Three Poems by Umberto Saba, Translated by Geoffrey Brock
PN Review 164, July - August 2005
From Casa e campagna / Home and Countryside (1909-10)
The Sapling
Today is made of rain.
Late morning looks like evening,
spring like autumn,
and a great wind is blasting
a sapling that holds - surprisingly - steady;
it stands above the plants like a boy
grown too tall for his green age.
You watch, filled with pity
perhaps for all those pale flowers
stripped by the gales; they are fruit,
they are winter's sweet
preserves, those flowers that fall now
to the grass. And you grieve in your vast
maternity.
The Goat
I've spoken to a goat.
She was alone out in the field, and leashed.
Sated with grass, drenched
by rain, she bleated.
Her steady bleat was brother
to my own grief. And I replied - at first
in jest, and then because the voice of grief
is one unchanging everlasting note.
That was the voice
moaning out of the solitary goat.
Out of that goat with its Semitic face
came grievances regarding every evil,
from every throat.
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From La serena disperazione / Serene Despair (1913-15)
A Memory
I cannot sleep. I see a street, some pines,
and in my heart the old anxieties gather.
We used to go there alone, to be together,
another boy and I.
It was Passover, the old folks' rites arcane
and slow. And if he doesn't care enough,
I thought, and if he doesn't come tomorrow?
Tomorrow he did not come: a new pain.
Spasms that evening of grief. Now I know
friendship wasn't what we had in our grove;
what we had was love -
the first. And such love then, and what a glow
of joy, between the hills and sea of Trieste.
But why, tonight, am I unable to rest,
when all that happened fifteen years ago?
These poems by Umberto Saba, translated by Geoffrey Brock, are taken from PN Review 164, July - August 2005. Further contributions from Brock and Saba, including the rest of the poems in this issue, are available in the archive to paying subscribers, as well as more poetry, features, reviews and reports from across the back catalogue.
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