Description

Roberto Balò

Translated by Robert Fitterman

Saga

ISBN: 9781956921564 (pbk.)

(Shipping March 10, 2026)

Roberto Balò’s Saga is a book-length serial poem that reimagines The Odyssey from the vantage point of outer space. Science-fiction, popular culture, space opera, and classical literature weave through the book, as its minimal form intensifies the introspection and longing of the hero’s space travel: a parallel with Odysseus’ journey by sea.

In Saga, Roberto Balò’s first collection to be translated into English, not even the universe escapes banality and Odysseus is a Luke Skywalker-type ruminating at interstellar dive bars that, like most watering holes, are not devoid of people behaving like jackasses. Moments of disarming lyric intensity are plentiful. Stars are placebos for Penny, and while there’s “nothing new on the stellar front,” everything about this saga is at once enchantingly familiar and refreshingly unexpected. Fitterman’s colloquial translations strike the perfect pitch, and all is hunky-dory.
—Mónica de la Torre

In this tongue-in-cheek yet poignant mashup of The Odyssey, Star Wars, Star Trek, 2001, and sundry sci-fi spinoffs, Roberto Balò deconstructs masculinist tropes and affects, delivering a blistering sendup of late-Capitalism’s sentimental desires and ultimately futile hopes for salvation in the stars. Balò’s wistfully parodic space odyssey comes to us in English through poet Robert Fitterman’s subtle ear in the times of SpaceX and the techno-futurist daydream-wager on the exploration–and exploitation–of the last frontier. Space travel, it turns out, is “still a prison,” while back on planet Earth, in Ithaca, Penelope is still waiting for her voyager to grow up.
—Matvei Yankelevich

Nobody (Nessuno) is travelling: he searches for a meaning in the curvature of time, he chases crumbs of myth every day in his spaceship, and asks himself questions about the nature of being. This local space hero is often hovering over a black hole, looking for holograms of a you who is never left but from which one continues to leave: “useless to leave, useless to stay”. Epos and pop merge when one enters the hyperspace of nostalgia for places never seen where time is reset and everything is possible in its impossibility.
—Elisa Biagini