« Avrei voluto essere un dicitore di versi : aedo se volete ». La voce di Umberto Saba e le poesie degli altri

Abstract

The paper deals with an analysis of Umberto Saba’s poetry, focusing the phatic and performative aspects of the lyrical subject’s voice and the pivotal role attributed to the dual practice of listening : an attunement to both the interior life and the ambient murmurs of the external world. The emphasis on a convergence between the poetic voice and the ‘corporeal’ or ‘physical’ voice emerges as a recurring motif, a connective thread in the critical portraits of the Triestine poet articulated by Marino Moretti, Giovanni Giudici, Andrea Zanzotto, and Vittorio Sereni, whose verses incorporate Saba’s speech acts and spoken words as admonitions and fragments of orality. In his letters Saba presents himself as a « reciter of verses » and an « aedo », committed to publicly performing both his own poetry and that of others ; he also establishes a visceral connection with the works of younger poets he esteems, such as Sandro Penna and Vittorio Sereni. His interventions in their poetry, textual variants and rewritings, underscore a continuity that fortifies the conception of poetry as a collective enterprise and a form of universal expression