Amelia Rosselli, Hospital Series, Trans, by Deborah Woodard, Roberta Antognini and Guiseppe Leporace, New Directions, 2015.
Hospital Series, a bruisingly intimate colloquy with an elusive lover,
is Italian poet Amelia Rosselli s virtuoso, subversive, neo-Petrarchan
sequence of poems. Rosselli wrote much of the series in the mid 1960s
after being hospitalized for a mental illness she suffered from for most
of her life, and whose pain shapes her language and difficult vision.
These explosive poems, a furious cacophonic crescendo of semantic and
syntactic accumulations deeply admired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, place
Rosselli among the greatest writers of her generation"
In 1996 a woman leapt to her death from her fifth-floor apartment
balcony in Rome. Fifty-nine years earlier two brothers were found dead
by a road in Normandy, their carotid arteries severed. Later identified
as the Rosselli brothers, Carlo and Nello, it soon became clear the pair
had been assassinated by Mussolini’s agents; and with those deaths in
1937, Italy had lost two of its bravest anti-fascists just when it
needed them most. What many didn’t realize at the time was that these
deaths also signaled great loss for one little girl, who had lost a
father and an uncle in one fell swoop. It was this little girl who would
jump to her death fifty-nine years later, a great poet on the brink of
old age.
It’s unsurprising that Amelia Rosselli, Carlo’s daughter, only eight
years old at the time of his murder, was to live a life plagued by the
turmoil of her early years. Art and suffering are often said to keep
close company and in this case Amelia’s frequent bouts of depression,
and her mother’s death shortly after her father’s, led to a childhood in
exile from Fascist Italy in which creativity and poetry became a
natural means of escape, a manner in which to channel grief to larger
effect.
Working in the aftermath of World War II Rosselli became one of the
most important poetic voices emerging from Europe, but most importantly a
notably isolated female voice in the dominantly male narratives of war.
Serie ospedaliera (Hospital Series), Rosselli’s second book,
was first published in Milan in 1969. A self-professed ‘Poet of
exploration’, the collection certainly lives up to Rosselli’s
declarations of pioneering new expressions of language and form.
Unfortunately, at times these ambitions fail to fully deliver in what is
an intriguingly complex series.
It’s not every writer who has the luxury of choice when deciding
which language to write in, and the trilingual Amelia chose very
deliberately to write in Italian, her mother tongue. It stands to reason
then that to translate her work into English—a language, like French,
she chose to disregard—is particularly difficult. Rosselli knew the
parts of Italian that remained singular to the romance language—the
tones, the rhythms, the ease of its rhymes—all aspects that overwhelm
the language unlike any other. She understood acutely the manner in
which Italian words allow a compacting of meaning, the way a single
Italian word can tell you many things an English one can’t simply by its
ending. She chose Italy as the ‘ideal fatherland’, and, with it, its
language.
Writing in a confessional mode, Rosselli desired to create stanzas
that could be characterized by a new objectivity, what has been called a
“collective orientation”, “where the I is the public, where the I is
things, where the I is the things that happen.” This statement itself
needs a moment or two to digest, a factor that a reader soon realizes is
a commonplace when encountering Rosselli’s work. There is a
breathlessness to this poetry, a rushing hurry that infiltrates every
line, every comma and every upset pause. Ironically, despite its own
velocity, Rosselli’s work remains poetry made for slow digestion, for
repetition and quiet meditation. Whatever increased tempo the lines urge
the reader into they also beg for a stuttering repeat, a re-watch, a
careful scan (and re-scan) to pull them together again into a larger
whole. So many of the images that Rosselli invokes are deeply powerful,
but they appear like flashes in a minefield. It becomes harder as one
reads on to snatch at these moments as they run through to the next
line.
In other words, Rosselli is a demanding poet, her verse reminiscent
in some respects of Eugenio Montale’s, always asking more of the reader
– to re-read, to revise, to look away and come back with greater
understanding. However, whereas in Rosselli’s other collections there
remains a congruence of content, in this collection it is unsurprising
to learn the entire series was composed while she was a patient in
psychiatric care. The evident distress of such an experience comes to
the fore again and again; at times her language collapses completely: “I
know not: I want not: you are not: I see not: I stay not: not: not,
not, not.” The fragmentation of voice itself becomes a crucial part of
the creative process. It is through this “experience impossible and
dauntless we laboriously ruptured isolation”, and ultimately this seems
to be Rosselli’s goal, to rupture isolation, to escape to a greater
freedom.
This escapism also manifests physically within the collection. Her
enjambment is striking and used often and to dramatic effect, the
slippery nature of her lines becoming in and of itself a task before the
reader, one of fluid navigation and understanding. The structure of the
poems invites reconsideration to gain clarity, something Rosselli
self-consciously addresses while presenting emotional conflict openly on
the page:
I’m not sure if I’ve made myself clear, but I no
longer see you taking shape
reduced to an industrial love.
Sections reveal an absolute clarity.
