Five Poems
Translated by Amy Newman
So Be It
Since I too have fallen
Lord
at a threshold —
like the pilgrim
who has run out of bread and water,
has worn out
his sandals
and his eyes darken
and his ragged breathing
the essential life
and the path wills it
stretched out there
dead there
before he has touched
the stone of the Sepulchre —
as I too have fallen
Lord
and I stand here stuck
on my path
as on the cross
oh, grant me
this evening
from the depth of Your
nocturnal vastness —
as to the corpse of the pilgrim —
the mercy
of the stars.
9 April 1933
Curse
Not by clear rivers
but on the sad riverbanks
we stopped
where to dip your hands
was to lose them
under the silt
swarming from the bottom —
And the green of the elms
was shining in the heat —
the flowers of the meadow were fresh —
and of other flowers,
the dogged heart was fooled.
But that muddy water ran through
the path —
that corrupt odor cut through
the breath
of our our painful affection —
We couldn’t undo
that earth’s curse —
nor could we smother
the obscure voice
crying
you are lost
12 May 1933
Flowers
Is there no one,
is there no one who sells
flowers
on this damn street?
And this black sea
and this livid sky
and these adverse winds —
oh, yesterday’s camellias
the white red camellias laughing
in the golden cloister —
oh, the spring illusion!
Who will sell me a flower today?
I have so many of them in my heart:
but clasped
in painful bunches —
they’re trampled —
killed.
I have so many that the soul
suffocates and almost dies
under the enormous, unoffered heap.
But at the bottom of the black sea
is the key to the heart —
at the bottom of the black heart
will weigh
until evening
my useless captive
harvest —
O who sells me
a flower — another flower
born outside of me
in a real garden
that I may give it to him who waits for me?
Is there no one,
is there no one selling flowers
on this sad path?
14 February 1933
New Years
If the words tasted like snow tonight,
what songs —
and the stars
that I can never tell...
Motionless faces intertwine among the branches
in my own blue-blackness:
dead to the lights of distant houses,
still they defy
the indestructible smile of my years.
Madonna di Campiglio, 31 December 1937–1 January 1938
Periphery
I feel that old pang
— it’s the earth
that under blankets of frost
lifts its black arms —
and I’m afraid
of your muddy steps, dear life,
you walk beside me, you lead me
near old men in long cloaks,
to fast boys
riding dull bicycles,
to women
who wrap themselves in shawls —
And already we sense
at the edge of the bewildered birches
the smoke from the chimney stacks
dying rosy on the marshes.
At sunset burning factories howl
for the dark start of the trains...
But I, mute piece of flesh, I follow you
and I’m afraid —
bit of flesh that the spring
runs through with laughing pains.
21 January 1938
Translator’s Note
Because I wanted to increase the breadth of my Italian language study beyond the lessons, I thought I’d try to translate a poem or two in Italian, to see if translation would be a good activity for me. But what poet? I came across a review of The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems, in which the reviewer mentioned the absence of poet Antonia Pozzi. This caught my eye, so I chose a little book of selected poems (Guardami: sono nuda). In the title poem she imagines (one presumes) an onlooker observing her nude body. She describes herself sensually, and then laces the work at the end with a darkness and a toughness. She had an individuality in her voice, charged with something that seemed to call to me. With every poem I translated, I felt I was learning about her, as though I had spent the night in her room while she was away. She should be better known, I thought.
At first I didn’t really know much about her biography, so I dove in. Finding out about her life and the circumstances of the publication of her work — that none was published during her lifetime, that her father had revised her work to cleanse it of various aspects that were concerning to him, and published these after her death, that she had taken her own life at the age of 26, that she had been a photographer, a prolific writer with a thesis on Flaubert, a young woman who wrote in her letters of the weight of being female — I more and more understood her to be (though my American lens) a combination of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, a young woman devoted to writing and intensely aware of her position in the universe. There in the work is so much of her longing, and so much of a voice that is surprisingly modern.
In my experience of translating her, I want to keep what I am sure is her voice, and restore her authentic work for an English language audience. Important to me is undoing in the work what her father did, even if he meant his edits lovingly. He was either ashamed or worried about her desires, her sensuality, her issues with her faith.
For example, in “Odore di Fieno,” he removed the word ‘impura” from her phrase “anima impura” (impure soul) so that she would, in her poem and perhaps in her life and reputation, be understood to have had a pure soul. He was most devoted to cutting out aspects of her romantic life, in particular her relationship with Antonio Maria Cervi, her Latin and Greek tutor, begun when she was a student. Though the two had hoped to marry, Antonia’s father eventually forbid them to see each other. In her poem “L’allodola,” he removes the opening phrase “Dopo il bacio,” to delete the kiss and, in addition to removing the second stanza entirely, Roberto Pozzi changed the first line of her poem “Saresti Stato” (“You’d Have Been”) from “Annunzio” (the given name) to “Annuncio” (“Announcement,” or “Herald”). Why did Roberto Pozzi make such an alteration? The letters Antonia Pozzi wrote to Cervi refer to a child they hoped to have; they were planning to name him “Annunzio,” after Cervi’s brother Annunzio who had died in the war. This alteration on his part was no mistake; he scrubbed any evidence of his daughter’s dedication to Cervi, both figuratively and literally: Antonia Pozzi dedicated several poems to Cervi; her father removed every dedication.
When translating, you are at times a construction worker, at times an archaeologist, at times a language learner, at times a scholar, at times a poet, and at times, really, almost someone else other than yourself, trying to dwell as best one can another person’s mind, life, and outlook. I want to almost disappear, although that’s not possible. It’s delightful to try.
The copyright for the poems of Antonia Pozzi belongs to the Carlo Cattaneo and Giulio Preti International Insubric Center for Philosophy, Epistemology, Cognitive Sciences and the History of Science and Technology of the University of Insubria, depositary and owner of the whole Archive and Library of Antonia Pozzi.
ANTONIA POZZI (1912–1938) is an Italian poet. All her poems were published posthumously.