Italian poets whose careers spanned a large swath of the 20th century are inevitably measured, especially in America, by a political yardstick and a poetic one. Were they Fascists in the 1930s, victims of Fascism, or somewhere in between? And how do they compare with Eugenio Montale, the great modernist poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1975? Even by Italian standards, few poets were as indelibly stamped by the threat of Fascism and by the presence of Montale as Umberto Saba and Alda Merini.

Born in Trieste in 1883, when it was under Austro-Hungarian rule, Saba was a near contemporary of Montale and has long been identified with him and Giuseppe Ungaretti as one of the three tenors of Italian modernism. Saba's father converted to Judaism to marry Saba's mother (lured to marriage and his bride's religion by the promise of 4,000 florins, according to some accounts). After fathering Umberto, he promptly disappeared for the next twenty years. (The speaker of a Saba poem says his father was "'the assassin' to me" but also "a child, / and the gift that I have I had from him.") With his mother mired in a long depression after his father's departure, Saba was raised until he was four by a Slovenian wet nurse, "Bertie," who would figure as an image of motherhood and longing in many of his poems. From the end of World War I to 1938, Saba operated an antiquarian bookstore in Trieste. The Fascist race laws cost him the bookstore and trapped him in Trieste for the next five years. When the Nazis arrived in September 1943, Saba escaped with his wife and adult daughter to Florence, where they were shuttled from house to house for the duration of the war. Montale, himself persona non grata for refusing to join the Fascist party, slipped out every day to visit Saba, cementing a lifelong friendship.

As exemplified by Montale, most Italian modernists resisted traditional poetic language and favored arresting but often undecipherable imagery. Saba, by contrast, stubbornly clung to the inherited images and forms. "I loved the worn words that no one else / dared use," as the speaker puts it in a late poem. "I was enchanted by the rhyme June/moon" (fiore/amore—"flower/love"—in Saba's original, with which the translators had to take liberties). Rather than invented imagery, Saba's poems rely on direct observation, often of the people, animals, and landscape of his native Trieste, and they aspire to clear expression—verse that Saba himself called "honest" and his critics sometimes dismissed as too "easy."

The simplicity is in some ways misleading. Saba's finest poems achieve depth and complexity through repetition, subtle shifts, and a tone that is both distant and deeply empathetic. In "To My Wife"—which Saba, with characteristic self appreciation, called his first truly great poem—the speaker compares his wife to a series of domestic animals, starting with a chicken:

You are like a young
white hen.
Her feather ruffled by
the wind, she bends her neck
to drink, and scratches the earth;
but when she walks, she has your slow
queenly gait;
and advances in the grass
breast thrust out and proud.

The speaker also sees his wife in a pregnant heifer (its "flesh tinged / with a soft pink," and whose lowing is "so plaintive … you will uproot grass to make her a gift of it"); a "slender bitch"; the "shy rabbit"; the swallow; and the "provident ant." The comparisons are outrageous and tender, linked by the sly assurance to his wife that "among them you have your equals / and in no other woman."

Many of Saba's poems explore the intersection of love and the limits of mutual understanding. In "Blackbird," one of a series of late poems about birds, the speaker recalls how he mistakenly thought a blackbird was singing just for him, while the blackbird thought that the hamburger the speaker's mother was grinding was only for the blackbird. "Between a cooped-up boy and an insect-eater / who snatched the worms from his hand / in that house, in that distant world" the poem concludes, "there was love. There was also a misunderstanding." The tone of the poems is darkened by a persistent strain of melancholy—Saba himself suffered a series of breakdowns and bouts of depression—and, it must be said, by a fascination with young boys and girls that occasionally borders on the prurient. (As with Robert Frost, his closest parallel among American poets, Saba's dark side has been the subject of much speculation since his death.)

