Amelia Rosselli

On February 11, 1996, the distinguished and eclectic Italian poet Amelia Rosselli committed suicide by jumping into an interior courtyard through the kitchen window of her fifth-floor apartment building in Rome s via del Corallo. (Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, February 11 was also the anniversary of Sylvia Plaths death. Rosselli had translated some of Plaths poetry.) Rosselli was 66 years old and had suffered for many years from a paranoid depression which proved resistant to treatment. Make no mistake, a tribute by Stefano Giovanardi in next days Cronaca read, yesterday we lost a great poet.
Amelia Rosselli was born into a cultivated Jewish Livornese family. Her paternal grandmother, also named Amelia Rosselli, had collected her share of laurels as a playwright. The younger Amelia could also claim Alberto Moravia as a cousin, albeit a few times removed. But she was, most immediately, the scion of partigiani; Carlo and Nello Rosselli, her father and uncle respectively, were anti-fascist theorists and activists in the 20s and 30s who had fled Italy for Paris and founded the movement Giustizia e Liberta`. In fact, Amelia was born in Paris , in 1930. Though too delicate to put herself on the front lines of Resistance work, Amelias mother, Marion Cave , was also deeply political. In 1937, when Amelia was seven years old, Carlo and Nello were assassinated by order of Mussolini. If her fathers and uncles deaths were not the root cause of Amelias later mental illness, they were certainly a major contributor to her malaise. Indeed, Amelias cousin Aldo
Rosselli (Nellos son) dates her disturbances from this trauma, with its acute personal and public reverberations. (Streets in Italy are named after i fratelli Rosselli, the Rosselli brothers.) For Amelia, the years of displacement continued; raised abroad in France , the United States , and England , she became trilingual in the process. Her gifts, which might have been anticipated in the normal course of things, were thus conceived under duress and fostered in exile.
For one whose life was impacted so viscerally by the public sphere, Rosselli produced a body of work largely private, even hermetic. This short poem from her first collection, Variazioni belliche (Bellicose Variations) comes to mind: My life was saved by a retrograde love. My/ life flared up at a bawling out. My circumstances/ were such that I couldnt escape from others./ My fellow citizens raised flags and shouts and again raised/ hearts. I tasted the sun. In Rosselli, a bent towards caustic social satire promoted by an acute awareness of the events of her day is mediated by a protracted, and possibly alternately beneficial and malign, impulse to sit things out. At the end one might feel, to quote one of the translations which follows, almost safe.
Rossellis love poems, with their invocations of a semi-demonic I-thou relationship, both shake her out of her lethargy and reaffirm her narrative of doomed connection. Substituting free verse fulminations/variations for the sonnet, she is, in a sense, a modern Petrarch or Donne, renovating the love lyric as self portrait for her own time. In technical terms, this renovation of the lyric is abetted by Rossellis use of the sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately employed textual glitch Pier Paolo Pasolini dubbed the lapsus in an early and influential essay on Rosselli. The lapsus took the form of misspellings, neologisms, wordplays, and eccentric punctuation. Pasolini goes on to suggest that these bizarre and seemingly arbitrary fissures in language connect the poet to a literary tradition that, in this misshapen form, she can fully claim.
Rich, even florid, images heap up upon one another only to be abruptly broken off. The speed and openness of the poets self-revelations are thus modulated by linguistic and punctuation-induced pitfalls. As my co-translator Giuseppe Leporace has suggested, the commas comprise rotture (breaks) or, to put it another way, variant caesuras that dictate pauses and rhythm while delaying or complicating the payoff of a verb or an image. We can see this technique at work in Maybe Ill die, maybe Ill leave you these in the extra emphasisjagged bursts of perception as opposed to a more traditional lyric succumbingthe comma-enclosed phrase receives in death is a sweet/ companion, taking you, beyond aspiration. Similarly, in the poems send-off imageShe puts her right hand on the steering wheel/ breaks it and deftly, embarks upon magnificent rivers.the final comma is an adventurous choice, creating an obstruction, almost a dam, from which the magnificent waters
release their torrent.
Although Rosselli resisted being translated (sometimes I wonder if she felt she knew some of the target languages all too well), in recent years her poems have appeared in English in versions by a number of translatorsLucia Re and Paul Vangelisti (working in tandem), Jennifer Scappettone, and Ann Snodgrass among them. Giuseppes and my translations herein presented are all taken from Rossellis l969 second collection, Serie ospedaliera (Hospital Series).

