Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
a file that, on the surface, looks like a standard
biography of a writer. But the moment you peel
back that first layer, you realize we're actually
looking at the psychological blueprint of the
entire 20th century. We're talking about a man
who essentially invented himself, piece by piece,
from his name to his profession, all against
the backdrop of a crumbling empire, two world
wars, and the dawn of psychoanalysis. We are
talking about Umberto Saba. Exactly. Umberto
Saba. And it's a case study that, you know, it
resists almost every easy classification we try
to put on it. Right. Saba is a giant of Italian
literature. He's right up there with Montali
and Ungaretti, but he's also the perennial outsider.
He's the poet of the everyday, but his internal
life was anything but ordinary. It's just a series
of contradictions. Total contradictions. He's
Jewish and Catholic, Italian and Austrian, a
bourgeois merchant and a radical poet. And a
man of the borderlands. I think we have to start
there with the geography because with Saba, the
map isn't just a setting. It's a character in
the story. It absolutely is. He was born in 1883
in Trieste. Now, for a modern listener, you hear
Trieste, you think Northern Italy, nice coffee.
James Joyce lived there for a bit. But in 1883,
calling Trieste Italian was a political statement,
not really a geographic fact. Exactly. You have
to strip away the modern map. In 1883, Trieste
was the jewel of the Austro -Hungarian Empire.
It was Vienna's port, the fourth largest city
in the empire, a massive commercial hub where
the Teutonic world met the Mediterranean. You
had this incredible friction, Austrian burocracy,
Slavic hinterlands, Italian culture, and a thriving,
very distinct Jewish community. It's the ultimate
limbo state. It wasn't legally Italy, but for
someone like Saba and, you know, the Irba dentists
of the time, it was culturally the most Italian
place because it was longing to be part of the
motherland. That longing defines him. It completely.
defiance. He was born into a city that was having
an identity crisis, which seems almost too perfect
a metaphor for a man whose entire life was an
identity crisis. And that is the central tension
of this deep dive today. We've got a massive
stack of sources, his canzonier or songbook,
his letters, the psychoanalytic notes. And our
mission is to figure out how this tumultuous
personal history generated such a singular body
of work. Right. We're going to unpack the songbook,
which isn't just a collection of poems, but a
50 year autobiography in verse. And we're going
to try and solve or at least debate the mystery
of his name. Because Umberto Saba is a fiction.
A total fiction. He constructed that name to
survive his own reality. So let's get into that
reality. The origin section of our outline is
titled The Broken Family Tree, which honestly
feels like a bit of an understatement. It really
is. Usually when we talk about a broken home
in literary biographies, we mean, you know, the
parents divorced when the kid was seven or maybe
one died young. But Saba's family was broken
before he even took his first breath. This is
high drama right out of the gate. The circumstances
of his birth are the primal wound that drives
everything he ever wrote. So who are the players?
Okay, so he was born Umberto Poli. His father
was Ugo Adorto Poli, a young, somewhat flighty
Christian aristocrat. or at least he pretended
to be one. Okay. And his mother was Felicity
Rochelle Cohen, a Jewish woman from a fairly
strict traditional background. She was 37. Ugo
was 29. Wow. The age gap alone raises eyebrows
for 1882, but the religious divide must have
been the real scandal. Oh, it was a massive logistical
and social nightmare. But Ugo, in this fit of
what we might call performative romance, actually
converted to Judaism specifically to marry Felicita.
He converted. He did. It was this grand theatrical
gesture. But as we see so often with grand theatrical
gestures, there wasn't a lot of substance behind
it. No, and the timeline here is just brutal.
Felicita is pregnant with Umberto. They are newlyweds.