Rosselli herself translated the likes of Sylvia Plath and Emily
Dickenson and with this knowledge it’s hard to view this collection
without noting the similarities of their work. The resemblances,
particularly with Dickenson’s fragmentary voice, the scattered often
stream-of-consciousness dissolution, combined and contrasted with razor
sharp and incisive observations made in overly clipped clauses. Her eye
never passes, but pierces. Even sex becomes objectified: “violent as an
object (quarry of whitened marble)/(curved amphora of clay)” – and, with
this objectification, seen again anew.
The musical nature of the Italian language is almost impossible to
render in English, and yet the translators, Deborah Woodard, Roberta
Antognini and Guiseppe Leporace, have clearly made an effort to mimic
the rhythms of Rosselli’s words. The translations ache with the effort,
yet on some occasions the effects chime brilliantly, as with the line:
“Inkling inkling your gloves will never touch a living thing.” There is
poetry alone in the detail of such translation. In fact the naming of
the ‘series’ remains as a subtle nod to Rosselli’s own musical training
(she was both an accomplished musicologist and musician, who played the
violin, piano, and organ), something that becomes clear very quickly
when reading her work out loud wherein the highly musical metric
structures of her poetry come into full light. Rosselli’s words are as
powerful as musical notes, and their composition, whether on a page or
when spoken aloud, maintains this sense of importance.
There is one poem towards the end of the collection in which Rosselli
transforms her body into a ship, cast out into the ocean of life,
wrecked and wonderful in a single moment. Painting, like writing, is
presented as an artistic act that creates but also one that strips back
and destroys; layers are added, but so too are they taken away. The same
analogy could well be used for Rosselli’s poetry. In fact, on
re-reading such a section, it is hard not to see the reader as the ship
“storm-tossed” in the sea of Rosselli’s mind:
Your watercolors discomposed my mind
loquacious from winterstice. Throughout spring’s
discomfiture, I, storm-tossed ship, was still craftily
scaling the bright carousels: drowned treasure
yours and mine. The paintbrush quivered gently
in the simplicity of a shack discomposed by winter
that was an unremitting cruelty, a sleep of yours hidden
from my prayers, a slipping away from railroad tracks
often sliding toward my head instead, bowed
when there was light.
One failing that remains ingrained within this collection is the
fluidity that plagues its production. Individual poems are difficult to
pick apart from the whole, which although immersive is also bewildering.
To read the series is to wander until a sudden change in direction
makes you stop and reflect; it can be hard to recognize at which points
certain poems end and others begin. Rather than individual poems, then,
the reader finds it is instead sections and moments that come to the
fore. One passage in particular near the collection’s end speaks to the
title and again seems to resonate both with Rosselli’s personal
experiences within the confines of her hospital bed, along with the
reader’s experience of encountering her poetry:
In the chamber you were lying on the bed so narrow
as to be my mate, while you fared
anything but close, in a house of bordellos
closed only to me. You lived in the very air!
and it was a self-querying, this silence, that
dragged oblivion throughout its sentences.
Later, the speaker reaches out:
I lay my hand on the air that separates us
as if I could touch all that unripeness: you don’t
see it, you’re too touched by your illness.
I don’t withdraw my hand; I leave it there suspended
as if there were a void to disobey, and
often I see it transforming itself that soul
of yours you detest enlarging.
Without moving her hand, the speaker is left with a “stillborn gesture”. Left alone, she turns inward:
I step back, I no longer nurse the slightest
desire to enchant you; in your illness you’re
a zebra moving, taut in its
preserve.
The clarity of such action, the pained simplicity of it, heightens
the beauty of Rosselli’s account of the entire situation. Rather than
the chaotic crisscrossing of ideas that often permeates these poems it
is at these moments of stripped back observation that Rosselli comes
into her own. -
Thea Hawlin
Severe the
threefold sentences. En route with the archipelago we were
swept up by the
current, inorganic event, land and sea spit
blood instead.
As you split, I stared at myself in the vast
archipelago
that was my mind, very severe, logical,
desperate
before so much void: a battle, two, three battles
lost. But the
furor of our looks, you lantern
who thought to
guide, I routed crank, but the furor
of these two
looks of ours blocked: the victory taken for
granted the
battle conquered the bandits stronger than us, the union
of two souls a
tarantella.
*
The unhappy
moon bowed down in its lament.
Innocent
rivulets, halfempty boats, the mountains’ lakes agape
premise that I
should be yours, and obedient.
*
Your aquarelles discomposed my
mind loquacious
for the winterice. With the mess of
spring,
storm-tossed ship, I cut footholds still
among the
merry-go-rounds colored with cunning: your my
drowned
treasure. The paintbrush sweetly shook
in the modesty
of a hovel discomposed for the winter
that was a
continual cruelty, a sleep of yours hidden
from my
prayers, a straying from the railway
that often
rather veered toward my head, reclining
when there was
light.
And the light discomposing itself in equal
parts evolved
economical
colorations on the map of the railroadman.
Pallid, enervated, irascible, you warded
off swallows
while I painted
on, equally enamored of
nature and of
my need.
Amelia Rosselli’s Serie ospedaliera among the poet’s most haunting,
imaginatively intense and formally rigorous collections, has just been
published by New Directions as
Hospital Series, translated by Deborah Woodard, Roberta Antognini, and Giuseppe Leporace .
