The most influential Italian modernist poets—Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Umberto Saba—are starkly different, one from the other. The youngest of the three was Montale, whose dense, elliptical, formally intricate early work mellowed into the casual free verse of his later years. (He once quipped that his early poems “were written in a tailcoat” and his late poems “in pajamas.”) Ungaretti, born and raised in Egypt and schooled in French, followed an almost opposite trajectory: in his revolutionary, minimalist, pellucid free-verse poems of World War I, he ignores much of the Italian poetic tradition, only to later recuperate the traditional hendecasyllabic line in his later, more hermetic work.

And then there was Saba, the eldest of the three, who remains the least known outside of Italy. In some ways he seems the least “modernist” of these poets: throughout his career he retained, for example, an almost classical sense of form. His project, however, seems to me in many ways the most modern. Like Whitman, Saba is chiefly known for a single book of poems that he revised and expanded throughout his life, a book he called (à la Petrarch) the Canzoniere (Songbook), which can be read as a sort of autobiography-in-verse written over a fifty-year span, and which stands as a singular landmark of 20th-century Italian poetry. Late in his life, Saba published a companion volume—a pseudonymous book-length critical “study” of the Canzoniere, called Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere (History and Chronicle of the Songbook)—which provides an extraordinary window into both his poetics and his psychology.

A few years older than Ungaretti, he was (like Ungaretti) born outside of Italy: in Trieste, in 1883, when that city was still part of Austria-Hungary. It became part of Italy in 1920, the exact midpoint of Saba’s life, though Saba already had Italian citizenship through his Catholic father. (Saba famously didn’t meet his father, who had left his Jewish mother before Saba’s birth, until he was grown.) He was raised in an Italian-speaking Jewish community but with a Catholic Slovenian wet-nurse, who became a towering figure in his life. Unsurprisingly, then, Saba’s religious identity is vexed, and like Kafka (who was born in the same year) he had a fraught relationship to his Jewishness. Rather than identifying as Catholic or Jewish, Saba wrote that “I never felt myself anything but an Italian among Italians.”

Saba’s sexual identity is similarly complex. His American publisher rightly calls his autobiographical novel, Ernesto, not published till two decades after his death, “a classic of gay literature.” Yet until recently, Saba has rarely been spoken of, in Italy or elsewhere, as a “gay writer”—no doubt in part because he was married and wrote some famous love poems to his wife. Strikingly, however, those poems are not erotic, and indeed the erotic energy in his work is reserved almost exclusively for male objects of desire. On several fronts, then, he frustrates attempts to label him and eludes our contemporary taxonomies.

Saba wrote the first four poems presented here—“The Closed Chapel,” “Trieste,” “Three Streets,” “A Summer Night’s Insomnia”—when he was in his twenties, before the first world war. The fifth poem, “Opicina 1947,” was written after the second world war, in the final decade of his life. In all of them, we see him navigating, with his characteristic “sullen grace,” the various borderlands in which he made his home.