Nomadic Translations: (G)hosting in Amelia Rosselli’s <em>Variazioni belliche</em>

Abstract

The poet Amelia Rosselli was the first female author-and remains one of the few-included in the canonizing anthologies of twentieth-century Italian poetry. And, although Rosselli has been published outside of Italy, few book-length translations of her work exist. However, critical scholarship on her work-including biographical criticism and textual analysis-has been on the rise, especially since the tenth anniversary of her death. 1 As Daniela La Penna states in "'Cercatemi e fuoriuscite': Biography, Textuality, and Gender in Recent Criticism on Amelia Rosselli," such significant renewed interest has transformed Rosselli's work into one of the most researched and examined poetic corpora of either gender in twentieth-century Italian literature. In this regard, Rosselli shares the rare distinction with such male authors as Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mario Luzi, and Andrea Zanzotto. 2 In October 2012 Mondadori finally published the much-anticipated annotated scholarly edition of Rosselli's poetry in Italian. 3 Rosselli was born in 1930 during her parents' exile in Paris the daughter of the assassinated Italian anti-Fascist Carlo Rosselli and his English wife Marion Cave. Rosselli spoke French, Italian, and English: raised in France, she learned Italian from her father and English from her mother. She was a prolific poet until her suicide in Rome in 1996, producing eight volumes of poetry in three languages. Her oeuvre includes Variazioni belliche (1964), Serie ospedaliera (1969), Impromptu (1981, and a collection of poems in English, Sleep: Poesie in inglese (1992). 4 A female intellectual among the male elite, Rosselli was also a journalist, musician, musicologist, and literary translator. She translated the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Evans, a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 70s. Growing up in the years between the two World Wars, Rosselli lived and studied in France, England, Canada, and the United States before moving permanently to Italy, where she chose the language of her paternal heritage, Italian, to write most of her poetry over a period of thirty years.Her art forges an alliance between the three languages she spoke fluently. Following Rosi Braidotti's concept of nomadic subjectivity in Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Rosselli can be considered a nomadic polyglot poet, never at home within one single language but always wandering among Italian, English, and French. Her Italian poetry