Originally published in Italian by Il Saggiatore, Milano, in 1969
Serie Ospedaliera also contained an earlier long poem,
La Libellula,
The Dragonfly, composed in 1958.
For the first edition, Rosselli insisted on an IBM monospaced font
(one in which each letter occupied the same amount of space), and on a
layout with each poem printed on its own recto, accentuating a geometric
and formal rigor.
Each stanza can be read in equal amount of time, composing a square,
echoing the arresting image chosen for the cover: a series of squares
receding one inside the other.
Rosselli worked on the poems of Hospital Series from 1963 to 1965,
yet in an interview with Renato Minore (in Il Messaggero, Feb 2, 1984)
she stated they were written all at once during a fifteen day creative
burst.
Following Amelia Rosselli’s first collection of poems
Variazioni belliche (War Variations), the title
Hospital Series again contains a musical term: series is a reference to serial music which Rosselli was studying.
Alessandro Cassin interviewed Deborah Woodard a poet and translator
living in Seattle and Roberta Antognini, Associate Professor of Italian
and Chair of Italian at Vassar College.
Alessandro Cassin
. When did you encounter the work of Amelia
Rosselli, and what was your initial response to it? Given for formidable
challenges of Rosselli’s language, what drew you to undertake this
translation?
Deborah Woodard. I think it helped that, when I started, I had no
idea what I was getting into. An old friend of mine, Linda Lappin, who
is herself a translator, sent me a bundle of books she was discarding
from her library, and
Variazioni belliche was among them. I
stowed the books in the lower compartment of a sideboard in the dining
room and, eventually, drew out the Rosselli. I opened it up and put it
back. It was too difficult to parse. But then having lost interest in
another translation project, which seemed too thin, I went back into the
sideboard stash, and picked up the Rosselli once again. Fascination
trumped doubt. I translated a sample poem, brought it to Giuseppe
Leporace, whose classes I was auditing at the University of Washington,
and we began translating. When we learned that Lucia Re and Paul
Vangelisti’s translation of
Variazioni belliche was forthcoming from Green Integer, we made the decision to switch to
Hospital Series.
Roberta Antognini. I truly encountered Amelia Rosselli and her poetry
through Deborah. I teach Italian language and Literature at Vassar. A
few years ago, realizing that in the foreign literature classroom,
translation is inseparable from writing and reading, teaching and
learning, I decided to build on my lifelong passion for translation by
developing a seminar on literary translation from Italian to English,
for fourth year students of Italian. As a consequence of this course, I
found myself increasingly immersed in translation studies, fascinated by
a field that defines me as an individual and, in this country, as a
professional. Although I had some previous experience as a translator—I
translated Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” and Teodolinda
Barolini’s book,
The Undivine Comedy, into Italian—it was this
course that whetted my appetite for translation. The first time that I
offered it, I invited Deborah Woodard for a class presentation on her
work on Amelia Rosselli. And I soon discovered that Rosselli is one of
the most interesting and innovative Italian poets of the past
half-century. As she was both a poet who wrote in three
languages—Italian, English and French—and a translator, questions of
translation are central to her work. Deborah asked me to collaborate
with her in preparing
Hospital Series for publication and I enthusiastically accepted.
AC
Amelia Rosselli’s first collection of poems, Variazioni
belliche, was published in Italy in 1964, and her last, Sleep, in 1992.
How do you explain the long delay in translations and critical attention
in America?
DW Translation doesn’t fare all that well in the United States in
general. And poetry itself is a hard sell. Each translation that comes
out adds to the momentum and reaches out to new readers. Having
translated Rosselli for twenty years, I know that she only gets better.
This process of bestowing upon her the attention she deserves, though
still achingly slow, is irreversible.
RA One can even say that Amelia Rosselli is more appreciated in the
United States than in Italy. Although quite known in Italy, she has not
yet received the critical attention she deserves. Partly because her
poetry requires such a strenuous, almost physical, mental effort, and
partly because Rosselli was a particularly difficult individual, an
outsider somewhat isolated from the contemporary literary scene.
AC
Now at last, thanks to your work, that of Lucia Re and Paul
Vangelisti, and of Jennifer Scappettone, there are a variety of
different translations available. Many scholars are beginning to study
her work. Do you have any hypotheses for why her moment has finally
arrived?
DW As I said above, it is a slow build. But we are getting there.
RA There is a tendency among American scholars in Italian studies to
translate, especially women. To the point that, for instance, we have
the paradox of Italian original texts by sixteenth, seventeenth hundred
women writers available in Italian in a modern edition only because of
the English translation. I believe Amelia is part of this trend.
AC
Translations are often done in teams: could you describe the
specific nature of the collaboration between you, Giuseppe Leporace and
Roberta Antognini on Hospital Series?
