The Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba

With Stories and Recollection, the short prose works of the great Italian poet Umberto Saba, 1883-1957, make their first appearance in English. Here are the stories, memoirs and reflections of a poet who spent much of his life in his small antiquarian bookshop. This work largely overlooked but for friends such as Svevo, Montale, Pavese, Ungaretti and Carlo Levi, who found Saba’s ‘rich and complex prose of such scrupulous realism that it recalls Goethe or Thomas Mann, but is so much more brilliant, modern, and nervous.’ The Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba is a revelation: In its apparent simplicity, moral sense, its understanding, and, most of all, its quiet beauty, it is a true companion piece to the work of his fellow Triestan Italo Svevo, who one would have thought sui generis. Estelle Gilson’s distinguished translation of the Italian prose stylist won the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award for 1992 and the Italo Calvino Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University in 1991.