Radical Shadows

by Bradford Morrow

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  Antonia’s suicide at twenty-six, as well as her gender, made early critics uncomfortable, reluctant to pronounce her an important contemporary poet. So they decided that the case was moot, her talents unfulfilled. They searched for signs of “femininity” in her poems. Eugenio Montale preferred to read them as poems, which everywhere evinced a “desire to reduce the weight of words to the minimum.” And he shrewdly observed that “this desire already constitutes Pozzi’s departure from the generic feminine gratuity that is the dream of so many male critics.”

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  Between 1939 and 1989 Antonia’s poems were published in several substantial selections. Yet they were all based on texts edited by her father, Roberto, who undoubtedly wanted to craft a respectable image of his daughter. Thus he revised the line, “Tremolano nella mia anima impura” (“They tremble in my impure soul”) by deleting the word “impura.” He also retitled poems to remove any hint of suicide. “Fine” (“End”) became “Imbarco” (“Embarkation”).

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  Stylistically, the poems are representative of “hermeticism” (ermetismo), the powerful combination of precise language, dense imagery and free verse that dominated Italian poetry from the 1920s to the 1950s. Antonia admired the first books of the major hermetic poets: Giuseppe Ungaretti, Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo. She would underline titles and phrases in their work. And she understood it in the context of international Modernist trends. She read Eliot, Pound, Valéry and Rilke in the original languages.

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  Ermetismo was initially a pejorative label, a swipe at the obscurity created by the Modernist form of the poems, their avoidance of ornate diction and rhetorical tropes, their discontinuities and ellipses, their metaphysical silences. Yet this poetry came to dominance under Mussolini as a defense against fascism, a withdrawal from hopeless political action to evoke deeply personal experiences, at once dramatic and transitory. Antonia’s poems are frankly autobiographical, intimately connected to the decisive moments in her life. These moments began at age five, when her parents purchased an eighteenth-century villa in Pasturo, a small village in the mountains of northeastern Lombardy. Then at fifteen she fell in love with a classics professor at her secondary school, a man whom her father forbade her to marry, but who returned her love. Antonia continued the relationship for some years before finally abandoning it.

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  In 1955 the British publisher John Calder issued a bilingual selection of Antonia’s poems rendered by Nora Wydenbruck, a translator of Rilke. Wydenbruck’s version was based on texts that Roberto Pozzi had edited. She also tried to efface the Modernist style of the poems. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement described her translation as “overscrupulous sometimes in its purpose of making the original as intelligible as possible.” Wydenbruck herself wrote that “English is perhaps the language best adapted to imitate the terseness and render the delicate overtones of Antonia’s diction.” But this had little effect on her translation. Where the Italian reads simply “bianca bellezza” (“white beauty”) or “veste” (“clothes”), the English inflates and exoticizes: “white, dazzling splendour,” “veils.”

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  Against the backdrop of British and American poetic traditions, Antonia Pozzi conjures up suggestive resemblances, some more telling than others. Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath—an isolated woman whose unsettling poetry is dubiously edited by friends and relatives is now a familiar figure in our literary history. The mark of a compelling translation, however, is its impact on the native traditions it must use to rewrite the foreign work. Antonia offered me an unusual opportunity to make Modernist poetry in English a little less familiar. Relying on a 1989 Italian text that returns to her notebooks and manuscripts, I tried to recreate precisely those features that Wydenbruck perceived in the poems. When I read the Italian, however, I heard the stripped-down classicism of H. D. and the angular but mellifluous rhythms of Lorine Niedecker. I even recalled specific poems, like H. D.’s “Wine Bowl” (1931) and Niedecker’s “In Exchange for Haiku” (1959):

  July—waxwings

  on the berries

  have dyed red

  the dead

  branch

  The sound effects I sought weren’t so much in the Italian as inspired by its abrupt musicality, now resonant with Anglo-American Modernism. Yet no reader is likely to confuse the poetries in play here. On the contrary, Antonia’s landscape, her personal dramas, her tragic death all ensure that any resemblance to poets living or dead is purely … uncanny.

  The Indifferent One

  Marcel Proust

  —Translated from French by Burton Pike

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  PROUST INTENDED THIS STORY for Les plaisirs et les jours, but substituted another for it. It was written in 1893-1894, when Proust was twenty-two, and published in an obscure and ephemeral periodical in 1896. As he was beginning to write A la recherche du temps perdu in 1910, Proust tried to find a copy of this story; it is not known whether he succeeded. The many links between the story and the novel are striking. The story was recovered and published in French only in 1978, and was previously available only in a very limited edition in English by another translator.

  I.

  MADELEINE DE GOUVRES HAD just arrived in the box of Mme. Lawrence. General de Buivres asked: “Who are your gallants this evening? Avranches? Lepré?”

  “Avranches, yes,” Mme. Lawrence answered. “Lepré, I didn’t dare.”

  Indicating Madeleine, she added: “She is so difficult, and as it would have been almost like introducing her to a new acquaintance …”

  Madeleine protested. She had met M. Lepré several times, found him charming; he had even, once, lunched with her.

