Vorrei donarti il mio sangue tutto
Ma esso corre in piccoli inestricabili
rivoletti, e non graffia la tua porta
d’entrata con abbastanza tenerezza
per tenerci a galla.
O forse sei qua ad accompagnarmi? Ne
ho perso le vie anch’io di questa tua
triste casa. Non vedo altro che luci
e tramonti che a me sembrano diabolici.
Hai rime intense per me, non posso
provvedere al caso che tramite questo
tuo essere re delle mie giornate.
*
Pietre tese nel bosco: hanno piccoli
amici, le formiche ed altri animali
che non so riconoscere. Il vento non
spazza via il sasso, quelle fosse, quei
resti d’ombra, quel vivere di sogni
pesanti.
Resti nell’ombra: ho un cuore che scotta
e poi si sfalda per ingenuamente ricordarsi
di non morire.
Ho un cuore come quella foresta: tutta
sarcastica a volte, i suoi rami lordi
discendono sulla testa a pesarti.
Insonnia
I miei occhi che non s’aprono, dal
sonno o dalla tortura, ed invece eccoti
qua, a scegliere un’altra via: la medicina
per non addormentarti.
I miei occhi sembrano pieni di sabbia
tanto ha fatto l’alba svegliandosi
e costretta a riparare guasti, ha lanciato
motivi d’appello; per non svegliarsi
ma invece sono le cinque ogni giorno
prima che la notte ti conosca in piedi
o assorto nel sonno.
*
Uno strepitare svelto di ali smorzate
questo incesto non
si ha da fare.
Nel cavo della mano rimane
solo un fluorescente pensarsi?
Le scienze
naturali e colte
il mio grido di fanciulla senza colomba.
*
Ho sognato visite di parenti
maldestre donne e sindacati
mi congiungo a chi vive più vivo di me
sviscerare le piante, emettere un grido.
Poi dimostrarsi inadatti alla causa
mentre balenano pidocchi
scrittore in povertà, la mente
disturbata da nonsensi.
Come una bestia le tue indulgenze, e
i cuscini affondavano comodamente
in una specie di clausola senza causa
senza emettere un suono.
Mentre fiaschi di vino e trappole usuali
strizzavano l’occhio a tanta verginità
ed ora annaspa nel retrocampo
umiliandosi le mani.
da Documento
Amelia Rosselli
Listen to "Insomnia" read in the original Italian by the author:
Translation takes a lot of time and, if one has a cotranslator , coordination of schedules. The two of us have been collaborating for years, first over the phone and lately taking advantage of wonderful Zoom. When working on an author such as Rosselli, where tradition and innovation are so deeply intertwined, almost every word is a challenge, and the experience of cotranslating Document has been exhilarating, to say the least, with the two of us endlessly debating solutions. While Deborah delved into the depth of the target language, Roberta was digging into the source language, trying to unearth as much as she could in order to convey to Deborah the movement of Amelia’s poetic voice and precise meanings. Rosselli’s intentions, in short.
All of Rosselli’s poetry is characterized by an inner tension between the geometry of the prosody and the freedom of the language. Document is a challenge, but we were drawn to the magnitude of this text. It took Rosselli seven years to complete the process of selecting poems for it. The final work, published in Milan by Garzanti in 1976, includes 175 poems, chronologically ordered as in Francis Petrarch’s famous thirteenth-century canzoniere. Long fascinated by the classical sonnet as an ideal model, with Document—her third and last major collection—Rosselli went a step further by adopting Petrarch’s approach, i.e., generating meaning partially through the sequencing of the collection, thus helping to contain the flood of her poetic work. At first glance, nothing seems to be farther from Document than Petrarch’s carefully built collection. However, Rosselli was well aware of the interplay between autobiography (albeit highly idealized) and fiction in Petrarch’s poetry, and she was fascinated by what it means to tell a story through a collection of poems—in Rosselli’s story or stories, as in Petrarch, autobiography is always knowingly lurking. Speaking of Document, Rosselli said: “It was hard work, those who do not write poetry cannot imagine what difficult studies poets do to compose, even if they live on a budget and even if the principle remains that poetry is either inspired or worthless.” This “hard work,” one Rosselli was most fond of, resulted in the transformation of the literary model of her predecessor Petrarch into an innovative and ambitious venture reflecting the challenges of her own subjective experience—the pain, the intensity and turmoil of her existence—and of our own violent and chaotic times.
