III
They melted the war device with my
fingers too busy to have
cannibalistic foods and the whole world
ran to see.
Shattered penis and broken conduct are
there to guide you: experience is
the master of the listless, the poor in imagination
that rolling in the afterlife wanted
to imprison you. Desire to act tempered
by habits that instead have trembling
practices: of not knowing where
they left them.
And it’s duty leading you as if it were
a cracked and faded lantern that
illuminates nothing except your foot’s
missteps.
Airplanes started shooting
on a crowd then betrayed as
it’s normal in everyday rain
and even in the evening.
Every day they try a trap and every
day purity returns and every night
they question what they did
by day.
They dream by day; keep watch by night;
in the afternoon they sleep; in the morning pray.
They pray that it won’t leave so soon
the life that hid death for
so long until one day they found
the night laid out like the dead.
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.
