Translated from the Italian by Amy Newman
Though a ray of sunshine,
it’s not thawing.
The pale tangle of shadows
is still
the only ornament of the earth
beneath the bare trees.
In Norway — right now — on the ice
the children dance, dressed
in red;
with the blades of their skates they draw
silver flowers
on what was once
dark water —
Oh, to freeze even more, to become
for those eyes
that watch from the shore
just a shining slab, hard —
as the mists dissolve, at the edge
of forests — the mirages
of daybreak —
31 December 1931
Born in Milan in 1912, Antonia Pozzi lived a brief life, dying by suicide in 1938. She left behind letters, diaries, and notebooks containing over 300 poems; none of her poetry was published during her lifetime. Her work is significantly underrepresented in translation, and her omission from the 2004 Faber Book of 20th Century Italian Poems has been called “the most obvious lacuna.” (1)
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. In 1955, Nora Wydenbruck’s translations of theseposthumously revised poems —translated with the help and under the close surveillance of Roberto Pozzi—reproduce a sanitized edition of the original work for English readers. In 1989 editors Alessandra Cenni and Onorina Dino restored the poems to their original form in Parole, and then Tutte le Opere, the authoritative texts from which Amy Newman works.
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 or are forthcoming in The Harvard Review, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Delos, Cagibi, Blackbird, Arkansas International, and elsewhere. She teaches at Northern Illinois University.
1) Oliver Burckhardt, “The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems.” Quadrant, 1 May 2005, p. 70.