All of Rosselli’s poetry is characterized by an inner tension between the geometry of the prosody and the freedom of the language. Document is a challenge, but we were drawn to the magnitude of this text. It took Rosselli seven years to complete the process of selecting poems for it. The final work, published in Milan by Garzanti in 1976, includes 175 poems, chronologically ordered as in Francis Petrarch’s famous thirteenth-century canzoniere. Long fascinated by the classical sonnet as an ideal model, with Document—her third and last major collection—Rosselli went a step further by adopting Petrarch’s approach, i.e., generating meaning partially through the sequencing of the collection, thus helping to contain the flood of her poetic work. At first glance, nothing seems to be farther from Document than Petrarch’s carefully built collection. However, Rosselli was well aware of the interplay between autobiography (albeit highly idealized) and fiction in Petrarch’s poetry, and she was fascinated by what it means to tell a story through a collection of poems—in Rosselli’s story or stories, as in Petrarch, autobiography is always knowingly lurking. Speaking of Document, Rosselli said: “It was hard work, those who do not write poetry cannot imagine what difficult studies poets do to compose, even if they live on a budget and even if the principle remains that poetry is either inspired or worthless.” This “hard work,” one Rosselli was most fond of, resulted in the transformation of the literary model of her predecessor Petrarch into an innovative and ambitious venture reflecting the challenges of her own subjective experience—the pain, the intensity and turmoil of her existence—and of our own violent and chaotic times.
Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris on March 28, 1930, and took her own life in Rome on February 11, 1996. She was the daughter of the antifascist Italian political leader and philosopher of Jewish descent Carlo Rosselli and the British political activist Marion Cave. After her father's assassination in Paris at the hands of the fascists, the family moved to England and then to the United States. After the end of the war, she relocated to Europe in 1946, first briefly to Florence and then to London to complete her studies. In 1948, Rosselli was back in Florence prior to moving permanently to Rome, where she would remain until her death. Rosselli was the author of many collections of poetry in Italian, including Variazioni belliche (War Variations; Garzanti, 1964), Serie ospedaliera (Hospital Series; Il Saggiatore, 1969), Documento (1966–1973) (Document; Garzanti, 1976), Primi scritti 1952–1963 (First Writings; Guanda, 1980), Impromptu (Impromptu; Edizioni San Marco dei Giustiniani, 1981), Appunti sparsi e persi, 1966–1977 (Notes Scattered and Lost; Aelia Laelia, 1983), Diario ottuso. 1954–1968 (Obtuse Diary; IBN, 1990), and Sleep: Poesie in Inglese (Sleep, Garzanti, 1992). She translated poets such as Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, and was an accomplished musicologist and musician who played the violin, piano, and organ.
Roberta Antognini is originally from the canton of Ticino in Switzerland, where she currently resides. She is associate professor emerita of Italian studies at Vassar College, where she taught for over twenty years. Her research interests lie in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and twentieth-century Italian literature, and literary translation. Since retiring, she has continued to read, write, and translate poetry. She is the author of a monograph on Petrarch’s letters, Il progetto autobiografico delle Familiares di Petrarca (The Autobiographical Project of Petrarch’s Familiar Letters; LED Edizioni Universitarie, 2008), and coeditor of the collection of essays Poscritto a Giorgio Bassani (Postscript to Giorgio Bassani; LED, 2012). With Deborah Woodard, she has translated five of Amelia Rosselli’s collections into English: Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015; also with the translator Giuseppe Leporace), Obtuse Diary (Entre Ríos Books, 2018; also with the translator Dario De Pasquale), The Dragonfly (Entre Ríos Books, 2023), Notes Scattered and Lost (Entre Ríos Books, forthcoming 2024), and Document (World Poetry Books, forthcoming 2025). With Peter Robinson, she has edited and translated Giorgio Bassani’s The Complete Poems (Agincourt Press, 2023).
Deborah Woodard is the author of Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star Press, 2006), Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012), and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). With Roberta Antognini, she has translated Amelia Rosselli’s Hospital Series, Obtuse Diary, and The Dragonfly. Woodard and Antognini’s translation of Rosselli’s Notes Scattered and Lost completes their translations of Rosselli’s short texts and is forthcoming, also from Entre Rios Books, in the fall of 2024, while World Poetry Books will bring out their translation of Rosselli’s longest collection, Document in winter 2025. Woodard cocurates the literary series Margin Shift: Friends in Poetry and teaches at Hugo House, a literary center in Seattle, Washington.
