My translation of Umberto Saba’s early sonnet “Così passo i miei giorni” went up today over at The Sonneteer. The poem was first published in the journal La Brigata in 1917, and according to Saba it was originally written between 1900 and 1902, when he would have been in his late teens. This version of the poem is from the “Poesie dell’adolescenza” (poems of adolescence) section of the 1921 edition of his magnum opus, Il Canzoniere.

Saba said he wrote many sonnets in those early years; “Così passo i miei giorni” is one of a half-dozen he chose to preserve. While he didn’t comment on this one by name in his pseudonymous, auto-critical volume “Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere,” it’s one of a handful — of “minor importance” as far as his “future development” was concerned — that “portray, to a greater or lesser extent, that state of diffuse melancholy (partly blissful, partly anguished) characteristic of the age in which they were written.”