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 READ MORE…