DW Giuseppe and I worked on
Hospital Series for several years. We put the translation on the back burner when Alfredo de Palchi of Chelsea Editions invited us to compile
The Dragonfly:
A selection of Poems 1953-1981. By the time I returned to
Hospital Series,
several new books on Rosselli had been published, and the Mondadori
definitive edition of her work was in the offing. It was time to take a
fresh look at
Hospital Series. When Roberta and I met at
Vassar, and subsequently attended the Barnard symposium in 2011 on
Rosselli, we agreed to work together to review
Hospital Series
and prepare it for publication. We came to terms over a couple glasses
of red wine. Thanks to Roberta, the translation is crisper and more
accurate, and there is more of Amelia’s music in it and a pinch more of
her word play, all of which makes me very happy.
RA Even though I was revising more than translating, the experience of co-translating
Serie ospedaliera
with Deborah has been exhilarating. In Amelia, tradition and innovation
are so deeply intertwined that almost every word is a challenge. When
Deborah was looking into the depth of the target language, I was digging
into the source language as profoundly as I could, trying to find out
as much as I could in order to convey to her the movement of Amelia’s
poetic voice.
AC
In 2009 you translated with Giuseppe Leporace a selection of
Amelia Rosselli’s poems (The Dragonfly. A selection of Poems 1953-1981,
Chelsea Editions). That earlier collection included 17 poems from
Hospital Series. In your new book you have reworked those same poems, at
time making different choices of words, word order and entire verses.
Can you contrast the experience of working on the two translations and
describe how your understanding of this material has changed?
For example, in your first translation of Sex violent as an object (whitened quarry of marble)
You first translated: “Non gaudente, non sapiente serpentinamente
influenzato da esempi illustri o illustrazioni di candore, per la pace e
per l’anima purulava” as: “Not pleasure-seeking, not learned
serpentinely influenced by illustrious examples or illustrations of
candor, it festered for peace and for the soul.
In your new translation it becomes:
Not sybaritic nor sage
serpentinely influenced by illustrious examples or illustrations
of candor, it festered for peace and for the soul.
DW I wanted to speed the lines up a bit, too, as this poem moves so
beautifully. In general, few translations are written in stone. With a
poet such as Rosselli, one can always have a new idea because she
presents us with concentric circles of sound and meaning. I consulted
the thesaurus, came up with “sybarite” and “sage,” and loved the
sure-footedness of these new choices. In fact, as Roberta pointed out to
me, “gaudente” and “sapiente” are hapax words, occurring only once in
the text. We needed something a little out of the ordinary, for a poet
who is
always out of the ordinary.
AC
Now that several translators have worked on Amelia Rosselli’s
poetry, the English language reader has choices. One measure of the
difficulty of translating Rosselli is highlighted by the fact that even
the title of her first collection, Variazioni belliche, has been
translated alternatively as War Variations, Martial Variations and
Bellicose Variations… Would you care to elaborate?
DW I’m not completely convinced by any of these translations of Rosselli’s title. At the time, I felt that
Martial Variations
flowed well, but, rethinking that choice, I fear that it suggests a
regimented display that is the complete antithesis of what the text is
about.
War Variations is accurate but sacrifices the Latinate mellifluousness of the original. At the moment, I think that I prefer
Bellicose Variations
(Scappettone) because the attitude, the bellicosity of the narrator’s
voice, is so prominent in these poems. It is more of a mouthful in
English than in Italian, but, for whatever reason, this title is tricky.
Fortunately,
Hospital Series is always going to be translated as just that (I think!).
RA The discussion of this title provides a great example of the way Deborah and I worked on the final draft of
Hospital Series: literally dissecting words and debating solutions. In this case, the great fascination of the vaguely oxymoronic title
Variazioni belliche comes from the combination of the (also but not only) musical term
variazioni with the adjective
bellico that retains the Latin etymology (the noun would be “guerra” which has the same German origin of the English “war”). However,
bellico means “pertaining to war”, rather than “bellicose”, eager to fight, for which there is the adjective
bellicoso. Hence, the
variations are not
bellicose, they just belong to war. Personally I like best the more literal translation of
War Variations, which in English has a nice alliteration to it.
AC
Rosselli’s experimentation with language takes radical new
turns from book to book. Having translated both earlier and later work,
how would you characterize the specific language of Hospital Series?
DW With the exception of the heightened lyricism of the
Campana-influenced “La Libellula: panegirico alla libertà” (“The
Dragonfly: panegyric to liberty”), I didn’t find the language between
her first two books to be markedly dissimilar.
Hospital Series is a bit more meditative than
Variazioni belliche at
times, perhaps. The issues are the same, but the theater is smaller and
more intimate—again, with the notable exception of “The Dragonfly”,
which was written earlier.
Documento strikes a very different
note, but I can’t adequately characterize the ways in which its language
differs as of yet. I might provisionally term it more austere.
AC
Do you plan to translate more of her work in the future?
DW Yes, once our schedules synch up, Roberta and I will be reviewing Rosselli’s poetic prose / veiled autobiography
Diario Ottuso (
Obtuse Diary), which I initially translated with Giuseppe Leporace for
The Dragonfly,
and which I worked on with another translator, Dario de Pasquale, as
well. I love this little book of “prosa d’arte.” Then, finally, Roberta
and I will turn our attention to
Documento (
Document).
Documento
is a challenge, to say the least, but we are drawn to the magnitude of
this text. It is an entire landscape, and a very social and political
one, it would appear.
