A beautifully translated selection of poems by one of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century Umberto Saba's reputation in Italy and Europe has steadily grown since his death in 1957, and today he is positioned alongside Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti as one of the three most important Italian poets of the first half of the twentieth century. Until now, however, English-language readers have had access to only a few examples of this poet's work. This bilingual volume at last brings an extensive and exquisitely translated collection of Saba's poems to English-speaking readers. Both faithful and lyrical, George Hochfield's and Leonard Nathan's translations do justice to Saba's rigorous personal honesty and his profound awareness of the suffering that was for him coincident with life. An introductory essay, a translation of Saba's early manifesto, "What Remains for Poets to Do," and a chronology of his life situate his poetics within the larger context of twentieth-century letters. With its publication, this volume provides the English-speaking world with a momentous occasion to rethink not just Italian poetry but also the larger European modernist project.

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.

Essays. Criticism. Memoir. This odd and engaging volume consists primarily of essays written between 1900 and 1944, in which the Italian poet Umberto Saba writes of himself in the third person, providing a truly fascinating critique of his own work. As work of criticism written pseudonymously, and without irony, about one's own work, and for the primary purpose of celebrating that work, the History and Chronicle of the Songbook remains unique . . . in literary history . . . This is not a work of self-promotion; it is, like all Saba's writing, in poetry or prose, a work of self-definition, even self-creation (from the Translator's Foreword). As an exercise in self-objectification, then, the book becomes not only a useful work about Saba's poetry, but an inquiry into identity, the relationship of the self to the world around the self, and the ability of a poet to explicitly create a poetics but of a response to his or her own work.