Snowfield

Snowfield


I was in the brightness of day that lives
beyond the fir trees,
I walked on fields and mountains
of light —
I crossed dead lakes —
the captive waves whispered
a secret song 
to me —
I passed over white banks,  
called the dormant gentians
by name —
I dreamed in the snow
of an immense
buried city 
of flowers —
I was on the mountains
like a bristling flower —
and I looked at the rocks,
the high cliffs
though seas of wind
and sang to myself 
of a distant summer, which,
with its bitter rhododendrons 
blazed in my blood —

February 1st, 1934





Nevai
 

Io fui nel giorno alto che vive
oltre gli abeti,
io camminai su campi e monti
di luce –
Traversai laghi morti – ed un segreto
canto mi sussurravano le onde
prigioniere –
passai su bianche rive, chiamando
a nome le genziane
sopite –
Io sognai nella neve di un'immensa
città di fiori
sepolta –
io fui sui monti
come un irto fiore –
e guardavo le rocce,
gli alti scogli
per i mari del vento –
e cantavo fra me di una remota
estate, che coi suoi amari
rododendri
m'avvampava nel sangue –

 1° febbraio 1934






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.

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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, The Laurel 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.

Poet and photographer Antonia Pozzi, born in Milan in 1912, lived a brief life, dying by suicide in 1938. She left behind photographs, diaries, notebooks, letters, and over 300 poems; none of her poems were published in her lifetime. After her death, Pozzi’s poetry was posthumously altered by her father Roberto, who scrubbed any evidence of his daughter’s passionate love affairs and her doubts about religion. It would not be until 1989 that editors Alessandra Cenni and Onorina Dino restored the poems to their original form in Parole, an authoritative text of Pozzi’s poetry, the most recently revised edition of which is Tutte le opera (2009), edited by Cenni.