RA All of Amelia’s poetry is characterized by an inner tension
between the geometry of the prosody and the freedom of the language.
Amelia considered
Documento her most mature work, and, if we intend for maturity a sort of crystallization of this tension, it probably is.
AC
How, if at all, do you feel that your work on Rosselli has impacted your own poetic practice?
DW I was very influenced by “The Dragonfly,” specifically by the way
Rosselli interrogates lyrical imagery at the same time as she
rejuvenates it. In my view, she renovates the lyrical line by finding
ways to distort it, if that makes any sense, and by stopping it in its
tracks and then picking it up again. I learned a lot from Amelia about
timing. Her ear is impeccable. The extended riffs of “The Dragonfly”
gave me a sense of freedom—the poem is, after all, a panegyric to
liberty. I hope that
Documento will give me another key, somehow. -
primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/hospital-series/
Amelia Rosselli, Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, Trans. by Jennifer Scappettone; a bilingual ed., University Of Chicago Press, 2012.
A musician, musicologist, and self-defined “poet of research,” Amelia
Rosselli (1930–96) was one of the most important poets to emerge from
Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Following a childhood and
adolescence spent in exile from Fascist Italy between France, England,
and the United States, Rosselli was driven to express the hopes and
devastations of the postwar epoch through her demanding and
defamiliarizing lines. Rosselli’s trilingual body of work synthesizes a
hybrid literary heritage stretching from Dante and the troubadours
through Ezra Pound and John Berryman, in which playful inventions across
Italian, English, and French coexist with unadorned social critique. In
a period dominated by the confessional mode, Rosselli aspired to
compose stanzas characterized by a new objectivity and collective
orientation, “where the I is the public, where the I is things, where
the I is the things that happen.” Having chosen Italy as an “ideal
fatherland,” Rosselli wrote searching and often discomposing verse that
redefined the domain of Italian poetics and, in the process, irrevocably
changed the Italian language.
This collection, the first to bring together a generous selection of her
poems and prose in English and in translation, is enhanced by an
extensive critical introduction and notes by translator Jennifer
Scappettone. Equipping readers with the context for better apprehending
Rosselli’s experimental approach to language, Locomotrix seeks to
introduce English-language readers to the extraordinary career of this
crucial, if still eclipsed, voice of the twentieth century.
In Scappettone, Rosselli has found an inventive, aesthetically
kindred translator, one who rightly chooses ‘to startle when Rosselli
startles, and not to gloss';—to maintain, that is, rather than tame, the
singularities of Rosselli’s capacious and difficult work. But the word
‘maintain’ makes it sound too easy, as if the translator had only to
leave well enough alone, when of course what is often required is the
invention in English of sympathetic singularities, which Scappettone, a
poet herself, provides in abundance. As if that weren’t enough, the
poems themselves are framed by Scappettone’s excellent introduction and
by well-chosen prose selections and helpful bibliographies and notes. . .
.
Locomotrix is an exemplary volume and by far the best introduction to Rosselli now available to English-language readers.” -
Geoffrey Brock
“After
more than a decade of research, travel, translation, revision, and
cross-examination, Jennifer Scappettone offers to the Anglophone reader
an extraordinary harvest of texts by Amelia Rosselli, under the
comprehensive (and Rossellian) title Locomotrix . . . in a
bilingual edition, which permits the volume to continue the dialogue
across languages that is in fact the powerful root of Rosselli’s
imagination and poetry. A poet herself, beyond being a scholar,
Scappettone is the ideal translator of a dense and multifoliate writing
like that of Rosselli. . . . [B]oth readers for whom the voice and
history of Rosselli are still unknown and those already familiar with
her work will find elements of reflection and annotations that
interrogate and reinterrogate the texts (which are now legible in a new
light thanks to the insight/translation into English).” - Marco Giovenale
“Jennifer
Scappettone’s selection from the full corpus of [Rosselli’s] work, with a
substantial introduction to match, offers English speakers with little
or no Italian the best chance yet of engaging in depth with Rosselli’s
demanding and strangely rewarding voice.” - Peter Hainsworth
“Scappettone
succeeds more consistently in rendering the intensity and grit of
Rosselli’s language than the previous translators, contending
imaginatively with a poetic style in which words are often twisted,
invented, or forced into use from other languages; besides which she
gives us a very substantial introduction to Rosselli’s life and poetics,
not to mention useful endnotes, along with Rosselli’s most important
statement of intent, the essay ‘Metrical Spaces.’ Also included are an
interview, a handful of letters, and appreciations of her work by
Zanzotto and Pier Paolo Pasolini.”
-
Barry Schwabsky
“[Scappettone]
is always conscious of trap doors and multiple meanings to unravel and
iron out . . . [and] knows how to render the tone of reflection or
desperation, invective, shock, spontaneity, and freedom in the poetry of
Amelia. All with great daring—or rather, thanks precisely to this
daring of hers.” - Giulia Niccolai
“Poet,
translator, and professor, . . . Scappettone—who has also translated
authors of her own generation, like Giovanna Frene, Florinda Fusco, and
Marco Giovenale—offers a truly compelling example of the vivacious
osmotic exchange between the current experimental poetry of the United
States and that of Italy. Her Locomotrix is not only an
accomplished example of an ‘expanded’ anthology (that includes critical
writings, letters, and photographs), but also a stimulating and
felicitous theoretical attempt to present the complex—and certainly not
easily translatable—work of the splendidly ‘obtuse’ giantess-mother of a
great part of today’s poetic research to a global public.”
