Antonia Pozzi
trans. by Amy Newman
Path
It’s lovely to walk along the stream: you
can’t hear footsteps; it doesn’t seem like
you’re going anywhere.
From the top of the path you see the valley
and distant peaks at the edges
of the plain, like pale cliffs
on the edge of a harbor—you think
how lovely, how sweet the land is
when you linger to dream
your sunset
with long blue shadows of mountains
along the side—You walk along the stream:
it’s a grand song that deafens
the melancholy—
Breil, 9 August 1934
Antonia Pozzi (1912-1938) was a poet and photographer born in Milan. She left behind photographs, diaries, notebooks, letters, and over 300 poems; none of her poems were published in her lifetime. Pozzi’s poetry was posthumously altered by her father Roberto, who scrubbed evidence of his daughter’s love affairs and doubts about religion. In 1989 editors Alessandra Cenni and Onorina Dino restored the poems to their original form in Parole (Garzanti), an authoritative text of Pozzi’s poetry.
Amy Newman’s sixth book of poetry, An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Happiness and Unhappiness, is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2023. Her translations of Pozzi's poems and letters appear or are forthcoming in Sonora Review, Laurel Review, Bangalore Review, Ilanot Review, Azonal, Poetry, Bennington Review, Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University.