Amelia Rosselli
Translated by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard
Excerpt from Document
[forthcoming from World Poetry Books in January 2025]
I saw the sky gloat: it was purple
then gradually cleared and I
cleared with it: I couldn’t
be it!
When it went from gray to light it was no longer
sky: ah a fleeting moment that even
I destroyed!
When the sky went back to being that
coarse engine of our city
winters I almost forgot that it could
be a blaze at dawn.
Without warning the blue turned colorless
the depth of dawn and night
faded into agony at break of day.
Ho visto il cielo gongolarsi: era purpureo
poi mano a mano si schiariva ed io mi
schiarivo con esso: non riuscivo ad
essere esso!
Quando fu grigio a chiaro non fu più
cielo: ah un attimo sfuggente che perfino
io distrussi!
Quando il cielo tornò ad essere quella
macchina sguaiata dei nostri inverni
cittadini dimenticai quasi che potesse
essere all’alba un fulgore.
A tradimento il blu si fece incolore
la profondità dell’alba e della notte
sfumò in agonia di primo mattino.
Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris on March 28, 1930, and died in Rome, taking her own life, 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. At the end of the war, in 1946, she relocated to Europe, 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 eight collections of poetry: War Variations (1964), Hospital Series (1969), Document (1966-1973) (1976), Impromptu (1981), First Writings (1952-1963) (1980), Notes Scattered and Lost 1966-1977 (1983), Obtuse Diary 1954-1968 (1990), Sleep. Poems in English (1992). She was a translator of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, among others, and an accomplished musicologist and musician who played the violin, the piano and the organ. Document was first published in 1976 in Milano by Garzanti.
Roberta Antognini is Associate Professor Emerita at Vassar College, where she taught for over twenty years. She is co-editor of the collection of essays Poscritto a Giorgio Bassani (LED, 2012) and co-translator, with Peter Robinson, of Giorgio Bassani’s poetry, In Rhyme and Without (Agincourt Press, 2023). Deborah Woodard’s books include Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star Press, 2006), Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012) and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). Antognini and Woodard have co-translated Amelia Rosselli in Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015), Obtuse Diary (Entre Rios Books, 2018) and The Dragonfly (Entre Rios Books, 2023). Their translation of Rosselli’s Notes Scattered and Lost is forthcoming in the fall of 2024, also from Entre Rios Books. And World Poetry Books will bring out their translation of Rosselli’s Document in the winter of 2025.