Posts featuring Amelia Rosselli

Farewells in the Form of Burials: Deborah Woodard on Translating Amelia Rosselli’s The Dragonfly

The Dragonfly is the most propulsive of Rosselli’s works. . . one can imagine the poem “scrolling off” the typewriter platen as she typed.

Amelia Rosselli’s The Dragonfly is a tour de force, a powerful composition of the Italian poet’s singular multilingualism, musicality, and vertiginous travels around language, in which she reaches the heights of ecstatic sensuality to speak of the deepest violences. This major work has recently been republished by the independent Entre Ríos Books via Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard’s mesmerizing translation, and in this following interview, Woodard divulges on Rosselli’s experimental style, the politics amidst the lyricism, and the extent to which the poet’s personal reality inhabited her work.

Eva Heisler (EH): What an experience reading The Dragonfly! The long poem meanders, sometimes circles, but never settles. In “Metrical Spaces,” an essay Rosselli wrote around the same time as this poem, she says: “I noted strange thickenings in the rhythmicity of my thought, strange arrests, strange coagulations and changes of tempo, strange intervals of rest or absence of action; new sonorous and ideal fusions in accordance with the changing of practical time, of graphic spaces and of the spaces surrounding me continually and materially.” This description is strikingly on par with my own experience of the poem as a voice on the move, passing through rooms and streets and texts. Can you say more about the relationship between these two texts?

Deborah Woodard (DW): “Metrical Spaces” is key to understanding what Rosselli is up to in this “poemetto,” or long poem. Both texts illustrate Rosselli’s experimental poetics—or rather, “Metrical Spaces” is the theory, while The Dragonfly serves as the theory’s exhibit A. Rosselli was searching for a poetics that would be less constraining than formal verse, which she calls neo-classicism, yet be more rigorous than free verse and the surrealism that evolved in the early twentieth century, and which she viewed as somewhat played out or “too easy.”

Basically, as the title “Metrical Spaces” indicates, allotment of space on the page serves as the poem’s (visual) metrics. As my co-translator, Roberta Antognini, has noted, The Dragonfly was originally published in an IBM font, which tended to make each word take up an equal amount of space—a crucial insight for understanding Rosselli’s spatial poetics. For Rosselli, the unit of composition is the word, and the first line of the poem determines the form, or the approximate length of subsequent lines.

Rosselli read Objectivist poet and theorist Charles Olson in her mid-twenties, a few years before writing the first draft of The Dragonfly in 1958, and she appears to have embraced Olson’s theory of projective verse and composition by field. Olson writes: “Then the poem itself must at all points be a high energy construct, and, at all points, an energy discharge. So how is the poet to accomplish same energy. . . what is the process by which the poet gets in at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place. . . ?” Olson goes on to say: “I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath.”

For Rosselli, as for Olson, it is the typewriter that makes possible composition by field, enabling spacial precision via layout and allotment of white space, and serving as key to the author’s ear and breath. Rosselli describes working on the typewriter in terms that make it sound akin to a musical instrument, referring at the close of “Metrical Spaces” to timbres and tempos, and “writing faster than light.” Rosselli was a serious student of music, and around this time she was making the choice to give up music, in part due to financial constraints but also in response to her growing sense that she’d be able to find publishers and make her way as a poet. Not long afterwards, she sold her musical instruments, making a clean, if difficult, break and transferring her musical acumen to her verse. The Dragonfly is the most propulsive of Rosselli’s works; its narrative unfurls at quite a clip, and one can imagine the poem “scrolling off” the typewriter platen as she typed. READ MORE…

“Unintentional Unity”: Deborah Woodard and Roberta Antognini on translating Amelia Rosselli’s Obtuse Diary

Translating Rosselli’s prose is not different from translating her poetry. Her language is equally challenging, her syntax equally subversive.

Amelia Rosselli’s work is deeply marked by her family and personal history. Born in 1930 to a British activist and a martyred Italian-Jewish antifascist, she lived as an eternal outsider in France, the US, the UK, and Italy. A polyglot with persistent depression, her poetry challenges. It challenges the confines of genre and conventional syntax, it challenges the society with which she was ever at odds, and it challenges the reader to accompany her through her brave literary wanderings. Rosselli ended her own life by jumping out the window of her fifth-floor apartment in Rome in 1996.

Obtuse Diary, published by Entre Rios Books in late 2018, is the first and only collection of Rosselli’s prose. The writing spans a number of years and is organized into three sections and two illuminating afterwords, one by the author and one by one of the translators. Asymptote’s Lindsay Semel spoke with Deborah Woodard and Roberta Antognini, two of the collection’s three translators, about the joys and challenges of rendering Rosselli’s stunning and difficult Italian into English.

Lindsay Semel (LS): Tell me about the origin of this project. How did you come to translate this text together? What was the collaboration process like?

Deborah Woodard (DW): Translating Amelia Rosselli’s Diario Ottuso into Obtuse Diary was quite the saga. It’s a little book, but it took forever to translate. Giuseppe Leporace, my first co-translator, and I brought out some sections of the Diary in The Dragonfly, a selection of Rosselli’s poetry, back in 2009. After we finished The Dragonfly and brought it out through Chelsea Editions, I decided to rework Obtuse Diary and publish it in its entirety.  When Giuseppe became too busy to review it with me, he graciously stepped down from the project. On Giuseppe’s suggestion, I worked on the Diary with Vanja Skoric Paquin, a talented young linguist with a particular gift for unraveling snarled syntax. When Vanja gave birth to her daughter she, in turn, stepped down. A year or so passed, and then I recommenced with Dario De Pasquale. Dario and I tore the earlier translation apart, sentence by sentence. When Dario became too busy to continue to translate with me (do we see a pattern here?), I was extremely fortunate to join forces with Roberta, my current—and from here on out, sole—co-translator on the final version. READ MORE…

Translator Profile: Jennifer Scappettone

The notion of a unitary, homogenous, and monolingual “America” is as much an alternative fact as Spicer’s attendance numbers at the inauguration.

Former Asymptote blog editor Allegra Rosenbaum interviews translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, whose profile appeared in our Winter 2016 issue. Her translation of Italian poet Milli Graffi was featured on the Asymptote blog last week and her translation of F. T. Marinetti’s futurist poetry appeared in our Spring 2016 issue. 

Who are you? What do you translate? (This is just a preliminary question! To be taken with an existential grain of salt.)

I am a poet and scholar of American and Italian nationalities who grew up in New York, across the street from a highly toxic landfill redolent of the family’s ancestral zone outside of Naples (laced with illegal poisonous dumps). I translate Fascists and anti-Fascists; Italian feminists and a single notorious misogynist; inheritors of Futurism and the historical avant-garde; and contemporary poets who are attempting to grapple with the millennial burden of the “Italian” language by channeling or annulling voices from Saint Francis through autonomia.

READ MORE…