  “In any event,” Mme. Lawrence concluded, “you need have no regrets. He is quite nice, but there’s nothing remarkable about him, and nothing at all for the most spoiled woman in Paris. I can quite understand that your kind of intimacies makes you difficult.”

  Lepré was very nice but quite insignificant, that was society’s opinion. Madeleine felt that it was not at all hers, and was astonished; but as Lepré’s absence did not cause a more lively disappointment in her either, her feelings did not go so far as to worry about it.

  Heads in the hall were turned towards her, friends were already coming up to greet and compliment her. This was nothing new, but yet, with the subliminal clairvoyance of a jockey during a race, or an actor during a performance, this evening she felt herself triumphing more easily and more completely than was usual. Without a jewel, her bodice of yellow tulle covered with cattleyas, her black hair was also adorned with cattleyas, which suspended pale garlands of light within this shadowy tower. As fresh as her flowers, and like them pensive, with the Polynesian charm of her hairdo she recalled the Mahenu of Pierre Loti and of Reynaldo Hahn. Soon a regret mixed in with the happy indifference with which she saw her graces mirrored this evening in the dazzled eyes that reflected them with an infallible fidelity, a regret that Lepré had not seen her thus.

  “How she loves flowers!” Mme. Lawrence exclaimed, looking at Madeleine’s bodice.

  She indeed did love them, in the vulgar sense that she knew how beautiful they were and how beautiful they made her. She loved their beauty, their gaiety, their sadness too, but from the outside, as one of the stances of their beauty. When they were no longer fresh, she threw them out like a faded dress.

  Suddenly, during the first intermission, Madeleine glimpsed Lepré down in the orchestra, a few instants after General de Buivres and the Duke and Duchess of Aleriouvres had left, leaving her alone with Mme. Lawrence. Madeleine saw that the door of the box was being opened for Lepré.

  “Madame Lawrence,” she said, “will you authorize me to ask M. Lepré to stay with us, since he is by himself in the orchestra?”

  “But the more so, my dear, as I will be obliged to leave in a few moments; you know, you
gave me permission; Robert is not feeling well.—Do you want me to ask him?”

  “No, I’d rather I did.”

  During the intermission, Madeleine let Lepré chat with Mme. Lawrence the whole time. Leaning on the edge of the box and looking at the hall, she affected to scarcely pay attention to them, certain of being better able to enjoy his presence when, shortly, she would be alone with him.

  Mme. Lawrence went out to put on her cloak.

  “I invite you to stay with me for this act,” Madeleine said with an indifferent amiability.

  “You are very kind, Madame, but I cannot stay, I must leave.”

  “But I will be all alone,” Madeleine said in an urgent tone; then, suddenly, desiring almost unconsciously to apply the maxims of coquetry contained in the celebrated “If I don’t love you, you will love me,” she caught herself: “But of course you are right, and if you are expected, please don’t be late. Adieu, Monsieur.”

  She sought to compensate by the warmth of her smile for the harshness that seemed to her implied in this permission. But this harshness was only relative to her violent desire to keep him there, and to the bitterness of her disappointment. This advice to leave, given to anyone else, would have been perfectly amiable.

  Mme. Lawrence came back. “Well, he’s leaving; I’ll stay with you so you won’t be alone. Did you say tender farewells?”

  “Farewells?”

  “I believe he’s leaving at the end of this week for a long trip to Italy, Greece and Asia Minor.”

  A child who since its birth breathes without ever having been aware of it does not know how essential to its life is the air that swells its chest so gently that it is not even conscious of it. Will the child, during a fit of fever, or in a convulsion, suffocate? In the desperate efforts of its being, it is almost for its life that it struggles, for the lost tranquility that it can only recover with the air from which it never knew itself inseparable.

  In the same fashion, it was only at the moment when Madeleine learned of this departure of Lepré of which she had not remotely dreamed, that she understood, in feeling everything that was tearing itself away from her, what it was that had happened. And she looked at Mme. Lawrence, crushed, disconsolate and yet gently, harboring no more resentment towards her than does the poor suffocating patient against the asthma that is strangling him, who, through eyes filled with tears, smiles at the people who pity him without being able to help him. Suddenly she stood up.

  “Let us leave, my dear friend, I don’t want to make you get home late.”

  While she was putting on her cloak she caught sight of Lepré and, in her anguish at letting him leave without seeing her again, she quickly went downstairs.

  “It would be a shame, especially if he is leaving, if M. Lepré were to imagine that he did not please me.”

  “But he never said that,” Mme Lawrence answered.

  “But yes, since you imagine it, he imagines it as well.”

  “No, quite the contrary.”

  “But because I’m telling you,” Madeleine answered harshly. And as they had caught up with Lepré: “M. Lepré, I expect you for dinner on Thursday at eight.”

  “I am not free on Thursday, Madame.”

  “Then Friday?”

  “I am not free then either.”

  “Saturday?”

  “Saturday, agreed.”

