Umberto Saba, whose real name was Umberto Poli, was born in Trieste in 1883. His father, Ugo Edoardo, was a Venetian businessman, a Catholic, who abandoned his Jewish wife, Rachele Coen, shortly after their marriage. Alone and pregnant, Rachel Coen raised her son with the help of the overly attentive Slovenian nanny, Peppa Sabaz. Some critics sustain that the choice of the surname Saba―used for the first time in 1910 for the collection Poesie―was a tribute to his attentive nanny; others believe it was to honour his mother: saba is, in fact, a Jewish word which means sated (with food, bread)[1].

This brief poem, Uccelli, gives its name to one of his last collections of poems, written in 1948.

Notwithstanding a lifetime of depression (he spent many years of his life in and out of clinics), this poem expresses a lightness and joy. It is a well-known fact that Umberto Saba loved all animals, and that in their manifest simplicity they represented for him truth in life, innocence. But he was especially fond of birds, especially canaries, of which he had many.

The poem is brief and extremely musical. In its simplicity, it is truly a tribute to the creatures he so loved. I tried to recreate the rhythm and flow but found it difficult…In shorter poems consonants, vowels, and even spaces seem to count more. I wish I could have found better solutions for the rhyme. I wish I could have kept the harmonious “a” sound, which in Italian gives wonderful airiness (so reminiscent of the the world of birds), to the poem. As always, so much was lost.- M.C.

[1] According to https://biblehub.com/hebrew/7647.htm However, in numerous biographies of the poet, the word saba is said to mean bread.

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Painting: Matì, Great tit, oil on canvas.