Translators-

Deborah Woodard--

Deborah Woodards poetry and translations have appeared in Artful Dodge, the Bellingham Review, Chelsea, Harness, Monkey Puzzle, and the Threepenny Review. She has published two chapbooks of poetry: The Orphan Conducts the Dovehouse Orchestra (Bear Star Press, 1999) and The Book of Riddles (Boxcar Press, 1998). Her first full-length collection, Platos Bad Horse , was published in 2006, also by Bear Star. In collaboration with Giuseppe Leporace, she is currently translating the distinguished modernist Italian poet, Amelia Rosselli. A selected poems of Rosselli will be published by Chelsea Editions in 2007. Deborah teaches at The Richard Hugo House, a community arts center in Seattle.

Giuseppe Leporace--

Giuseppe Leporace is a poet, short story writer, novelist, and translator. He directs the Italian Language Program at the University of Washington. In addition to co-translating Amelia Rosselli, he is currently translating the poetry of Mark Strand into Italian.

1.

In the evening the sky dilates, a poor
thing it is through the window its grey
(though it was green) undulating. Or else

colors that I never thought to reconquer
barked darkly at the doorstep. If
this dark virginity cannot

rid the heart of its psalms
then there's no peace for
the one who unstitches, night and day, banalities
from its lips.

It's not the house (stitched with tiles)
that guides you; it's the crumbling
mystery of the ariel facades

that subtly promises you merriment.

2.

Children own this town
there isn't any theftt only spells transformed
into feverish acquiring and selling, a bit
of wool for pungent feet, and a thick
mattress for lying down. There are only
women in widow's weeds, old lullabies
and the desire to be city folk, like
the rest.

There are no widow's weeds at all in town
only turbaned women or other apishness
children playing with a harp, fingers tight
around a branch.

3.

The heart ponders: nothing can stop it from pondering
"the heart is good", I'm fed up
with driving the rhinoceros. But if winning
war is honor, blinding light, virtue's
fine adjustments (yawning) then conquering the heart
is one's revenge!

4.
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Your watercolors discomposed my mind
loquacious from wintriness. 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 the winter
that was an unremitting cruelty, a sleep of yours hidden
by my prayers, a sidestepping of railroad tracks
which nonetheless kept veering at my head, bowed
when there was light.

And the light discomposing into equal parts evolved
the economical colors of the railroad worker's sheet.

Pale, exhausted, angry you warded off swallows
while I painted equally enamored of
nature and of my need.


5.

If you want, I don't know, if you can, relight the fuse
terribly cold (cotton wool in the sky
still a pearl) though you grow sad, pointing to the sky
mud-filled hands.

Attempting a solution: even if it's only death
indivisible from your ascending, sun.


6.

You with all your heart frighten yourself
with the air that shakes you and loses you:
down along the illiterate facades
dreams are freed, big drops
of blood that you count
as they gush down upon the hands
withdrawn in the anguish of knowing
where the air is what it stirs why
it speaks, of such watered-down wrongs
as to appear, so many things rolled together
but not one which forgets that dragging
of yours through endless days
night and blood.

7.

Seeking in the last shreds of evening a hiding place
less suited than this one that stimulates my
reflexes in long obligatory fringes. Or
to find again in the grass streaked with tenderness
an obligatory cruelty the day that
you fixed your eye on the spring furrow
mesmerizing a world of beasts with glassy
tears that didn't fall but became embroiled
in your so rosy sleep.

Seeking in sleep which yields some phantom
comfort a slim shadow which was that
youth eroded by want, when you gilded
the book of hours.


8.

The sentinels beyond the bridges, the sacrosanct
duties propound tripled considerations: if
you're really a crystal sky almost green
or else tenacity confounds the eels, tenacity
battling self-contradiction, yet another flight
of mine to the outskirts of the illusion that I might
conjoin with azure coasts, hardly
tenacity, here's what it is, not wanting you and having you
in vain, darkly discouraging surveillances
I receive you oh night in the crystalline hands that
reach me separately. Separation and the self-distillation,
of the herbs at the bottom of the tankard the glimmer
of voices and the eternal beyond a song roughed out
with pride.

In the evening I didn't see any of the angels begging
my forgiveness, the air's heavier arms, wrath
an impossible coordination of battles
when the mouth of the river bore us off.



translated by Deborah Woodard and Giuseppe Leporace