Courtesy of Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York, NY.
Note
These translations appear in the collection Document, published by World Poetry Press in April 2025. They are reproduced here with the publisher’s permission.
I
Flanking the empty tree the ants’
tents seemed to remember what
madness it was to exist. They had rich
columns of substitutes flung out
in the itch of the virulent rind
like a godly god.
Outside I saw my every effort marking
itself with saliva at the game going badly
in green undulations.
Which forest of unsuspecting firs restored
my lost strength?
And sometimes they die on the treetops
the grim squirrels within the calibre of
a long tail; the thick grip of
proliferous arches and thorns hasn’t necessarily
any meaning. But I’ve also seen
the sacrifice of animals come in handy
and it’s not always beneficial to be a
maremma for the humiliated deer defeated by the
cold.
Questioning nature I saw only one
false step: that of the envious man
of maternal nature who castrating himself
obeyed primordial instincts. They
destroyed all sorts of placid occasions
at the meek vivification of life that crowning itself
with successes could no longer bear
the squalid vicissitudes of the exiled.
And they opened masks to such an involuntary
wish for peace on earth. What could it have been
this arid genius that put so many obstacles
in the way of a richer safeguard? Maybe
life is defeated and has no species resolved
to fight evil.
Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris in 1930 to the British political activist Marion Cave and Carlo Rosselli, an antifascist Italian political leader and philosopher of Jewish descent. In 1948, she settled in Rome where she would spend the rest of her life. She translated Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath into Italian and was an accomplished musicologist and musician, who played the violin, the piano, and the organ. Rosselli published 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), and
Sleep: Poems in English (1992). Aside from one early collection, all of Rosselli’s works have been translated into English. After years of struggling with mental illness, Rosselli took her own life in 1996.
Roberta Antognini is from Canton Ticino, Switzerland. She has a Laurea from the Università Cattolica di Milano, Italy, and a PhD from New York University. She is Associate Professor Emerita of Italian Studies at Vassar College, the author of a monograph on Petrarch, and co-editor of a collection of essays on Giorgio Bassani, whose collected poems she translated with Peter Robinson. With Deborah Woodard, she has translated Amelia Rosselli’s collections
Hospital Series, Obtuse Diary, The Dragonfly, Notes Scattered and Lost, and
Document.
Deborah Woodard studied with Charles Simic at the University of New Hampshire and has a PhD from the University of Washington. Her books include
Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats) and
No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press). With Roberta Antognini, she has translated the poetry of Amelia Rosselli in
Hospital Series (New Directions),
Obtuse Diary, The Dragonfly, and
Notes Scattered and Lost (Entre Rios Books). Their translation of Rosselli’s
Document has just been published by World Poetry Books. Deborah teaches at Hugo House in Seattle, Washington and co-curates the reading series Margin Shift.
