Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

"Suppose we met tonight
on a path
sunk
in fog
puddles would dry
round our warm patch
of earth:
my cheek
against your clothes
sweet
deliverance
from life.
But the girls---
their smooth brows chide
my age: a tree
my sole mate..."

-Antonia Pozzi (1912-1938)

This is the second poet of Italian extraction that I've attempted reading this year. The first was Italian-Uruguayan Delmira Agustini, who, like Pozzi, was a fair-skinned woman born to overbearing upper-class parents who met a violent death in her late twenties after a thwarted romantic love experience. Agustini died after being shot in the head by a jealous ex-husband; Pozzi committed suicide by drug overdose and exposure, some years after her parents forbade her to marry the man she passionately loved, a classics professor named Antonio Maria Cervi. Pozzi's biography also superficially resembles that of another athletic, fair-skinned 20th-century female poet whose life ended prematurely in suicide and whose papers were heavily bowdlerized by her family after death: the American Sylvia Plath. The fraught father-daughter relationship and death-by-suicide also bring to mind the South African poet Ingrid Jonker.

The poems in this collection tend to blend into one another, as they are all rather similar, even though their dates of composition are spread out across a nine-year timespan. All these poems are written in free verse and employ scenery-pieces from Pozzi's northern Italian landscape (snow-covered mountains, blue alpine lakes, stone houses, trees, birds, horses, etc.), in varying spatial and temporal arrangements, to evoke some highly charged emotional or psychological state, such as thwarted eros, nostalgia for childhood, or yearning for death. The language is stripped-down, haiku-like in its economy. The abrupt juxtaposition of disparate images is also haiku-like: e.g., "I show off/my scarlet/jumper/in the grey light:/but inside/soul feels/livid/like the soft flesh/of a drowned baby," from the poem "Late Twilight." Such sudden shifts in mood remind me of the concept of kireji that is so central to traditional Japanese haiku-writing.

Pozzi's imagery is always fresh, vivid, sometimes violent: "The lost puppy/still howls/in the brambles:/maybe the black-hoofed bay/broke into a run/& kicked him/in the face." However, there is a sort of flat literalism to these poems that I find rather limiting: for the most part, all the poems here use images that seem to be taken from direct visual observation, describing things that the poet actually saw. All these poems have the same speaker, which seems to be Pozzi herself. They read a bit like diary entries. In most of these poems, there are no "what if"s, no counterfactual suppositions, no complex imaginary constructs. Nowhere in these poems does Pozzi analyze why she feels the way she feels, verbalize an opinion or an ethical stance, assert a generalization, synthesize disparate components into a theory, enunciate a philosophy. There is no cerebration here, no analytical commentary on life's flux of events, just a dance of perception and emotion: quite lovely, but ultimately (for this one reader) rather unfulfilling.

Pozzi's work has been rendered in English by more than one translator: Breath consists of Lawrence Venuti's translations, but Peter Robinson and Nicholas Benson have also produced translations. Here is a link to some of Robinson's: http://www.almaclassics.com/excerpts/... . And here is a link to Benson's, published on one of my favorite websites, The Brooklyn Rail's InTranslation section: http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org...

The thing I like about this group is being introduced to poets like Antonia Pozzi who I wouldn’t otherwise have come across although it sounds as though she is well known in Italy. I liked the first poem you quoted in the review and the spare quality of the poems in the links. The Robinson’s link has her poems in Italian as well as the English translations. I don’t speak much Italian but it is good to have a chance to read the originals. Thanks for the review.

Caroline, the Venuti translation also contains the original Italian poems and English translations on face-to-face pages. Venuti has an interesting philosophy of translation, which he discusses at length in the book's introduction, so that you know what you are getting into. Venuti's translations try to emphasize the modernist aspects of Pozzi's writings, the similarities that she has with English-language modernist poets like H.D. and Lorine Niedecker. Frequently, in order to accomplish this, he gets creative with his line breaks, introducing many a line break that is not to be found in the Italian original. I haven't looked into Robinson's translations much, but his are said to place more emphasis on preserving the "northern European pitch" of the original: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/a...

Very interesting, Jenna. I've never heard of this poet before. Thanks so much for looking into other translations and providing the links. I was in total agreement with what you said in your third paragraph based on what you'd quoted from Venuti's translation. There was an emptiness to them. But the Robinson translation gives me an entirely different feel for her poetry. For me it's the difference between writing her off and an interest in reading more.

Maybe I should have started with the Robinson translations instead! But alas, I am loyal to the Wesleyan Poetry in Translation series.

Many thanks for the link to the TLS article Jenna. It sounds as though one is spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing a translator for this poet and how lovely that she is being re-discovered.

This movie trailer looks intriguing: https://vimeo.com/156560127