And Ugo, the man who just converted faiths to
be with her, realizes he's made a mistake. And
he doesn't just leave. He evaporates. He abandons
Felicita and the unborn baby before Umberto was
even born. So Umberto enters the world in March
1883 as a fatherless child in the most literal
sense. He's the son of a ghost. And this creates
that absent father trope that we see haunting
his work. But unlike a lot of writers who mythologize
The Missing Parent, Saba had to deal with the
very real. very bitter presence of the parent
who stayed. Exactly. Felicita was left holding
the bag. She was humiliated, abandoned, and now
she's raising a child who probably looked a lot
like the man who ruined her life. That dynamic
is so heavy. The mother who stays, but who is
just consumed by bitterness. Yeah. Sources describe
her as stern and unhappy. But the fascinating
twist in his early childhood is that he did have
a warm maternal figure. He just didn't find her
in his mother's house. No, he didn't. We have
to talk about Pepa. Pepa. Josefa Guprovich Shobar,
known as Pepa. This is the woman who saved him,
emotionally speaking. She was a Slovene Catholic
wet nurse. Okay. And the context of her arrival
is just heartbreaking in its own right. She had
just lost her own baby. Oh, wow. So you have
a collision of traumas. You have a baby whose
father fled and a mother whose baby died. They
filled the void for each other. Precisely. Pepa
took infant Umberto into her home. For the first
three years of his life, he lived with her and
her husband in what he later remembered as a
paradise. A paradise. It was a Slovene environment,
Catholic, filled with affection, singing, and
a simple, unburdened love that he just wasn't
getting from Felicita. I can only imagine the
psychological whiplash when that ended. Because
it did end. It did. In 1887, when he's roughly
four years old, he's moved back to his biological
mother's care, into the home of her sister, Regina.
That transition is the first great tragedy of
his life. He goes from Peppa's world, which he
associates with joy, milk, and warmth, to Felicita's
world, which he later describes as shy and solitary.
He called his mother's house the ghetto of his
soul. Yeah, the ghetto of his soul, even though
they weren't living in the actual ghetto. It
was a house of silence and judgment. And he was
a lonely kid, right? The notes mention he kept
pet birds and studied the violin. Very much an
internalized existence. He wasn't out playing
soccer in the piazza. He was in a room. absorbing
his mother's grief and probably hearing constant
diatribes about his good -for -nothing father.
The assassin. The assassin. That's what his mother
called Ugo, the assassin. Can you imagine growing
up hearing that your father is a murderer? Not
because he killed someone, but because he killed
her happiness. That is a heavy burden for a six
-year -old. It sets up this incredible duality
in his psyche. You have the good mother, who
isn't his mother, Peppa, the Catholic. slavic
one and the bad mother who is his blood felicita
the jewish bitter one and then the assassin father
somewhere out there it's no wonder he ended up
on a psychoanalyst's couch later absolutely but
let's look at his education because this surprised
me he didn't do the classic intellectual route
he wasn't trained in greek and latin at lucio
classico no and this is crucial for understanding
his poetic voice he started at the gymnasium
the academic track but he wasn't a good student
He failed Latin. He failed Latin. So in 1897,
his mother pulled him out and enrolled him in
the Imperial Academy of Commerce and Navigation.
The Imperial Academy of Commerce and Navigation.
It sounds like he's training to be a sea captain
or a shipping logistics manager. Basically, he
was. He was training to be a merchant. This is
Crieste, remember? The city runs on ledgers,
shipping manifests, and insurance rates. So after
the academy? After the academy, he went to work
as a clerk for a customs agent. I think this
is a superpower for him, though. When you read
Saba, he doesn't sound like he's trying to impress
you with obscure mythological references like
Denunzio or some of the heavy academics. No,
not at all. He sounds concrete. He lists things.
He values the object. Absolutely. He wasn't living
in an ivory tower. He was grounded in the commercial
reality of the port. He understood the value
of things. He understood exchange. And interestingly,
this merchant identity gave him a way to interact
with the world that wasn't purely intellectual.
It kept him tethered to reality, which, given
his mental health struggles, was probably a lifesaver.
