In addition to writing poems, Saba maintained a day job as a seller of old books. 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. The TU Library also owns a different English language edition of Ernesto translated from the Italian by Estelle Gilson. The edition in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room was translated from the Italian by Mark Thompson. It is shelved in the Fiction section of the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room in the Pridi Banomyong Library.Įrnesto is a novel by the Italian poet Umberto Saba (1883–1957). These items are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.Īmong them is a book useful for TU students interested in literature, European history, translation studies 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. This raw, autobiographical novel provides an honest look at romantic struggles and first loves.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. Saba’s straightforward language, use of traditional forms and realism also have had an impact on the work of many of the leading Italian poets today.” -Susan Stewart, The Nation
“He saunters through every street of Trieste, catching glimpses of the city’s manifold forms of life his sky holds a little cloud that has haunted him from childhood…a certain crisp exactitude…. Saba inherited the mixture of Romantic plangency and Classical stoicism that gave his own work its peculiar timbre.” -Rosanna Warren, The New Republic “From this skeletal account, one may derive the main elements of the story, and the key images and preoccupations, from which Saba would build his poems: the errant father, the lost paradise of Peppa’s house, the city of Trieste, the innocent and then tormented love for his wife, melancholy, solitude, and sexual desire, including some lightly sketched yearning for boys…. “Spare, realistic prose that…manages to convey great emotion and deep thought simultaneously…should gain some of the recognition already won by his friends and fellow Italian writers Carlo Levi and Eugenio Montale.” - Publishers Weekly What sets Ernesto apart (and Saba’s prose) is the equanimity, the sparkling irony of the sensibility with which he greets this unexpected turn in his life…a lovely, bright, wise fragment that by comparison makes most other adolescent sex-memory fiction read like drying cement.” - Kirkus Reviews “One of the greatest modern Italian poets…. “Even in an incomplete state, Ernesto has the limpid style and emotional power of a major literary work.” -Benjamin Ivry, Forward Estelle Gilson’s translation catches the intimate rhythms of these discoveries.” -Rosanna Warren It’s a story so fresh, so alive to nuances of feeling and perception, it defies any formulaic understanding of love in Saba’s time or in our own. “Umberto Saba’s secret novel Ernesto re-creates a boy’s awakening to sexual love with both men and women. “A work of tenderness that doesn’t smudge its complex corners.” -Anakana Schofield For all its modesty and charm, the novel’s profound, unassuming beauty has a force and finally a grandeur that come from the source of all great art, what Saba calls ‘the red hot center of life.’” - Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You “This little miracle of a book tackles the weightiest themes-the unthinking cruelty of youth, the shock of adulthood, the humanizing force of love-with the humor and lightness of touch that are the surest sign of mastery.