History and Chronicle of the Songbook - Tapa blanda

The moral physiognomy of Saba is very powerfully alive in his work, and makes him, now and forever, a great author. To this vast, complex, long-suffering personality, his poems bear witness, and from it draw their light...I have the impression that Saba, in our day, has been just discovered, and that the task of evaluating the full scope of his greatness will have to fall to others, when distance will have further clarified the perspectives. Saba will have to wait. Yet how many in Europe, can be as certain in their wait as he?' - Quarantotti Gambini (1946) 'Saba's poetry seems like the pure sound of a voice, a voice nearly freed from the bonds of words. The monody is pure feeling, in a musical state. The Language of Italian poetry which has almost always sought transfiguration in plasticity and relief, has rarely known an exception so singular. Saba attains the lied as if without realising it.' - Eugenio Montale.

History and Chronicle of the Songbook by Umberto Saba (1883-1957), the great, is a unique book of self-criticism, memoir and criticism. Here we have Saba writing about the art of poetry, the birth and meaning of his own poems.