Because the effects in Saba's poems are so subtle, this "easy" poet is notoriously difficult to translate. George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan's extensive new selection of Saba's Songbook is the third major effort to bring Saba into English. The translators have lovingly re-created Saba's elegant, distant, and loving tone. What they lose—for it is impossible to bring all of Saba into English—is a good deal of his distinctive music—especially his rhyme, which they only rarely hint at or replicate (one exception is the "June/moon" rhyme above). This omission obscures some of the elegance and charm of Saba's songs, as well as his movement in and out of rhyme, in the later poems especially. But the presence of the Italian on the facing pages of this beautiful book will give even readers who do not know Italian some sense of Saba's formal sophistication.

Alda Merini is a generation younger than Saba, and has Catholic rather than Jewish roots, but her family's life also was turned upside down by Fascism and the war. Merini's father never joined the Fascist party, and as the Allied forces bombed Milan in 1942, when Merini was 11, the family fled to a town a few miles away and lived as refuges until the end of the war. After the war, Merini came to the attention of Giacinto Spagnoletti, a prominent critic whose house in Milan was a meeting place for many of the leading poets and critics of the era. Still a teenager, Merini quickly became a fixture at the salon (their "mascot," as translator Susan Stewart tartly puts it), and had a lengthy affair with the married journalist and critic Giorgio Manganelli, followed by an affair with the poet Salvatore Quasimodo. Merini's key early breaks came in 1949 and 1950, when selections of her poems were included in two major anthologies, the second, Poetesse del Novocento, at the urging of none other than Eugenio Montale.

As fervently as Saba resisted, Alda Merini embraced the pyrotechnics of modernism. Hers is a poetry of arresting metaphors and startling contrasts. "Merini's syntax is something like a nervous system in itself," Stewart writes in her introduction to Love Lessons. "Whatever regularity stems from her reliance on a basic five-beat line is countered by her use of enjambment, seemingly arbitrary punctuation, and surprising, complex, phrase and sentence structures."

In a famous untitled poem, quoted here in full, Merini writes:

As for me, I used to be a bird
with a gentle white womb,
someone cut my throat
just for laughs,
I don't know.
As for me, I used to be a great albatross
and whirled over the seas.
Someone put an end to my journey,
without any charity in the tone of it.
But even stretched out on the ground
I sing for you now
my songs of love.

The matter-of-fact tone, the violated womb, the mixture of outrage and love—all are recurring features of Merini's verse. Rather than relying on direct observation, as Saba did, Merini patches together and imaginatively reconstructs myth, history, and the often sordid details of her own life, which has included troubled love affairs, periods of serious mental illness, and lengthy stays in mental institutions. Orpheus, the poet and singer who was destined to leave his wife in Hades, makes frequent appearances, and has often been linked by commentators to the older male poets who seem to have both nurtured Merini and cast her off. ("My nudity became my shame, / throughout my whole life," the speaker declares in a late poem called "The Slip," "and Orpheus vanished from me forever.") Several poems draw on figures associated, like Merini herself, with a tension between saintliness and sex, such as the Cumaean Sibyl, a priestess of Apollo who was denied her eternal youth because she refused his advances; and Mary of Egypt, a 4th-century courtesan who converted to Christianity and spent her final years living in isolation in the desert.

In Stewart, Merini is blessed with the perfect translator. A folklorist at Princeton and a fine poet herself, Stewart is at ease in the mythological byways and idiosyncratic diction of Merini's poems. In another untitled poem that centers on abuse of the speaker's womb, Stewart translates a phrase that means "smuggling of the mother" as "mother-theft," nicely capturing both the oddity and sense of violation of the original. Although Stewart hews closely to the Italian, she also takes occasional risks to convey the stark flamboyance of Merini's tone. In "The Raven," she translates a phrase that means "unhinged from life itself" as "crowbarred from life itself"—a clever pun on the raven of the title that also (coming after the c's and r of "crumbled in the cold of my hands") deftly mimics the alliteration of Merini's Italian.

One wouldn't wish the turmoil of either Umberto Saba or Alda Merini on anyone. But from the wreckage of their lives, each produced—and in Merini's case, is still producing—magnificent poems. In their different ways, these lovely translations will enable American readers, many of whom will be encountering these poets for the first time, to see what all the fuss is about.

David Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, blogs about Christianity, law, literature, and other topics at lessleast.com.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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