnyard: a rabbit, a heifer, a bitch, a hen, an ant. It is an enthusiastic love poem, full of almost childish admiration for small creatures who wander freely and proudly in their own worlds. But it says something about Saba’s sensitivities that he was shocked when the adoring paean infuriated his young bride. When their daughter, Linuccia, was born, Saba seems to have acted without concern for Lina, insisting that the child be sent, as he had been, to a wet nurse in the country, though there was no reason Lina could not care for her. Ambitious for his poetry during this period, Saba spent time in Florence courting the interest of the young writers centered there. But Lina, alone in Trieste and unhappy with her husband’s long absences, soon found a suitor, retrieved Linuccia from the countryside, and left Saba. The couple eventually reconciled and went on to live a caringly quarrelsome life together—though not always together.

  Recalled to military duty in 1915, Saba suffered another breakdown requiring hospitalization. Still without a sure source of income in 1919, he used money left to him by his aunt Regina to purchase a bookshop, “the dark cave,” where he was to spend the greater part of his life. The store bearing his name, Libreria Antiquaria Umberto Saba, at via San Nicolò 30, still in existence (it now serves as a Saba museum as well), not only provided a livelihood for Saba but became a refuge for him from the loudspeakers and street rallies of the early days of Fascism.

  When the Italian racial laws were passed in 1938, Saba fled to Paris, where, cut off from language, friends, and family, he felt so isolated that despite his lack of money and proper papers, he risked reentering Italy. His friends arranged an interview with the writer Curzio Malaparte, who was influential in the Fascist regime, to try to “regularize” Saba’s stay in Italy. Malaparte assured Saba there would be no problem about his remaining in the country if he renounced Judaism and accepted baptism into the Catholic Church, which Saba refused to do. Later, when the Germans occupied Italy, Saba, along with his wife and daughter, escaped to Florence, where they were forced to flee from dwelling to dwelling to evade capture. The family returned to Trieste after the war.

  Though Saba’s love for Trieste’s beauty is manifest throughout his writing, it was, indeed, not a nurturing birthplace for Italian writers. Situated at the northeastern extreme of Italy, with its face to the Gulf of Trieste and the sea and its back to the Carso, a range of rugged limestone hills, Trieste was not even Italian at the time of Saba’s birth. It was an Imperial Free City within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and had been under Hapsburg rule since the fourteenth century. During Saba’s youth, it was a bustling, prosperous free port, one of the most important cities in the empire. Though its inhabitants were primarily Italian and fiercely committed to joining the emerging Italian republic, German was the language of power and commerce. Austrians had major roles in the shipping, insurance, and banking firms and had introduced Triestinos to Sacher tortes, waltzes, and cafés, as well as to psychoanalysis and Middle-European architecture. As Trieste grew and prospered, immigrants from Adriatic and Mediterranean lands disembarked daily along its waterfront to trade exotic wares or seek their fortunes. When James Joyce arrived in the city in 1904 to teach English (he lived briefly in the very building where Saba later owned the bookstore), he was fascinated by the fezzed, sashed, and skirted Turks, Greeks, and Albanians who strolled the city’s streets in native costume.

  Doing its business in German, despite its Italian heart, and isolated from the Italian mainstream, Trieste was, in Saba’s words, a cultural backwater: “No one ever spoke to me about books there.” Like many isolated cities it developed its own dialect. But even Trieste’s writers’ use of Italian was disdained by the Italian literary establishment, which rarely reviewed their works. Few Triestinos, much less Italians, knew that sixty-year-old Triestino Italo Svevo had written two novels until James Joyce “discovered” him. One is left wondering at the coincidence that Umberto Saba and Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz), two of Italy’s most important twentieth-century writers, were Triestine Jews who neither practiced Judaism nor wrote under
their own names.

  When Saba was in his mid-forties and in his own words “almost suicidal,” he had consulted psychiatrist Edoardo Weiss, just returned from studying with Sigmund Freud in Vienna. Under Weiss’s care, Saba was able to unravel some of the turmoil evoked by his father’s desertion, but nervous ailments and depressions continued to plague him. Weiss, in fact, consulted Freud about Saba’s prognosis, to which the master replied, “I don’t expect your patient to heal completely. At the most he will understand more about himself and about others. But if he’s a true poet, poetry is too strong a compensation for him to give up the benefits his neuroses provide him.” Saba’s poetry series Il piccolo Berto (Little Berto) is dedicated to Weiss.

  Perhaps because Weiss had also treated Svevo, among other Triestinos, he produced a paper titled “Agoraphobia and Its Relation to Hysterical Attacks and Anxiety,” about a disorder he described as “symptomatic of the inhabitants of a border city who try to construct something solid out of the loss of their identity and feel themselves part of a minority.”

  Saba’s words and writings seem to substantiate Weiss’s theory. Whenever he was asked how he wanted to be remembered, Saba’s answer was brief and unvarying: “As an Italian poet.” In a late poem, “Avevo” (“I Had”), he constructs just that identity: a poet tied to Trieste and thus to Italy.

  Fear of maintaining that identity assailed Saba in 1946 when an international postwar commission was considering ceding Trieste to Yugoslavia. “If Italy loses Trieste,” he wrote to Linuccia, “no one will ever understand anything about me.”

  In 1948, at the age of sixty-five, Saba adopted yet another pseudonym, Giuseppe Caramandrei, to publish History and Chronicle of the Songbook, a series of essays explicating and lauding Umberto Saba’s poetry. Though he wrote of himself in the third person, it was known that he was the author of this unique auto-exegesis. He was sure, he wrote, that he was “sufficiently ‘detached’ from his poetry to look at it with relatively impartial eyes.” The History’s first lines are “Saba has made many mistakes. But ignoring Saba’s poetry would be like ignoring the evidence of a natural phenomenon.” The work, with its detailed revelations of factors from Saba’s memories and emotions to the poetic techniques he employed with cited poems, has proven invaluable to scholars. However, the underlying message of the History was to reiterate Saba’s view of poetry. Umberto Saba’s poetry has not been understood or properly valued, the reader is told, because of the sterile critical approach that examines a poem as a thing in itself, instead of as “the expression of a poet, who must have a specific nature and moral physiognomy.”