But the urge to write was there. It was always
there. And with the writing came the need for
a name. Because Umberto Poli was his father's
name, and his father was the assassin. He couldn't
be a Poli. No. And his early attempts at renaming
himself are, well, they're revealing of a young
man trying to find a costume that fits. Oh, I
love the early drafts. Yeah. In 1900, he's signing
poems as Umberto Chopin Poli. Chopin. It's so
teenage, isn't it? It's like a kid today calling
himself Humberto Cobain. It just screams, I am
sensitive, I am suffering. It's the tortured
artist archetype. He's signaling to the world
that he aligns with the romantics, with the delicate
geniuses who die young. But it's a mask. It's
not an identity. Then he pivots in 1905. And
the context here is huge. He meets his father.
Ghost materializes. He travels to Florence and
finally stands face to face with Ugo. And this
meeting shatters the myth his mother had built.
He expects a monster, an assassin. Instead, he
finds a man who is charming. Yeah, Hugo is a
bit of a libertine, a wanderer, arguably a bit
shallow, but he's not a villain. He's just a
man who wasn't cut out for domestic life. And
Saba realizes that he actually shares a lot of
traits with his father. The restlessness, the
love of poetry. There's that famous poem, Mio
padre ha estado per me el asesino, my father
was the murderer to me, where he pivots and says
he realized his father was just a child, a balloon
that shouldn't be held down. Exactly, a child
with a blue gaze. He humanizes him. And briefly,
he adopts the name Umberto da Monteriale using
his father's birthplace. So he tries to connect
with that side of the family. It's an attempt
to connect with that petrolineal line, but it
doesn't stick. He can't fully embrace the father
who left. So we land on Saba. He publishes his
first collection in 1910 as simply Saba. And
scholars have been fighting over this for a century.
What is your take on the name? I know there are
three main theories. The theories are fascinating
because they represent the three pillars of his
identity. Theory one is the Hebrew connection,
Sova or Saba. Sova means satiated or full, which
might be a kind of wish fulfillment for a man
who always felt empty. Or Saba, meaning grandfather
in Hebrew. Which would be a nod to his mother's
Jewish lineage. The Coens, the Lozados. Yeah.
Reclaiming the heritage his father rejected.
Right. It validates his mother's side. Yay. But
then there's the theory that I find the most
psychologically compelling. Okay. The connection
to the wet nurse. Her name was Peppa Shobar.
It's right there phonetically. Shobar. Saba.
If you shorten Shobar or Italianize it, you get
Saba. If this theory holds, and many biographers
believe it does, he literally named himself after
the only person who gave him unconditional love.
So he rejected the poly from the father. And
the coming from the mother. And chose the third
option, the caretaker. Exactly. But there's a
subversive layer to that, too. By taking a name
that sounds Hebrew, Saba, grandfather, but means
the Catholic wet nurse, Shobar, he's secretly
merging the two warring halves of his childhood
into one word. It's the ultimate synthesis. He
becomes the bridge. That is the brilliance of
it. It's a name that allows him to be everything
at once. And he committed to it. He legally changed
it in 1928. He became Saba. But a new name doesn't
cure an old sickness. We have to talk about his
mind. Because even as he's finding his voice
in the early 1900s, he's falling apart. The cracks
were there early. In 1903, he went to Pisa to
study, trying to get that classical education
he missed. But he had a breakdown. A breakdown.
A nervous disorder forced him back to Trieste.
This wasn't just sadness. This was clinical depression,
likely neurasthenia, a condition that would plague
him for the rest of his life. He operated in
cycles periods of intense manic creativity, followed
by crushing paralyzed darkness. And it's in this
volatile state that he enters the world of relationships.
He meets Carolina Wolf Lerlina in 1905. And honestly,
Lena deserves a medal. Lena is the anchor. She's
the queen of the hive in his poetry. They married
in 1909 in a Jewish ceremony, and they had a
daughter, Lenuchia. For a moment, it looks like
Saba has achieved the bourgeois stability he
was trained for. Wife, child, home. The whole
package. But then comes 1911, the crisis. And
I want to challenge the way this is usually told.
Usually it's the wife cheated. But looking at
the sources, Saba left her alone in Trieste with
a baby. while he went off to Florence to play
the literary socialite with the magazine Lavos.
