This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Antonia Pozzi. Translator Amy Newman writes that “Pozzi’s poetry was posthumously altered by her father Roberto Pozzi to reshape her public image; he scrubbed any evidence of his daughter’s passionate love affairs and her doubts about religion.” These translations represent the restoration of a singular vision, showing that the work of translation can polish away the muck of misrepresentation meant to stifle the subjectivity of women. In these poems the brightness of the mind is painted next to the depths of angst. Here, Pozzi explores the poetry of her own body and what it means to contemplate an individual death in a time of the hierarchy and patriarchy of war.
Thoughtlessness
I remember a September afternoon
in Montello. I still a young girl,
with slender braids and itching
to race wildly with my knees.
My father, crouched inside a passage
dug out in a rise of the ground
pointed out to me through a fissure
the Piave and the hills; he spoke to me
of the war, of himself, of his soldiers.
In the shadow, the grass, cold and sharp
grazed my calves: underground,
the roots were perhaps still sucking
some drops of blood. But I burned
with the desire to spring out,
in the encroaching sun, to gather
a handful of blackberries from a hedge.
Milan 22 May 1929
Song of My Nakedness
Look at me: I’m naked. From the restless
languor of my hair
to my slim, tense foot
I am all thin, almost ripe,
sheathed in ivory.
Look: my flesh is pale.
One would think the blood does not rush.
Red does not show through. Only a faint
blue pulse fades within the chest.
See how hollow the belly. Uncertain
is the curve of hips, but the knees
and the ankles and all the joints
are bony and resolute like a thoroughbred.
Today, I curve naked, in the clarity
of the white bath and I’ll curve tomorrow
above the bed, if someone
will take me. And one day, naked, alone,
spread out passive under too much earth,
I will be, when death calls me.
Palermo, 20 July 1929
Translated from the Italian by Amy Newman
Antonia Pozzi, born in Milan in 1912, lived a brief life, dying by suicide in 1938. She was a poet and photographer. None of her poetry was published during her lifetime. In 1989 editors Alessandra Cenni and Onorina Dino restored the poems to their original form in Parole. She was especially skilled in photography; in addition to her poetry collections, a collection of her photographs, Nelle immagini l’anima, was produced by Ancora Editrice in 2007. A film about her life, Antonia, written and directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, won best film at the 2016 Gallio Film Festival.
Dr. Amy Newman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently On This Day in Poetry History (Persea Books, 2016). Her translations of the poems of Antonia Pozzi have appeared in Poetry, The Bennington Review, The Laurel Review, Cagibi, Interim, Mantis, River Styx, and elsewhere; her translation of Pozzi’s letters to Antonio Maria Cervi was published in Delos. Newman teaches in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University.
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