Umberto Saba (1883–1957) is one of the great Italian poets of the twentieth century, as closely associated with his native city Trieste as Joyce is with Dublin. He received a sparse education but was writing distinctive poetry before he was twenty, ignoring the modernist groups which dominated the day. He came at personal themes in unexpected ways, using an unapologetically contemporary idiom. He acquired an antiquarian bookshop which prospered for a time, but his Jewish background placed ...

The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2018 Recommended Translation.Asked to name the great Latin love poets, today's reader is likely to offer Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace. Propertius, a successor of the first and influential peer to the others, has not been blessed by posterity. Yet at their best his poems match any of the period. They are poems of love, of desire, of insecurity and obsession: of struggle, too, as they resist the Augustan Empire's attempts to turn its ...