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100 PoemsUmberto SabaEdited by Patrick WorsnipTranslated by Patrick WorsnipForeword by
Categories: 20th Century, Italian, Jewish, Translation, War writings
Imprint: Carcanet Classics Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (192 pages) (Pub. May 2022) 9781800171930 £14.99 £13.49 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. May 2022) 9781800171947 £11.99 £10.79 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
Umberto Saba (1883–1957) is one of the great Italian poets of the twentieth century, as closely associated with his native city Trieste as Joyce is with Dublin. He received a sparse education but was writing distinctive poetry before he was twenty, ignoring the modernist groups which dominated the day. He came at personal themes in unexpected ways, using an unapologetically contemporary idiom. He acquired an antiquarian bookshop which prospered for a time, but his Jewish background placed him at risk with the rise of Fascism. When the Germans took northern Italy in 1943, he and his family went into hiding in Florence where they escaped detection until the Allied liberation.
National fame came late in his life. 100 Poems is the most extensive selection of his work so far published in Great Britain. He emerges as one of the great European writers of his time. The book features writing from every period of his writing life. Patrick Worsnip's translations honour the poet’s use of traditional Italian forms while using appropriately colloquial diction. This edition includes a preface by Angela Leighton, literary critic, poet and translator from Italian. An afterword and explanatory notes from Worsnip contextualise Saba’s life and clarify references in his poems.
Awards won by Patrick Worsnip
Winner, 2018 Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation
(Poems)
Praise for Umberto Saba
'Saba's poetry seems like the pure sound of a voice, a voice nearly freed from the bonds of words. The monody is pure feeling, in a musical state. The Language of Italian poetry which has almost always sought transfiguration in plasticity and relief, has rarely known an exception so singular. Saba attains the lied as if without realising it'
Eugenio Montale 'The moral physiognomy of Saba is very powerfully alive in his work, and makes him, now and forever, a great author. To this vast, complex, long-suffering personality, his poems bear witness, and from it draw their light....I have the impression that Saba, in our day, has been just discovered, and that the task of evaluating the full scope of his greatness will have to fall to others, when distance will have further clarified the perspectives. Saba will have to wait. Yet how many in Europe, can be as certain in their wait as he?' Quarantotti Gambini Praise for Patrick Worsnip '[an] excellent volume... it has clearly taken Worsnip a great deal of effort and carful work to write a volume of poetry so joyfully composed and so intellectually stimulating. Don't sit down with this book if you want to be bored.' Timothy Foot, The Postmaster and the Merton Record 'With the earlier poems Worsnip is happily slangy, and relishes the moments of naughty exuberance... Worsnip is good, indeed probably better than any other English translator so far, at the twinkling' Colin Burrow, London Review of Books 'The translation is play as well as passion and, despite the scholarship of the introduction and the generous notes at the end, the book is characterised by spirit, desire and a briskness of touch that makes the reading of these "personal poems" a valuable pleasure.' George Szirtes, PBS Autumn Bulletin 2018 'Propertius is perhaps the most enigmatic of the great poets from the golden age of Latin literature [...] Patrick Worsnip's vibrant contemporary translation will bring him to a new generation of discerning readers.' Peter Heslin, from the Introduction Praise for Angela Leighton 'Leighton's playful, imaginative language gives rise to form that is ingeniously attentive to the strange coincidences, chance encounters, and arbitrary correspondences of which a life is constituted.' Joseph Turner, Oxford Review of Books 'Its lasting impression is a renewed awareness of poetry's manifold reach.' The TLS 'Outstanding among the excellent ... the poems ring like bells.' Anne Stevenson 'Angela Leighton's genre-defying book -- poetry, memoir, experiment in translation in its many and often surprising senses -- explores with beautiful precision what she calls the 'two-ply tongue', a suggestive metaphor for the way we speak and think and write.' Patrick McGuinness |
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