Deborah Woodard
A Note on Amelia Rosselli
ON FEBRUARY 11, 1996, the distinguished and eclectic Italian poet Ameilia 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 Plath’s death, a poet whom Rosselli had translated.) 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 the prominent critic Stefano Giovanardi in next day’s Cronaca soberly affirmed. “Yesterday we lost a great poet.”
Amelia Rosselli was born into a cultivated Northern Italian Jewish family, notable for its artistic and political contributions, both realms of which were perceived of as essentially complimentary fields of endeavor. 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. Even more closely, Carlo and Nello Rosselli — Amelia’s father and uncle respectively — were socialist theorists and activists in the ’20s and ’30s who had fled Italy for exile in France where they promptly founded the movement Giustizia e Libertà. Amelia, in fact, was born in Paris, in 1930. Though her health was delicate, Amelia’s mother, Marion Cave, was also deeply political, choosing to follow Carlo into what must have been, in domestic terms, a difficult life abroad.
In 1937, when Amelia was seven years old, Carlo and Nello were assassinated by order of Mussolini. If her father’s and uncle’s deaths were not the root cause of Amelia’s later mental illness, they certainly contributed to her malaise. Indeed, Amelia’s cousin Aldo Rosselli (Nello’s son) dates her disturbances from this trauma with its acute personal as well as public reverberations. (So celebrated were the brothers and so heinous was the crime against them that streets in Italy are named after i fratelli Rosselli, the Rosselli brothers.) For Amelia, displacement was to prove ongoing. She was raised abroad in France, the United States and England, and 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 couldn’t escape from others. / My fellow citizens raised flags and shouts and again raised / hearts. I tasted the sun.” In Rosselli, a bent toward caustic social satire — promoted by an acute awareness of the events of her day — is mediated by an impulse to disengage and sit things out. For, after everything is over, one might feel, to quote one of the translations which follows, “almost safe.”
Rosselli’s 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 variations (or fulminations) 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 Rosselli’s use of a sometimes unconscious, sometimes deliberate textual glitch that Pier Paolo Pasolini, in an early and influential essay on Rosselli dubbed the “lapsus.” Typically, the lapsus took the form of misspellings, neologisms, wordplays, and eccentric punctuation. Pasolini 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 embrace.
Rich, even florid, images heap up upon one another only to be abruptly broken off. The speed and openness of the poet’s self-revelations are thus modulated by linguistic and punctuation-induced pitfalls. As my co-translator Giuseppe Leporace has suggested, many times the non-standard 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 at the end of the third stanza of the poem that starts, “Maybe I’ll die, maybe I’ll leave you these…” Here, the comma-enclosed phrase “taking you” in “death is a sweet / companion, taking you, beyond aspiration” receives extra emphasis, creating a sense of jagged bursts of perception as opposed to a more traditional lyric succumbing. Similarly, in the poem’s send-off image — “She 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 during her lifetime 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 translators — Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti (working in tandem), Jennifer Scappettone, and Ann Snodgrass among them. Giuseppe’s and my translations presented here in Artful Dodge are all taken from Rosselli’s 1969 second collection, Serie ospedaliera (Hospital Series).
—Seattle, Washington, January, 2005
Amelia Rosselli
***
All the doors closed: but I see you, throwing together
a fate for me; it’s my dream that you open the
doors. Then you make yourself scarce: I wake up
holding your good intentions between my hands, an
oiled flower struggles to be born. Instead death and
solipsism, enriched by your reminding me, wander
on the golden plain, it would really be a
dream, your saying that you’re here with me.
Am I reborn? Do I graze on the grass? You remote instead
from every crude origin fail to appear and ominous
forests are mine alone. Spirit remembers and gets bigger
body laments. Maybe you’ve given my
life a pointless impetus. I’m not about to have you
fix me up between your hands.
(Translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard and Giuseppe Leporace)
Amelia Rosselli
***
Hanging faces, bronzes on the wall, brazen faces, saints hanging
on the wall of a solitary rented room, for four
days I wait. A shabby room, weighed down by plastic
flowers, and lions at the door. A clarion sea, and a
hick town: outside green doors set back from the new
road, phantom mountains, the light’s a diadem. The
hills are then green horses, their gallop an embroilment,
a strategem for self-oblivion. It’s still hot, and the sky
is stained with unmarked graves.
(Translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard and Giuseppe Leporace)
Amelia Rosselli
***
Maybe I’ll die, maybe I’ll leave you these
poor sheets as a memento: don’t waste
any thoughts on wilderness, on the poor, but upon the
rich, bestow all my blood.
And my blood in rich rivulets refuses
to be surprised: promiscuity with the neighbors
or a saddle in the wild. Clasp about
me your flowered hand, depart again for
another case of bloodless flowering, I
have never promised, permitted, myself to be
the one who pines away.
But on the trail of my life there’s a battle
of puppies, spectacular fan for
my condolences. Once more tie the cart
to my lips, which condescending to
speak, strangle, the blood, vision
of an incest of smiles, promiscuity,
sly blemishes. So many reasons for my
equivocal camouflage: a little womb
breathing, a voice falling silent, and the negligent
aspirin that remembers; death is a sweet
companion, taking you, beyond aspiration.
Dead I engage the traumatic line
to house these words: write them on
my unmarked grave: “this one can’t write, she dies
roosting on the basket of undigested things,
her manias unclear.”
Unclear her expectations, and the embroidery of
mourning, admonishes. Machine-gunned by a river
of words, she argues, chooses a path, hardly
a match for her potential, if it could be called upon
to abet the great reformation of such tenacious
thoughts. She puts her right hand on the steering wheel
breaks it and deftly, embarks upon magnificent
rivers.
(Translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard and Giuseppe Leporace)
Amelia Rosselli
***
Sweet chaos, a visionary sweetening
carries me fatigued into your model garden
perfectly designed for license,
for lust and for all things that together
procure ease, from your ever-
shifting face.
From within this peaceful
little park I see you leaving, your
steps still leisurely, for another garden
and I know that rain-drenched I will wait
until your image has been resurrected whole
from the graveyard of my penumbras, my thoughts.
Like one deaf you pause uncertainly
at the entrance, wire fence well-secured
against one of your possible departures, and
all around the kindly void seems
to be thinking of something else than your
return — seems, to be expelling you, infesting you
with some punishment — I don’t fall but am always
the one dying piece by piece. And
in this liquefaction of inclinations
the park floor upends itself, the
wood-scent quiets itself down, and all about
brims still the modest joy of being
almost safe.
(Translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard and Giuseppe Leporace)
