The Goat
You spoke with a goat.
It was alone in a field, it was tethered.
Stuffed with grass, soaked with rain,
it was bleating on.
That monotonous bleat –
it answered to your condition.
You responded at first
as a joke; then because sorrow’s eternal,
and speaks with one unchanging voice.
That’s the voice you heard,
crying in a solitary goat.
In a goat with a Semitic face
every other hurt complained,
that of all creaturely existence.
Umberto Saba (1883-1957) was born to a Jewish mother in Trieste, where he lived for much of his life working as an antiquarian bookseller. During the German occupation in the Second World War he was in hiding in Florence. His poetry is autobiographical and shows an early interest in psychoanalysis. His collected poems wre published in 1988 (Tutte le poesie, Meridiani).
Simon Carnell is a freelance writer and lecturer, and has published poems in many journals, including London Review of Books, London Magazine, Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review. He is currently compiling his first poetry collection. His interest in Saba began as an interest in Trieste, and he notes in Saba’s work a ‘quite subtle political resonance – combined with an engaging directness and deceptive simplicity’. An earlier version of ‘The Pig’ was first published in Thumbscrew.
Robert Chandler is a prolific translator of prose and poetry, especially from Russian. His co-translations with Elizabeth Chandler and Angela Livingstone of Andrei Platonov’s fiction have been published by Harvill Press.
Simon Carnell is a freelance writer and lecturer, and has published poems in many journals, including London Review of Books, London Magazine, Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review. He is currently compiling his first poetry collection. His interest in Saba began as an interest in Trieste, and he notes in Saba’s work a ‘quite subtle political resonance – combined with an engaging directness and deceptive simplicity’. An earlier version of ‘The Pig’ was first published in Thumbscrew.
Robert Chandler is a prolific translator of prose and poetry, especially from Russian. His co-translations with Elizabeth Chandler and Angela Livingstone of Andrei Platonov’s fiction have been published by Harvill Press.
Translated by Simon Carnell
Page(s) 154
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