The motifs of friendship and brotherhood in »canzoniere« by Umberto Saba

Abstract

After asserting that in the complex nature of Umberto Saba, the poet born in Trieste in 1883, a desire had germinated from earliest age to transcend as artist the environment where he lived, to flee the stifling atmosphere of his home, to overcome the class bounds hindering his flights, to rise above race and religion from whose dominion as a son of a Jewess he could not liberate himself during his period of growing up, the author of the paper examines those poetic motifs insufficiently emphasized and evaluated by criticism; it is discovered that the poet through his friends sought a pathway to discover himself and that he devoted numerous verses to- friendship. Truths comprehended through experience and other life factors served Saba as impulses to posit friendship at the top of his ideals while brotherhood became his hidden aspiration. The analysis of the »Canzoniere« poems point to the role friends played in the poets’s troubled everyday life: friends soothe the blows life brings, encourage him to persevere in his »desperate love« of thisworldliness, sustain the balance between him and the objects that surround him. Displaced from the personal, emotive plan to the social, ie interpersonal or international level, these ideals contain the thought of the peaceful living together of people and nations, which is openly stated in the poem Quasi una mortalita where a boy is addressed with a call to learn: »from one who has much suffered, sinned, that Mercy still exists and that the world — THE WHOLE WORLD — needs friendship«. The love of life which renews itself with the hope of friendship gains special significance when the poet touches upon the broader ethical spheres. Then a vision of brotherhood is shadowed forth in the poet, embodied in the nurse Peppa, a Slovenian woman from Kras, who with a heart full of love builds an unobstrusive bridge between two peoples to whom history has dictated to live together. At the end it is asserted that Saba’s word is of native color and that the things which are expressed possess a human and ethical dimension especially when the motifs of love, pain and fear intertwine with motifs of friendship and brotherhood or when the latter appear independently and have an emblematic meaning.