Songbook: The Selected Poems

Two hundred poems selected from Saba’s lifelong project, “Il Canzoniere,” presented in a bilingual Italian-English edition translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan. This Yale University Press volume is the best way to meet a poet who wrote about the ordinary world with extraordinary tenderness.

Why Start Here

Saba spent his entire career building one book. He began “Il Canzoniere” in his twenties and kept adding to it until his death in 1957, eventually filling it with over four hundred poems organized by period: youth, maturity, and old age. This selection distils that life’s work to its two hundred strongest pieces, giving you the full arc without the passages that Saba himself might have trimmed.

What makes the selection especially valuable is the bilingual format. Saba’s Italian is musical and deceptively simple, closer to spoken language than to the coded hermeticism of his contemporaries. Having the originals alongside faithful English translations lets you hear the rhythm even if your Italian is limited.

What to Expect

Poems about recognizable things: a goat tethered in the rain, a girl named Lina, the streets of Trieste, a football match. Saba finds in each of these the full weight of human feeling. The tone is warm, direct, and sometimes painfully honest. He writes about his troubled childhood, his difficult marriage, and his Jewish identity with no filter and no literary posturing. If you come from Montale or Ungaretti, the openness may feel startling. That is the point.