From Documento (1976) [“Document”]
Translated from the Italian by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard
Not even winning over themselves
and how could he once shot?
He was shot and they recognized each other
after his death signed over to
wanting to ruin themselves
and with the help of others. The others!
how did they know about him?
They shot him while he was drinking, and
had no gloves. Brawls and persecution,
too late in the eyes of the
others he saved himself.
Oxygen in my tents, it’s you,
scratching my front door, to
heal my mysterious not going
unable to go in any way with
others. How do you do it? You guard me and
in the step that unites us there is above all
God’s quintessence; his babbling
if not exactly love something
bigger: your body your mind and
your muscles so weary: from
a message that lingered in the void
as if a greeting to a shadow hadn’t
been delivered by the tenant who is me: your
daughter, in a petrified forest.
With sickness in my mouth
scared
for the scarecrows
faded roses and there are stains on the wall
so small in the granary of your thoughts;
and with which color do you quit
painting?
I’d found my exact opposite.
How I devoured it! Then I ate it. And
I was devoured by it, in belles lettres.
And then running
for cover while certain old
ladies run too, to the urinal.
Then they quit running.
Your exquisite confections console,
madame, and with your gray curls you regally
set the table of feigned tears.
My trade! – discovering it later a vanity
of poisoned deafness, and sole rivalry
your clinging to the pen. It’s not enough!
leaning out of the friendship window:
saying so much more – such was my friendship.
And I’ve seen syllables lifting me up
that show nothing but one
past confirmation of a predetermined
order (all my vanities to the
point of not misleading).
I meant of course green as a
color-eater and I verified the flight
of storks, lowering my wings during
the flight and refusing to take into
consideration your loyalty as well.
I wanted to run away with a bagatelle
and I mistook a monster for a tarantella
confined in my literary approaches
to an immense and ordinary throng. I’ve
seen with my own eyes my language
become low level and decipherable: but it’s
not often that it moves, the earth
from its unscathed wheels.
And I inscribed in my fragile scale
a phrase that makes me belong to you
while with easy virtue you disjoined
your every real belonging to the cold
mountain flower stretching out
at the feet of the first who can lay claim to
defeat.
Hand uninterrupted still guides impotence
in its freckled flesh so full
of salt of the earth that never showed to
others other than goldsmiths, pigeons,
riots or massacres.
Joy contaminated by illustrious relatives
an extra duty illustrates unclarified
situations: it’s you! who
won’t clarify them: woman and love, force
or officer: war or revision all
settled in a whole green world of
flattery of the poor and embarrassed
who unable to bring bread to their lips
and hearts illustrate their whole morality
by paying duty.
Psychologically dexterous is the diamond
my fortress my color my pronunciation
varying between childhood and prostitution
latte for the prostrate.
Truth couldn’t be differentiated
bull’s eye that looks at you eating
its triumphs always adjacent
to a future that distracted you destroyed.
Sadness is like a siren scream
call for me the industrial sentences of fate
but stay beyond my furious lands
flesh splendidly spreading and then rising again.
Most miserable rain waning in the uproar
of passions also your red eye;
a carnal violence was lurking around the gaze’s
dry jaws, when innocence
worn out from pleasures, sat on the damp grass.
A trilingual writer who described herself as “a poet of exploration,” Amelia Rosselli has only recently been recognized as one of the major European poets of the twentieth century. Born in Paris in 1930, she was the daughter of the martyred antifascist philosopher Carlo Rosselli and the British political activist Marion Cave. Rosselli was the author of eight collections of poetry (one, Sleep, in English), a translator of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, and an accomplished musicologist and musician who played the violin, the piano, and the organ.
Roberta Antognini is Associate Professor Emerita of Italian Studies at Vassar College. She is the author of a monograph on Petrarch’s letters, Il progetto autobiografico delle Familiares di Petrarca (2008), and co-editor of the collection of essays Poscritto a Giorgio Bassani (2012). With Deborah Woodard, she has translated into English Amelia Rosselli’s collections, Hospital Series (2015), Obtuse Diary (2018), The Dragonfly (2023), Notes Scattered and Lost (forthcoming 2024), and Document (forthcoming 2025). With Peter Robinson, she has translated Giorgio Bassani’s The Collected Poems (2023).
Deborah Woodard is a poet and translator living in Seattle. She is the author of Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star Press, 2006), Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012), and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). With Roberta Antognini she has translated Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015), followed by a trio of Rosselli’s shorter texts: Obtuse Diary (Entre Rios, 2018), The Dragonfly, Entre Rios, 2023), and Notes Scattered and Lost (Entre Rios, 2024). Their translation of Rosselli’s Document is forthcoming from World Poetry Books in 2025.
World Poetry Review 