That's a very fair point. He was chasing fame,
leaving her behind. He was prioritizing his artistic
ego, for sure. He wanted to be part of the Florentine
avant -garde. And while he was gone, Lina, feeling
abandoned herself, and remember, abandonment
is the theme here, had an affair with a painter.
And when Saba finds out... The reaction is what
makes in Saba. A typical man of 1911 Italy might
have killed her, or at least cast her out and
shamed her forever. Right, social exile was the
norm. But Saba doesn't do that. He is devastated,
yes. The family unit is shattered. But after
a period of separation, he takes her back. They
reconcile in 1912. And more importantly, he writes
about it. He writes these incredible poems where
he processes the jealousy, the pain, but also
his own culpability. He compares Lena to a heifer,
to a bitch. The female dog to a hen. Which sounds
incredibly insulting to a modern ear. Yeah, calling
your wife a cow and a chicken. It sounds terrible
today, but in the context of the poem Amiya Mowgli
to my wife, it's actually an act of worship.
He's comparing her to the animals of creation
creatures that are close to God and nature. Unlike
him, the neurotic intellectual. So he's elevating
her. He's elevating her to an earth mother figure.
He forgives her because he sees her as a force
of nature that cannot be judged by petty human
morals. They stay together, but the road gets
rocky. They move to Bologna. They have no money.
He's reading poems to empty rooms. They end up
in Milan in 1914, managing a nightclub. It shows
his desperation. He was working as a secretary
and then, yes, managing a nightclub. Imagine
this shy. depressive poet dealing with the nightlife
of Milan on the eve of war. It's surreal. But
it shows his resilience. He would do anything
to keep the family afloat. And then the world
breaks. 1915, Italy enters World War I. Saba
is drafted. Now, when I think of WWI poets, I
think of Wilford Owen describing gas attacks
or Ungaretti writing fragmented lines in a trench
on the Carso. Was Saba in the trenches? No. And
this distinguishes him from the war poet canon.
He was drafted, but he never saw combat. Not
at all. No, he was hospitalized almost immediately
for his psychological condition. He spent the
war in the rear, in administrative roles, or
in hospitals. So while D 'Annunzio is flying
planes over Vienna and Ungaretti is staring death
in the face, Saba is fighting his own mind. And
he creates a sort of civilian war poetry. He
writes about the soldiers he sees, the camp life,
but he's an observer, not a warrior. He de -heroicizes
the war. Right. He isn't interested in the glory
or the carnage. He's interested in the humanity
of the boys in uniform. It's consistent with
his everyday focus. The war ends. Tristi becomes
Italian, finally, and Saba returns home in 1919.
And this is where he builds his fortress. His
sanctuary. He buys the Maylender bookshop and
rechristens it. La Libreria Antica e Moderna.
The ancient and modern bookstore. This isn't
just a job. This is him building a sanctuary.
The dark cave, as he sometimes called it. I love
the image of Saba in the bookstore, and it validates
his Commerce Academy education. He was a good
businessman. He knew how to haggle for rare and
cannabula. He knew how to spot a first edition.
It gave him financial independence, so he didn't
have to prostitute his art. Exactly. He didn't
have to write propaganda or popular novels to
eat. The bookstore paid for the poetry. And it
also became a cultural hub. Writers like Svavo
and Joyce passed through Trieste's literary orbit.
And it's here, surrounded by these ancient and
modern books, that he solidifies his own masterpiece,
the Canzoniere. Let's open the Canziniere, because
this isn't just a book he wrote in 1921 and moved
on from. It's a living organism. It's unique
in Italian literature. It's a songbook in the
Petrarchan tradition, but he treated it like
a novel. He published the first edition in 1921,
but he kept adding to it, rearranging it, and
editing it for the next 35 years. Wow. By the
end, it had over 400 poems. It's the diary of
a life. And the content. We touched on it to
my wife, but I want to talk about The Goat. It's
one of his most famous. He sees a goat tied up
in a field, bleeding in the rain. And he answers
the goat. He says, That's powerful. That is Saba's
genius. He finds the infinite in the mundane.
