Umberto Saba

When my writing buddy, Nick Dowson, drove me down to Trieste, in the cataclysmic year of 2016 our mission was to seek out the statue of author James Joyce. It was a literary pilgrimage that had been a decade and more in the not-quite-planning, and an excuse for crossing the home continent twice, taking in Heidelberg, Venice, Grenoble and Amiens on our way out and back.

            I’ve written about our encounter with JJ earlier in the blog, and also, I think, I mentioned another encounter, not at all planned, with a writer I’d not even heard of.

            The statute of Joyce shows a dreamy character, becalmed rather than paused on a bridge over the city’s Grand Canal. He looks to me, to borrow a phrase from Ulysses, ‘a balmy bollocks’ (or should that be ‘barmy’?).

            Either way, the surprise for us was to find another ,life sized, statue round the corner and one, that to my mind, seemed to show a much more switched on, ‘together’ character, striding rather forcefully, despite his walking stick, and with the collar of his long coat turned up against a wind that whips its hem. That wind, I like to think, is the one that blew off the long, old stone pier of the Mole Audace while we were there.

            I’d never heard of Umberto Saba, and had to look him up on our return. A poet, and antiquarian bookseller, he was born in Trieste in 1883 and died not far away in 1957.

            This morning (as I write), some 140 years after his birth (and on my 73^rd birthday), the Carcanet edition of editor and translator Patrick Worsnip’s 100 Poems Umberto Saba turned up among my presents! With a useful Preface by Angela Leighton, and Worsnip’s own Afterword and Notes, this is a great collection…. And has whetted my appetite for an attempt on Canzoniere, the collected poems in the original Italian!   

            My Italian is perfunctory and patchy – I wanted to read the short stories of Giovanni Verga, and Cesare Zavattini’s Toto il Buono (not yet translated into English as far as I know) – but it’s the music that’s always missing in translation it seems to me, and we can sometimes get an echo of that even when our grasp of the language is poor where meaning is concerned. A winter season of Italian lessons, just before Covid gave me a head start in how to pronounce – and there’s plenty online to listen to that helps with those rhythms. Worth a go, anyway, I’d say!

            I didn’t get a photo of Saba, so here’s one of Mr Joyce.!

Drawing a Line…

London’s Mayor appeared on Radio 4 recently, talking about immigration and the projected quotas. Quoting government figures, he suggested that London, on a pro-rata basis, might be ‘allowed’ just under forty thousand immigrants…less than needed to supply the building trade alone (where over 10% of workers will retire over the next five years, apparently). He suggested a special measure for the city that would allow it to have more immigrants, while the rest of England (and of the UK) could continue with its exclusions.

The interesting element in this, which wasn’t picked up by the interviewer, was how, and by whom, this arrangement would be ‘policed’. Presumably some sort of line would have to be drawn around London, and ‘surplus’ immigrants prevented from crossing it , at least so far as moving to other jobs, and to living elsewhere would be concerned. Days out, holidays, and visits, presumably would be OK? Who would draw this line? Who would control its crossing points? London? Or we Provincials? Would we need internal passports to get into, or out of whichever side of the line we inhabited? Would Londoners, wishing to move in to the rest of the UK, or Provincials wishing to move out to London, count as immigrants, and who would be counting?

Either way, it would be the first step in a discernible road. I seem to recall that both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, during their time as Mayors of London, remarked in public, that they thought it entirely feasible the city could maintain itself as a City State, without the aid of the rump of the UK.

In Trieste last year I encountered some campaigners for a sort of ‘free Trieste’. They were convinced that the city – much smaller than London – could successfully go it alone.

When things start to break up it’s not entirely predictable where the fragmentation will stop. We have a surplus of water in this part of the UK, which, global warming continuing, might support the local population if sold at a high enough price to those living in the soon-to-be-drier parts of the present country… Of course, we’d have to seize the reservoirs etc(Just a thought!).