  “But my dear, you forget that you are to dine with the Princess d’Avranches on Saturday.”

  “So much the worse, I shall cancel.”

  “Oh, Madame, I would not wish …!” said Lepré.

  “But I wish it!” Madeleine cried, beside herself. “There is no way I will go to Fanny’s. I never intended to go.”

  Returning home, Madeleine undressed slowly, recalling the events of the evening. When she came to the moment that Lepré had refused to stay with her during the last act, she turned red with humiliation. The most elementary coquetry, like the strictest dignity, demanded that after that she observe an extreme coldness towards him. Instead of which, this triple invitation on the stairs. Indignant, she proudly raised her head and glimpsed herself in the depths of the mirror, so beautiful that she no longer doubted that he loved her. Worried and upset solely by his imminent departure, she imagined the tenderness that, for some reason she did not know, he had wanted to conceal from her. He was going to profess his love, perhaps in a letter, very soon, and would doubtless delay his departure, would leave with her … How? … One mustn’t think about it. But she saw his handsome, amorous face drawing close to hers, demanding pardon. “Wicked boy!” she said.

  But then perhaps he did not yet love her; he would leave without having had time to fall in love with her … Desolated, she lowered her head, and her glance fell on the still more languishing glances of the faded flowers on her bodice, which beneath their withered pupils seemed about to weep. The thought of how briefly her dream, unconscious of itself, had lasted, how briefly her happiness would last if it were ever realized, associated itself in her mind with the sadness of these flowers which, before dying, languished on this heart that they had felt beating with its first love, its first humiliation, and its first sorrow.

  The next day she refused to have any more flowers in her room, which was habitually full and sonorous with the glory of fresh roses.

  Mme. Lawrence, when she entered, stopped in front of the vases where the last cattleyas were dying, despoiled of beauty, for eyes without love. “What’s this, my dear, you who adore flowers so?”

  “It seems to me that it’s today that I love them,” Madeleine was going to respond; she stopped, annoyed at having to explain herself, and feeling that there are realities that one cannot get across to those who do not already bear them within themselves.

  She contented herself with smiling amiably at the reproach. The feeling that this new life was unknown to everyone, and perhaps to Lepré himself, caused her a rare and grieving pride. Letters were brought; not finding any from Lepré, she made a gesture of disappointment. Measuring the distance between the absurdity of a disappointment when there had not been the slightest sustenance for a hope, and the all-too-real and cruel intensity of this disappointment, she understood that she had ceased to live solely the life of events and facts. The veil of lies had begun to unfold before her eyes for a duration impossible to foresee. Only through him did she see things any longer, and more than anything else, perhaps, those things which she had wanted to know and to live most genuinely and most like Lepré, those things which related to him.

  But a hope remained that he had lied, that his indifference was a front: she knew from the unanimity of opinion that she was one of the most beautiful women in Paris, that her reputation for intelligence, wit, elegance and her high social station added prestige to her beauty. Lepré, on the other hand, was considered an intelligent and artistic man, very gentle, a very good son, but he was little sought after, had never been successful with women; the attention she was bestowing on him must seem to him something improbable and unhoped-for. She was amazed and hoped …

  II.

  Even though Madeleine had, in an instant, subordinated all the interests and affections of her life to Lepré, she didn’t think less of him, and her opinion was only reinforced by the opinion of everyone else that, without being disagreeable, he was inferior to those remarkable men who, in the four years since the death of the Marquis de Gouvres, consoled her widowhood by visiting her several times a day, and who were the most cherished ornaments of her life.

  She was well aware that the inexplicable inclination that made of him a unique being did not raise him to that level in the eyes of others. The reasons for her love were within her, and if they were also, a little, in him, it was neither in his intellectual superiority nor even in his physical superiority. It was precisely because she loved him that no expression, no smile, no walk, were as agreeable to her as his, and it was not because his expression, his smile, his walk were more agreeable than others’ that she loved him. She knew men
who were more handsome, more charming, and knew it.

  And so when on Saturday, at eight fifteen, Lepré entered Madeleine’s salon, he was met, without his suspecting it, by a most passionate friend and most clairvoyant adversary. If her beauty was armed to conquer him, her mind was no less armed to judge him; she was prepared to pick like a bitter flower the pleasure of finding him mediocre and ridiculously unequal to the love she bore for him. It was not out of prudence! She felt that she would always be taken up again in the magic net, and that the links of chain mail that her too incisive mind would have broken while Lepré was present would have been repaired by her industrious imagination as soon as he had left.

  In fact, when he came in she was suddenly calmed; in giving him her hand, it seemed that she took all his power away from him. He was no longer the sole and absolute despot of her dreams, but nothing more than an agreeable visitor. They chatted; then all her prejudices fell away. In the delicacy of his kindness, the bold accuracy of his wit, she found reasons which, if they did not absolutely justify her love, explained it, at least to some degree, and, in showing her that something in reality corresponded to her love, made it put out roots and gave it more life. She noted, too, that he was much handsomer than she had thought, with a delicate and noble face of the type of Louis XIII.