Right. And he's doing this with a level of psychological
insight that was way ahead of its time. We have
to talk about 1929. Right. The year of the crash
for the world, but the year of the breakthrough
for Saba. He starts psychoanalysis. With Dr.
Adordo Weiss. This is a massive deal. Weiss was
a direct student of Sigmund Freud. He brought
Freud's papers to Italy. And you have to remember
at this time in fascist Italy, psychoanalysis
was viewed with extreme suspicion. It was seen
as Jewish science. It was seen as undermining
the heroic, masculine ideal of the regime. So
Saba going to therapy wasn't just a medical decision.
It was almost a political act. It was brave.
And he didn't keep it a secret. He integrated
it into the work. He used the therapy to unlock
his childhood trauma. The wet nurse, the assassin
father. He realized that his poetry was a way
to heal the split in his personality. There's
a poem, Amai, I loved, where he lays out his
manifesto. He says, I love the trite words that
no one dared. I love the rime flower love, the
oldest, most difficult in the world. He's saying,
I'm not afraid to be simple. While other poets
were using hermetic, difficult, obscure language
to hide from the regime or to sound smart, Saba
said, no, I will rhyme fiore, flower, with amor,
love, I will be honest. And psychoanalysis gave
him the confidence to be nakedly honest. It did,
but honesty comes with a price. He wasn't an
easy friend. The sources mention his relationship
with Virgilio Giotti, the poet who helped him
in the bookstore. They were inseparable, and
then silence. It's tragic. Giotti lost his sister
in 1929, and Saba, who was so consumed by his
own neuroses, perhaps couldn't provide the support
Giotti needed. Or perhaps the intensity of their
friendship just burned out. So they just stopped
talking. By the 1930s, they were crossing the
street to avoid each other in Trieste. Saba was
demanding. He needed constant reassurance. He
was, you know, a narcissist in pain. And the
pain was about to get externalized on a national
scale. The late 30s, the walls are closing in.
Mussolini aligns with Hitler. And in 1938, Italy
passes the racial laws. This is the nightmare
scenario. Saba is Catholic by baptism. He was
baptized as an adult. Under the racial laws,
he is defined by his mother's blood. He is considered
Jewish. Which means he is stripped of his civil
rights. He can't publish. He can't be in the
phone book. And crucially, he can't own a business.
The Libreria Antica e Moderna, his fortress,
is illegal for him to own. So he has to sell
it. He has to sell it. In 1940, he creates a
fake sale, or a forced sale, to his trusted assistant,
Carlos Cern. Cern becomes the legal owner to
save the shop from confiscation. Can you imagine
the humiliation? Walking into your own store,
the place you built, and legally being a stranger
there. It's devastating. And it gets worse. 1943.
1943. The armistice. Italy surrenders to the
Allies, but the Germans invade the north to prop
up Mussolini. Trieste becomes part of the Adriatic
Littoral Zone, directly administered by the Nazis.
And the death camps are running. The Risiello
di San Saba in Trieste is the only extermination
camp with a crematorium on Italian soil. Saba
is in mortal danger. He has to run. He leaves
Trieste with Lina and Lanuccia. They flee to
Florence. And we need to pause on this year,
1943 to 1944. This isn't just hiding. This is
a game of cat and mouse. The sources say they
moved to 11 different hiding places in one year.
Eleven. Eleven. Think about the logistics of
that. He's 60 years old. He's depressive. He
needs medication. And every few weeks, they have
to pack up their suitcases and move because a
neighbor is asking questions or a patrol is getting
too close. They were helped by friends. Montal
helped. Other writers helped. but the terror
must have been constant. There were close calls.
At one point, he was hiding in a house just yards
away from a German command post. He could hear
their boots. He wrote later that he felt like
a hunted animal. And yet, even in hiding, he
was writing. Always writing. Yeah. Processing
the trauma in real time. The war finally ends.
Florence is liberated, then the North. Saba survives.
He comes back to the surface. And you'd think,
okay, the man has suffered enough. Give him a
medal and let him retire. He got the medal, the
Viareggio Prize, in 1946. He was suddenly celebrated
as a moral authority, a survivor. But Saba couldn't
just sit still. No, he had to throw a grenade
into the piece. He did. The article. If I were
named governor of Trieste. Of this article. 1947.
