A major, career-spanning collection of an Italian master's poetry in English, gathered together for the first time. Amelia Rosselli is one of the great poets of postwar Italy. She was also a musician and musicologist, close to John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and she waged a lifelong battle against depression. The child of Carlo Rosselli, a significant anti-fascist intellectual who was assassinated with his brother Nello in 1937, Amelia grew up in exile and attended high school in Mamaroneck, New York. English poetry, especially the lyrics and sonnets of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, became a prime reference for her own poetry, which combines modernist experimentation with variations on more traditional forms. The elaborate, archaic, yet thoroughly modern poems, at once stumbling and singing, that Rosselli composed in English and gathered under the title Sleep are a beautiful and illuminating part of her work. Six of the poems were published by John Ashbery in the 1960s but have otherwise been unavailable to English readers. They are published here for the first time outside of Italy.
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Women's Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard, Roberta Antognini, and Dario De Pasquale. OBTUSE DIARY, published in 1990 as Diario Ottuso, is a collection of three "rational" prose experiments by one of Italy's most distinctive post-war poets. These early texts (1954-1968) by Amelia Rosselli reveal an "unintentional unity" through trilingual wordplay, experiments in syntactic structure, and the music possible in prose. The texts are deeply personal, awkward, and often startling--never simply a diary or an autobiography. Rosselli reclaims Italian on her own terms as she grapples with her felt experience as a "refugee." This bilingual edition includes an audio download of selections read in both Italian and English by translators Dario De Pasquale and Deborah Woodard. "The three texts reveal that experimenting in prose is what attracts me: it is equally true and likely that more can be said in prose than in poetry, which is often mannerist or decorative."--Amelia Rosselli
A musician, musicologist, and self-defined “poet of research,” Amelia Rosselli (1930–96) was one of the most important poets to emerge from Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Following a childhood and adolescence spent in exile from Fascist Italy between France, England, and the United States, Rosselli was driven to express the hopes and devastations of the postwar epoch through her demanding and defamiliarizing lines. Rosselli’s trilingual body of work synthesizes a hybrid literary heritage stretching from Dante and the troubadours through Ezra Pound and John Berryman, in which playful inventions across Italian, English, and French coexist with unadorned social critique. In a period dominated by the confessional mode, Rosselli aspired to compose stanzas characterized by a new objectivity and collective orientation, “where the I is the public, where the I is things, where the I is the things that happen.” Having chosen Italy as an “ideal fatherland,” Rosselli wrote searching and often discomposing verse that redefined the domain of Italian poetics and, in the process, irrevocably changed the Italian language. This collection, the first to bring together a generous selection of her poems and prose in English and in translation, is enhanced by an extensive critical introduction and notes by translator Jennifer Scappettone. Equipping readers with the context for better apprehending Rosselli’s experimental approach to language, Locomotrix seeks to introduce English-language readers to the extraordinary career of this crucial, if still eclipsed, voice of the twentieth century.
After a period of silence and mental illness, Amelia Rosselli wrote Impromptu in a burst of unexpected creativity in 1979. The poem won the Pier Paolo Pasolini Prize in 1981. It was the last original collection in Italian that Rosselli produced.
A poem cycle about hospital life and illness by revered, twentieth-century Italian avant-gardist. Hospital Series, a bruisingly intimate colloquy with an elusive lover, is Italian poet Amelia Rosselli’s virtuoso, subversive, neo-Petrarchan sequence of poems. Rosselli wrote much of the series in the mid 1960s after being hospitalized for a mental illness she suffered from for most of her life, and whose pain shapes her language and difficult vision. These explosive poems, a furious cacophonic crescendo of semantic and syntactic accumulations deeply admired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, place Rosselli among the greatest writers of her generation.
A musician, musicologist, and self-defined “poet of research,” Amelia Rosselli (1930–96) was one of the most important poets to emerge from Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Following a childhood and adolescence spent in exile from Fascist Italy between France, England, and the United States, Rosselli was driven to express the hopes and devastations of the postwar epoch through her demanding and defamiliarizing lines. Rosselli’s trilingual body of work synthesizes a hybrid literary heritage stretching from Dante and the troubadours through Ezra Pound and John Berryman, in which playful inventions across Italian, English, and French coexist with unadorned social critique. In a period dominated by the confessional mode, Rosselli aspired to compose stanzas characterized by a new objectivity and collective orientation, “where the I is the public, where the I is things, where the I is the things that happen.” Having chosen Italy as an “ideal fatherland,” Rosselli wrote searching and often discomposing verse that redefined the domain of Italian poetics and, in the process, irrevocably changed the Italian language. This collection, the first to bring together a generous selection of her poems and prose in English and in translation, is enhanced by an extensive critical introduction and notes by translator Jennifer Scappettone. Equipping readers with the context for better apprehending Rosselli’s experimental approach to language, Locomotrix seeks to introduce English-language readers to the extraordinary career of this crucial, if still eclipsed, voice of the twentieth century.
A major, career-spanning collection of an Italian master's poetry in English, gathered together for the first time. Amelia Rosselli is one of the great poets of postwar Italy. She was also a musician and musicologist, close to John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and she waged a lifelong battle against depression. The child of Carlo Rosselli, a significant anti-fascist intellectual who was assassinated with his brother Nello in 1937, Amelia grew up in exile and attended high school in Mamaroneck, New York. English poetry, especially the lyrics and sonnets of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, became a prime reference for her own poetry, which combines modernist experimentation with variations on more traditional forms. The elaborate, archaic, yet thoroughly modern poems, at once stumbling and singing, that Rosselli composed in English and gathered under the title Sleep are a beautiful and illuminating part of her work. Six of the poems were published by John Ashbery in the 1960s but have otherwise been unavailable to English readers. They are published here for the first time outside of Italy.
A poem cycle about hospital life and illness by revered, twentieth-century Italian avant-gardist. Hospital Series, a bruisingly intimate colloquy with an elusive lover, is Italian poet Amelia Rosselli’s virtuoso, subversive, neo-Petrarchan sequence of poems. Rosselli wrote much of the series in the mid 1960s after being hospitalized for a mental illness she suffered from for most of her life, and whose pain shapes her language and difficult vision. These explosive poems, a furious cacophonic crescendo of semantic and syntactic accumulations deeply admired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, place Rosselli among the greatest writers of her generation.
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