- Gian-Maria Annovi
“In the landscape of twentieth-century Italian writing, Amelia
Rosselli’s poems stand out as a unique achievement, cultivating oblique,
discontinuous forms that mix social diagnosis and satire, memory and
introspection, tragedy and utopianism. Jennifer Scappettone’s editorial
project is a work of cultural restoration that helps to create a broader
context in which the anglophone reader can more fully appreciate
Italian poetic traditions. But she has done much more: drawing on her
own formidable skills as an experimental poet in English, Scappettone
has produced an ambitiously innovative translation whose effects are at
once stunning and uncanny in recreating the Italian. The result is a
body of poetry that is challenging, to be sure, yet tremendously
powerful.” - Lawrence Venuti
Half a century after the searching start—across and between
tongues—of her uncompromising poetic practice, the poet Amelia Rosselli
has emerged in global literary discussions as exemplary: as both
prophetic and crucially contemporary. She has come to occupy a prominent
position in literary history as one of the twentieth century’s most
significant and demanding poets of the Italian language and beyond, with
a body of work that concretizes in its agitation the postwar era’s
fallout and bequest. Her books of poetry and recently collected prose
are testaments to a uniquely multiform sincerity, and to a fiendishly
restless mind, synthesizing a literary tradition that stretches from the
thirteenth-century
dolce stil novo through Rimbaud, Campana,
Kafka, Joyce, and Pasternak with the frankness of the news. The daughter
of an assassinated hero of the Italian Resistance who spent her
childhood and adolescence in exile between France, England, and the
United States before settling in Rome, Rosselli is esteemed for the
idiolect she forged to voice the aftermath of this experience while
resisting both the confessional first person dominating mainstream
poetry during the years of her production and the aesthetic conformities
of vanguardist schools. Self-described “poeta della ricerca” (“poet of
research”), she regarded poetry as a sphere of activity exceeding the
narcissistic gamut of self-expression and constraint of genteel
intellectualism: language in Rosselli’s handling is a site of innovation
with imperative philosophical and political consequences. Never mere
linguistic exercise, her writing launches explicit and implicit
structural assaults on the authority of traditional poetic forms, as
well as the social and cognitive forms that gave rise to them.
She has fed me senseless small change, brought me to the bank, had me counted and found the sum surplus. —“My Clothes to the Wind” (1952)
To summarize her oeuvre, then, is but “an obligatory cruelty”; in its
errancies, this work draws into question the synthetic categories of
postwar poetry that have been forged thus far. In the early English
prose piece called “My Clothes to the Wind,” the young author describes
those who would encompass her as “Biscuit-makers all, and I a crumb
who’d not coagulate,” voicing an attitude of alienation from reigning
forms that would persist on many fronts. Rosselli’s tumultuous
upbringing in the midst and aftermath of the Second World War as a
victim of Fascism fostered her estrangement from the Italian literary
establishment for decades. Being linguistically and culturally
heterogeneous, her writing was initially regarded as a key exception to
the rule of this national literature, even in the face of acclaim by
prominent poet-critics and her historical distinction as the first—and
still one of few—female Italian authors included in canon-defining
anthologies of twentieth-century poetry. Yet as consciousness rises
regarding the fundamental reciprocity between
italianità (Italianness),
emigration, and immigration, her poetic output has been subject to an
explosion of attention. The impulses of Rosselli’s work in and against
the Italian language are best appreciated when aligned with aesthetic
trends that are international, while her role in shaping the future of
this particular language and its literature is best grasped if we listen
for the way it articulates the Italian
patria, or
“fatherland,” as itself a hybrid, transnational cultural formation.
Rosselli’s is arguably the poetry most vital to evolving understandings
of global modernism and postmodernism to have emerged from postwar
Italy, testifying to the privations and hard-won inheritance of cultures
bound by colossal networks of commerce and violence. Her poetic
transmutes the war into which she was born into a battle against every
species of tyranny: literary, cultural, sexual, economic, and,
congenitally, political.
Rosselli was born in Paris in 1930 into a prominently, ardently
antitotalitarian climate—into a family living in political exile. Her
paternal grandmother and namesake, Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, was a
secular Jewish Venetian feminist and republican thinker from a family
active in the unification of Italy; Amelia Pincherle was the celebrated
author of plays, some in Venetian dialect, and of short stories,
children’s literature, political and literary essays, and translations.