Trieste is a mess. Yugoslav partisans want it.
Italy wants it. The Americans are occupying it.
It's a powder keg. And Saba publishes this piece
where he basically says, Italy is a land of parasites.
We are all guilty. He critiques the nationalism.
both sides. He calls Italians fratricides and
parasites, referencing his psychoanalytic theories,
killing the father, killing the brother. He suggests
that Trieste shouldn't just blindly be Italian,
but should perhaps acknowledge its complexity.
And he was savage for it. The nationalists called
him a traitor. The communists didn't like him
because he was too bourgeois. He managed to alienate
everyone by telling the uncomfortable truth.
The merchant of truth, again, refusing to sell
a comfortable lie. Exactly. But while he's fighting
these public battles, he's losing the private
one. The depression is back, worse than ever.
And the doctors. Well, the medicine was worse
than the disease. Injectable opium. It was a
common treatment for melancholia at the time,
but for a man with an addictive personality,
it was a death sentence. So from 1950 on, we
have this tragic image. The great poet, living
in a clinic in Rome, addicted to opium, drifting
in and out of lucid states. He became a sort
of oracle in the clinic. Young poets would come
to visit him like pilgrims visiting a shrine.
He would hold court in his pajamas, half high,
dispensing wisdom. It's pathetic, but also deeply
moving. He was trapped in his own body. Completely
trapped. And then the final anchor snaps. 1956,
Lena dies. The queen of the hive is gone. The
woman who stayed when he went to Florence, who
forgave him, who hid with him in 11 different
houses. When she died, Saba essentially turned
off the lights. He died nine months later in
August 1957. It's a heart attack, technically,
but we know what it really was. It was the end
of the song. But not quite the end of the work.
Because after he died, we found things in the
drawer. Hmm. Specifically, Ernesto. Tell us about
Ernesto. Ernesto is a revelation. It was written
in 1953, near the end, but he never published
it. It's an unfinished novel, and it explores
a homosexual relationship he had as a teenager
at the commercial academy with a man. This is
explosive stuff for the 1950s. It is. But what's
amazing about Ernesto is the tone. It's not shameful.
It's not sinful. It's tender, direct, and explicit.
It completely recontextualizes his early life.
It adds another layer to his outsider status.
He wasn't just Jewish in a Catholic world. He
was queer in a straight world, exploring desire
before he suppressed it into the heteronormative
marriage with Lina. It makes you wonder how much
energy he spent suppressing that part of himself
or sublimating it into his poetry. It confirms
that his entire life's work was an act of integration.
Trying to take all these fragments, the boy Ernesto,
the husband Umberto, the merchant Poli, the poet
Saba, and glue them together into one person.
So as we wrap this up, why does Umberto Saba
matter today? Why should a listener in 2026 care
about a bookseller from Trieste? I think he matters
because we are living in a time of fragmented
identities. We all feel like we are playing roles.
The online self, the work self, the private self.
Saba was the first modern writer to say, I am
broken and that is okay. I will make art out
of the glue. He didn't try to be a marble statue.
He was happy to be a clay pot that had been smashed
and put back together. Kintsugi. The Japanese
art of repairing pottery with gold. His poetry
is the gold that fills the cracks. That is a
beautiful image. And I want to leave the listener
with one final provocation. We talked about his
name. Saba. The grandfather. The wet nurse. The
bread. The ultimate riddle. Think about the power
of that choice. He was born into a history he
didn't choose, with a father he didn't know,
and a religion that put a target on his back.
But when he picked up the pen, He didn't write
as the victim. He wrote as Saba. He essentially
said, I reject the name you gave me. I will be
the father of myself. And in doing so, he fathered
a whole new way of being honest in literature.
Exactly. We were all, in a way, writing our own
names over the ones we were given. Saba just
did it in bold ink. Thank you for listening to
this deep dive. Go read the Canzonier. It might
just read you back.