Two Poems by Antonia Pozzi, transl. Amy Newman

Two Poems by Antonia Pozzi

Translated from the Italian by Amy Newman

The Deaf Dog

Because of the great wind
that flies and howls in the castle,
the dog is heedless.

Over the terraces—
by the wide lake
—he runs,
without a care:
the moss on the high stones
doesn’t get in his way,
nor does the loosened roof tile.

His strength so utterly
enclosed within him
he belongs to no one
and runs his own secret route free.

25 September 1933

Abandonment

Cut birch tree trunk
you lie in a furrow:
In red waves, the sunset
descends through the skies.

And above you the clouds
put on sandals of gold
to catch up to the rivers.

You stay—waking child
in your cradle
of earth:
in the midst of the world’s fiery whirls
your pale gaze
enchanted in stillness.

16 February 1935

Il cane sordo

Sordo per il gran vento
che nel castello vola e grida
è divenuto il cane.

Sopra gli spalti – in lago
protesi – corre,
senza sussulti:
né il muschio sulle pietre
a grande altezza lo insidia,
né un tegolo rimosso.

Tanto chiusa e intera
è in lui la forza
da che non ha nome
più per nessuno
e va per una sua
segreta linea libero.

25 settembre 1933

Abbandono

Tronco reciso di betulla
giaci
in un solco:
a rosse onde declina
il tramonto pei cieli.

E sopra te le nubi
sandali d'oro calzano nel vento
per raggiungere
i fiumi.

Tu stai – bambino desto
nella tua culla
di terra:
mentre a un acceso volgere di mondi
con bianchi occhi s'incanta
la tua immobilità.

16 febbraio 1935

[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. Used by permission.]

Translator’s Note

Antonia Pozzi, born in Milan in 1912, lived a brief life, dying by suicide in 1938. She left behind letters, photographs, diaries, and over three hundred poems. None of her poetry was published during her lifetime. Her work is significantly underrepresented in translation, with her omission from the 2004 Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems being described in a review of the anthology by Oliver Burckhardt (published in Quadrant in May 2005) as “the most obvious lacuna.” Pozzi’s poetry was posthumously altered by her father Roberto Pozzi to reshape her public image. He scrubbed any evidence of his daughter’s passion, her sense of her flawed humanity, her love affairs, and her questions about God. Nora Wydenbruck’s translations of these posthumously revised poems published in 1955—translated with the help and under the close surveillance of Roberto Pozzi—reproduce a sanitized edition of the original work for English readers, perpetuating these incorrect versions of her poems. In 1989 the editors Alessandra Cenni and Onorina Dino restore the poems to their original form in Parole, the authoritative text from which I work.

As I continue to translate both Antonia Pozzi’s poetry and her biography, I marvel at her capacity, her strength, and her ability to maintain and explore her work in the face of what she encountered as a female writer and artist of her time. She was deprived of the love of her life by her father early on (and thus, as she would write in her diary, of her often-imagined future maternity), routinely underestimated, discouraged by her colleagues at the University of Milan from writing poetry and instead directed to write prose, and harangued to write with less emotion and less about herself. In the face of all this, Pozzi may have outwardly appeared to go along, but privately, in her work, she asserted her individualism, continuing to write poetry, producing over three hundred poems that reflected her true sense of the world in her brief life.

Her poetry encompasses emotional complexities but with Dickinson’s “slant”—that is, disciplined by artistic mastery. One such example was her ability to find in the natural world objects and beings emblematic of her existence (for example, the birch tree in “Abbandono” and the dog in “Il cane sordo”). Although Pozzi would not necessarily know T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative”—the technique of representing a state of mind through images from the external world to avoid the direct expression of emotion—biographer Graziella Bernabò suggests Pozzi would have adapted the use of this technique from the Italian poet Eugenio Montale. In her marvelous biography of Pozzi, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue, Bernabò notes the technique of objective correlative in both “Abbandono” and “Un cane sordo.”

Of “Abbandono,” Bernabò writes:

We are faced with a bold “objective correlative,” through which a personal issue is expressed via exterior images that are loaded with dense symbolic meanings without, however, losing their own relevance. That you which Pozzi addresses to the birch tree/child is also likely directed to herself as well, or to the truest part of herself, feeling stuck in a confined environment and, at the same time, wrapped up in a vaster and more disturbing reality well-rendered by the turning of worlds in the ending.

Siamo di fronte a un audace<<correlativo oggettivo>>, attraverso il quale una problematica di tipo personale viene espressa attraverso immagini esterne che si caricano di densi significati simbolici senza perdere per. la loro solida consistenza. Quel tu rivolto alla betulla/bambino l’autrice lo rivolge verosimilmente anche a se stessa, o alla parte pi. vera di sé, sentendosi bloccata in un contesto angusto e, nello stesso tempo, avvolta da una realtà più ampia e inquietante, ben resa dal ruotare di mondi del finale. —Graziella Bernabò, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue. Ancora: 2022, p. 230.

And of “Il cane sordo”:

Certainly here the dog, by now deaf to the world around it but finally free, is also the modest, and at the same time effective, image of the tenacity with which Pozzi herself, in the name of a desperate fidelity to herself (and despite the difficulties that the outside world placed in the way of her dreams, imposing roles and scenarios on her that she did not share), pursued her destiny, which was one of loneliness and pain, but also of faithfulness to her own inner truth and freedom in the pursuit of poetry.

Certamente qui il cane, ormai divenuto sordo al mondo circostante ma finalmente libero, è anche l’umile, e insieme efficace, immagine della tenacia con la quale la stessa Pozzi, in nome di una disperata fedeltà a se stessa (e nonostante le difficoltà che il mondo esterno frapponeva ai suoi sogni, imponendole ruoli e copioni da lei non condivisi), perseguiva il suo destino, che era di solitudine e di dolore, ma anche di adesione alla propria verità interiore e di libertà nell’esercizio della parola poetica. —Bernabò, Per troppa, 151.

Amy Newman’s sixth book of poetry, An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Happiness and Unhappiness, is forthcoming from Persea Books. Her translations of the poems and letters of Antonia Pozzi appear in The Harvard Review, Poetry, Blackbird, AzonaL, The Arkansas International, Bennington Review, and elsewhere; her translation of Pozzi’s letters appear in Delos and Cagibi.

Published October 15 2024