Lo sparo e l’orologio. "Appunti" nel sistema del "Piccolo Berto" (e oltre)

Abstract

The essay analyzes Umberto Saba's poem Appunti in the belief that this text presents new themes and new formal strategies that are used in Il piccolo Berto and are destined to persist beyond that. In its broken and discontinuous brevity, Appunti says without explaining, it expresses a trauma that Saba does not verbalize. Saba burns the causal passages and requires the cooperation of the reader, forcing him to contribute to the construction of meaning and to fill the gaps in a text, in which silences and typographical leaps are worth as much as words. The analysis focuses on the modernity of a formal choice in which syntactic divisions and white spaces dramatize the inner restlessness. At the same time the essay aims to understand the enigmatic and disturbing meaning of this apparently accessible text, searching for the reasons in the macro-text, following the traces of the presence of a key object (the clock) and of some recurring reasons (the childish «hate», the perception of loneliness, the emblems of military life).