Stephanie Diaz

on translating Antonia Pozzi

I do not speak Italian, so this creating this translation was quite a trip! With the assistance of native speakers as well as Professor Silverman (who teaches a course on poetry translation at Penn), I was able to get a better feeling of the poem. In “Repose,” I focused on highlighting the intense physical sensations that Pozzi invokes in her version. In the line “– il cervello penetrato di rosso / traverso le palpebre chiuse –” Pozzi makes use of dashes to distinguish the sensation described from the rest of the piece. In my translation, I felt that, given the nature of the physicality of this line, it would be interesting to manifest this distinction in a more physical form. For this reason, I chose to indent the lines “brain interrupted by red / across eyes shut tight.”

“Tonight, on the sheets, in the same shape,” was perhaps the hardest part of the poem to translate, as I really loved the repetition of s sounds in Pozzi’s version. While I didn’t manage to find an equivalent for “tonight” that had a similar sound, I worked to maintain the s and sh sounds in the rest of the sentence.