Amelia’s mother, Marion Catherine Cave, was a brilliant English activist
of the Labour Party, from a family of Quaker and distant Irish Catholic
heritage and modest means. Her father, Carlo Rosselli, was an
intellectual leader and eventually a martyr of the anti-Fascist
Resistance. Having been convicted—in a trial he exploited to critique
Mussolini’s regime—of facilitating socialist Filippo Turati’s flight
from Italy, Carlo himself escaped from the penal colony on the island of
Lipari in 1929; Marion, pregnant with Amelia, was briefly arrested for
complicity before the family was reunited in Paris. It was from the
French capital that, with his brother Nello, Carlo launched Justice and
Liberty, a prominent non-Marxist resistance movement based on principles
of “liberal socialism,” which included Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese, and
Leone Ginzburg among its affiliates, and later became the influential if
short-lived Action Party. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War,
Carlo was among the first to mobilize an armed brigade of volunteers in
the fight against Franco, articulating the importance of organizing
resistance to Fascism across Europe with the rallying cry “Today in
Spain, tomorrow in Italy.” Identified as prime enemies of the regime,
the Rosselli brothers were brutally murdered by the French Fascist
terrorist organ La Cagoule in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, Normandy in June 1937.
The news was dealt to the seven-year-old “Melina” and her younger
brother Andrea by their mother as a problem of language: “Do you know
what the word assassination means?” She recalled in a 1987 interview,
“We answered yes.”
—
from the introduction by Jennifer Scappettone
from Variazioni belliche / Bellicose Variations (1964)
What ails my heart which beats so suavely
& maketh hee disconsolate, ese
soundings quite steel? lle Those
scomminglings therein ’mprinted fore Ille
be harrowed so
fiercely, alle hath evanished! O shhd mine
hares rampant thru th’nerves &s thru
channels rimed ’f thisse my lymph (o life!)
not stopp, thus yes, th’I, mio
nearyng unto mortae! In alle claundors soul of mine
thou dost propose a cure, thee I imbrace, you,—
find ’at Suave Word, you, return
to the comprehended saying that makes sure love remains.
from Documento / Document (1966-1973)
It comes
blown down the stairs,
likeness that I make of each thing
that passes through my mind
as if forgiveness were always at the ready there.
To barter the cigarettes of others
for a dormer full of good books . . .
In the court and the percentages I saw
the trial extended between the lines
and I acquitted the commanding officer
because you were the usual slaughterer
of women in the labyrinth
frightened by the scream
between mountains of stone
in the horror of a bomb
undetonated
like all of our best things:
politics in its chintzy sale
you bestow your assembled powers liberally
amongst the illiterate of the neighborhood
and amongst the dust you were carrying intact
in grey luggage.
•••
this is the sea today
in waves more serene that slash
that scream & that toil of yours deliberately
fusing the
vision of a gash with a gash
everything remakes itself,
& from the top & again
•••
the fragrant lymphatic canals
of mosquitoes
in the empty shack
no one can any longer lay hands on
knotty histories
trading them for a metaphor.
•••
There’s something like pain in this chamber, and
it is partly overcome: but the weight
of objects wins, their signifying
weight and loss.
There’s something like red in the tree, but it is
the orange of the lamp base
purchased in places I don’t wish to remember
because they also weigh.
Like nothing I can know of your hunger
the stylized fountains are
precise in wanting
a reversal can be settled of the destiny
of men divided by oblique noise.
General Strike 1969
lamps wholly alight and in the howl
of a calm audacious crowd
to find yourself there, acting with seriousness:
taking risks! May this apparent
childishness shatter even my own
power not to give a damn.
A deep inner God could have sufficed
my egotism did not suffice for me
the taste of riches in an otherwise
throttled revenge did not suffice
for these people. We had to
express something better: allow ourselves
this rhetoric that was a howl
of protest against undaunted
destruction in our frightened
houses. (I lost on my own that vertical
love of solitary god
revolutionizing myself in the people
removing myself from heaven.)
Please welcome the scholar and translator Diana Thow, who for
today’s entry has generously provided poems from her translation of
Amelia Rosselli's
Serie Ospedaliera (
Hospital Series) in addition to some illuminating and insightful Rosselli context and commentary.
—RF
From Serie Ospedaliera (1963-1965)
Amelia Rosselli/translation Diana Thow Lifting of weights and particularities of fate
little doves eyed my strength
taken from your take-off like
candy, the vocation melted into
a semantic revision of our quarrels
and birds. None of the soldiers who really
wanted to remarry was able to tell me
who is it that really marches.
….solitary in the didactic regions
I held the brigantella disappointed by
such a miserable fate, oh
see I’m exploding, don’t run away, the
piano’s machinegun subtracts
sensations, metro, camphor, the curved
red lips bricks of the safe.
*
A thin little voice: enough to open the shutter
of the little window, that changes the world
and its surfaces are a part of your
migraines. Enough to barely open, open, your
sleep measures itself against the sky, where
a tragic image stays.
You open a wall: another appears, to take
your pulse. You can’t razor the wall, you don’t want
to save yourself those few spirit hours, forcing
its mysterious cells. And still, you feel like
a fallen pine between the new pine groves,
straight end to rotten pity.
*
You scare yourself with all your heart
with the air that shakes and sheds you;
dreams radiate down through the
illiterate facades, you count
blood in fat drops
falling full into your hands
withdrawals from the anguish of knowing
where the air is what does it move why
it speaks, of ills so watered down
to seem, so many things together
but not one you forget, your
dragging night and blood
through immense days.
