Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These items are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them is a book useful for TU students interested in literature, European history, translation studies and related fields. It is shelved in the Fiction section of the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room in the Pridi Banomyong Library.

Ernesto is a novel by the Italian poet Umberto Saba (1883–1957).

The edition in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room was translated from the Italian by Mark Thompson.

The TU Library also owns a different English language edition of Ernesto translated from the Italian by Estelle Gilson.

TU students who enjoy Western European literature may also wish to look up Saba’s poems in the The FSG book of twentieth-century Italian poetry: an anthology edited by Geoffrey Brock, which is available for loan at the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

In addition to writing poems, Saba maintained a day job as a seller of old books. He lived and worked in the Mediterranean port of Trieste, Italy, at a time when it was the fourth largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Although Ernesto is fiction, it describes some real-life episodes in Saba’s life.

It includes details about the title character’s friendship for a violinist and his attachment to his native Trieste.

The novel is set in 1898 in Trieste, where Ernesto, a sixteen-year-old apprentice clerk to a flour merchant, lives with his mother and aunt. Ernesto adopts leftist political views, partly to annoy his employer.

Trieste, where Central Europe meets the Mediterranean Sea, is almost a character in the story. It is considered one of the world’s literary capitals and melting pots, because of its diverse ethnic groups and religious communities. Trieste is also known as City of Science, City of the Three Winds, Vienna by the Sea, and City of Coffee.

One of Saba’s most celebrated essays was written to inform his daughter about the books from the local public library which he had enjoyed reading as a boy, most of which are available on the shelves of the TU Library.

As Assistant Professor Mattia Acetoso, who teaches Italian at Boston College, USA, wrote:

In a short essay entitled “On the Public Library, or On Glory” (1957), the Italian poet Umberto Saba tells his daughter about the poets that he loved in his youth. Saba describes the dusty rooms of the public library where he first read the works that most directly contributed to his literary formation. He mentions Leopardi’s songs, the lyrical poems of Parini, Foscolo, Petrarca, and Manzoni. Saba also briefly names the Italian translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, as well as D’Annunzio’s Poema paradisiaco and, lastly, Giosuè Carducci. These names represent for Saba the “filo d’oro della tradizione italiana,” the golden thread of the Italian literary tradition, at the end of which he wished to place his own work. Throughout his career, Saba was preoccupied with the ambitious goal of belonging to this pantheon of authors, a concern that stems from his biographical circumstances; he was born in Trieste at the end of the nineteenth century, when the city was still a peripheral territory of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like other triestini writers, such as Italo Svevo (1861-1928) and Scipio Slataper (1888-1915), Saba wrote in Italian with the ultimate ambition of participating in the Italian literary tradition. To some extent, making poetry for Saba became a way to lay claim to a cultural background that he wanted to make his own. However, Saba omits a key figure in this essay, an individual who profoundly shaped his literary ambition and whose presence lurks throughout most of his finest writings. This figure is the Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), an artist who embodied for Saba a symbol of Italy itself. Because of his ambition, Saba’s relationship with Italian culture was fraught with conflict. His poetry did not find an easy position in any of the intellectual trends of his time; unrecognized by contemporary scholarship, he felt compelled to become his own critic. Saba went so far as to publish a book entitled Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere (1946), writing under the pseudonym of Giuseppe Carimandrei, in which he analyzed his own work in insightful detail. Throughout his œuvre, Saba’s poetic production is defined by a negotiation between a dire feeling of exclusion and a desperate need to belong, which translated into an enduring existential crisis. As a Triestine of Jewish descent, Saba’s relationship with such concepts as national and cultural identity was equally problematic. His place of birth exposed him to different, often colliding intellectual trends that amplified his sense of isolation, both intellectual and existential.

Here are some examples of Saba’s poetry as translated by Geoffrey Brock:

The broken pane

 

It all conspires against you. Nasty weather,

lights that keep going out, and the old house

jolted by every gust. It’s dear to you

for what you suffered in it, for the hopes

dashed there, and for a few good times as well.

Survival seems to you a refusal to obey

the way of things.

And in the shattering

of a window pane, you hear a judgment passed.

 

The sapling

 

Today is made of rain.

Morning looks like evening,

spring like autumn,

and a great wind is blasting

a sapling that holds—surprisingly—steady;

it stands above the plants like a boy

grown too tall for his green age.

You watch, filled with pity,

perhaps, for all those pale flowers

stripped by the gales; they are fruit,

they are winter’s sweet

preserves, those flowers that fall now

to the grass. And you grieve in your vast

maternity.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)