[Note: “You scare yourself with all your heart” first appeared in the estimable
THERMOS]
RF: Who was Amelia Rosselli?DT: In her words:
Born in Paris afflicted in the epoch of our fallacious
generation. Laid out in America among the rich fields of landowners
and the statal State. Lived in Italy, barbarous land.
Fled from England land of the sophisticated. Hopeful
in the West where nothing now grows.
—from “Contiamo infiniti morti…” in
Variazioni Belliche, translation Cinzia Blum and Lara Trubowitz)
Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) was a dynamic, idiosyncratic and intensely
lyrical presence in postwar Italian poetry. She was in a category of her
own: not only multilingual (she grew up speaking English, French and
Italian), she was often the token female in the largely male dominated
field of Italian literature at that time. Rosselli was born in Paris in
exile. Her father was the famous antifascist leader Carlo Rosselli, and
her mother was British. Her very name bore the scars of Italy’s
struggles to liberate itself from the fascist regime in an era that was
trying to forget its fascist past. After her father’s assassination, she
spent formative years in upstate New York with her extended family.
During this time her grandmother read the children Dante in Italian so
that they wouldn’t forget their Italian language and heritage. Amelia
finished high school in London, and moved with her grandmother to the
family home in Florence in the 1950s, eventually relocating to Rome,
where she would live for the rest of her life.
Her voice was as distinctive as her poetry:
she spoke Italian with a hint of a French accent (most noticeable in
her French pronunciation of the letter R). In addition to her work as a
poet, she also worked as a journalist, editor, and mentor to younger
poets.
Rosselli was deeply interested in prosody (both English and
Italian) and had a background in both visual and musical studies. She
was largely an autodidact, but had extensive formal training as a
pianist, organist and composer in her teens and twenties, and in the
decade before her first book of poetry was published she was intensively
involved in the experimental music scene in Rome. She attended the
famous Darmstadt music conference at the end of the 50s and beginning of
the 60s, and met composers such as Cage and Stockhausen and studied
with Italian composers Guido Turchi and Luciano Berio. Even when she
left music for a career in literature the influence of her musical
upbringing lingered: there is a recording of Rosselli reading her final
poem, “Impromptu,” in which she basically sings sections of the long
poem.
RF: Tell us about the traditions Rosselli was working out of and about her associations with her contemporaries.DT:
Rosselli’s trilingual background is crucial to her poetics—her verses
reflect this particular mesh of languages in their linguistic
flexibility and complexity. She was associated with the neo-avant-garde
poetry movements of the 60s and 70s, in particular the experimental
Gruppo ‘63, which included poets Edoardo Sanguineti, Antonio Porta,
Adriano Spatola, Giulia Niccolai, and Elio Pagliarini. Rosselli was
reticent about her affiliation with the group, as she felt herself to be
working within a more lyrical tradition; she named Montale, Campana and
Saba as influences, as well as Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rilke, and T.S.
Eliot. Yet, within the group she felt a special affinity for Antonio
Porta [For those unfamiliar with Porta, I recommend picking up the
recently released selected Porta
here —R.F.], who also translated some of her English poetry into Italian (the bilingual volume is called
Sleep-Sonno).
In Rome she frequented literary circles that included Alberto Moravia
(her cousin), Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and she
performed with Carmelo Bene. John Ashbery published her first English
poems in his Paris journal
Art and Literature in 1965.
RF: What work have you chosen to translate and why? DT: I’ve translated her second collection,
Serie Ospedaliera (
Hospital Series),
because I love the book. I was living in Rome when I translated it and
the city truly saturates the collection—the Roman cobblestones (
sampietrini,
named after Saint Peter’s Square) are mentioned by name, the Tiber
winds in and out of the poems, the green spaces are often the hidden
gardens of the Janiculum Hill, above Rosselli’s neighborhood in
Trastevere. The screech and shrill of the squares and scooters and
markets are audible in these poems, the solid stone of the buildings,
their windows and blinds opening and shutting. The poems share an
intensity, what Rosselli called a linguistic rigor, with
Variazioni Belliche,
yet there is a softer edge to them. Petrarch returns often, as does
Montale, and the violence of the first collection turns inward, becomes
more searching and contemplative. In the collection Rosselli navigates
the interiors of the lyrical subject, destabilized by illness. The
figure of the sick lover transforms sickness itself into a lover; the
lyrical object of desire also becomes the lyrical subject, the one who
speaks and observes. This reflexivity is also true on a linguistic
level: in Rosselli’s Italian there is always the pull of the English
language; the effect, for someone who reads both, is that of looking
through Italian at English. Translation always creates a space in which
the translator is asked to think about the translating language in a new
way, one that is estranged from its standard patterns and enriched by
its new associations with the source text. Rosselli’s multilingualism
opens English up to Italian and French in a way that illuminates all
three languages, sharp rays of light cast through a prism.
Martin Fierro the Gaucho
The Return of Martin Fierro
The Epic of the Gaucho (Americas Magazine, 1965)
short stories
