Document – Amelia Rosselli

[World Poetry Books; 2025]

Tr. from the Italian by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard

Amelia Rosselli “engages her readers (and her translators) in hand-to-hand combat without a moment’s respite,” writes Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard, translators of Document. I certainly struggled and, knowing that Rosselli had the upper hand, skipped to the Afterword halfway through the collection to get a leg up. What does the poet mean when she says “I’ve got green saliva” or “In the hollow of the hand remains / only a fluorescent thinking?” How does something “die octoberish?” There is no ambiguity in her images, only room for one to flex their interpretive muscles. And, without titles on most poems, the poet launches us directly into the rushing waters of her verses.

The poems’ syntax, at times disarming, enacts a strong forward momentum, jumping from one image or concept to the next without waiting for the reader to catch up. Rosselli begins one poem with: “Vaccination, my writing / given I couldn’t speak to your face / fatally bursting…” By jumping from the nouns “Vaccination, my writing” to the qualifying clause “given I couldn’t speak to your face,” the poet omits the central act of the sentence, focusing instead on the surrounding conditions, only then to offer a verb which floats without subject or object. I can imagine the translators sparring with Rosselli, trying to reproduce the anarchy and awkwardness of her language. How might a reader keep up with these leaps in meaning and syntax?

A few parameters help: Rosselli wrote Document after Petrarch’s Canzionere, a fourteenth-century collection of (mainly) sonnets exalting his love for a woman named Laura. Antognini and Woodard note that, as in Canzionere, the sonnets and fragments in Document were painstakingly selected and arranged by Rosselli to create, if not a narrative logic, an otherwise interconnected one. The poems were written between 1966 and 1973, while Rosselli lived in Rome, after spending her youth in France, Switzerland, England, and the United States. Because of her multinational upbringing, her poetry is lightly multilingual and contains some mis-(or innovative)-spellings. A member of the Italian Communist Party, Rosselli was raised by politically engaged parents; her mother, Marion Cave, was a British activist, and her father, Carlo Rosselli, was an Italian antifascist killed in 1937. Rosselli died in 1996 by suicide.

After finishing the afterword, I flipped back to where I left off with a few things in mind. First, that the feelings of wonder and confusion inspired by these poems are entirely intentional, and that perhaps Rosselli is trying to shake up and unsettle something in her reader in order to land together in some previously uncharted territory. It is a paradoxical feat that Rosselli would embrace a structured form like the sonnet, in addition to following Petrarch’s legacy of an interconnected structure between the poems, and still push the limits of language so boldly. I dove back in believing that I was not being led astray but rather toward a destination unknown to me.

Second, I was more receptive to the romantic, political, and psychological themes silhouetted in the poems, striking bolts of clarity amidst and through the puzzles of experimental linguistics. Many of the poems, particularly earlier in the collection, address a “you” that at times appears to be a lover and at others seems to refer to the poet herself, revealing a vulnerable internal dialogue. I relate wholeheartedly when Rosselli writes that “it was already too late at that hour / to get to understand each other better and / then explore the origin of our ardor / and our rancor.” I recognize, viscerally, the resigned acceptance that arrives when the moment for repair or renewal has passed, that we do not ever fully understand ourselves or each other or what lies between us. These lines are painfully legible.

Rosselli’s political poems strike equally visceral nerves, shorting the distance between violent act and impact. While the verse “Airplanes had started shooting / at a crowd then betrayal as / is normal in everyday rain / and even in the evening” does not follow a typical sentence structure, the impact is clear: “then betrayal.” Betrayal exists without the need to “arrive,” “come,” or “fall”; it simply is. Rosselli joins state violence with “everyday rain,” arriving at the fact of banality and the predictability of horrors. The poem is perhaps a recollection of fascist violence, but could also reference the political violence during Italy’s Years of Lead, which spanned some of the years these poems were written. During the Years of Lead, bombings and assassinations by both leftists and neofascist groups killed hundreds.

The poems’ multilingualism (a note by the translators points out that Rosselli had a slight French accent when speaking Italian) is present not only in Rosselli’s use of terms in French and English, but in the general liminality of her language. The translators, in turn, enter into this liminal space and make parallel choices. Sometimes they preserve the non-Italian terms used in the originals: “contented / with whatever mood / follies-bergères behind each / piece of furniture…” Presumably, follies-bergères references the Parisian music hall, though it’s function in the text is not obvious.

They go even further when translating words originally in Italian into French instead of English to mimic the considerations Rosselli might take, tracing her steps through a multilingual landscape. For example, the lines “E ne / fui divorata, in belle lettere” is translated to “And / I was devoured by it, in belles lettres,” using the French phrase in regard to writing as a fine art. Or, in translating “i rimpianti e le loro doleanze,” Antognini and Woodard choose “the forlorn and their doléance.” Rosselli’s use of “doleanze” is an Italianization of the French word, rather than the actual Italian word that means the same thing (laments, grievances), which would be doglianze.

Rosselli maintains affinities, through such multilingual translations, with French idiosyncrasies, even as she attempts to smuggle them into Italian. The translators inhabit Rosselli’s linguistic world and open it up to readers, creating an exchange that is not one-directional, but representative of the constellation of influences on Rosselli’s work.

Poet and critic Johannes Göransson states in his blurb that Rosselli’s poems are left him baffled, and this “bafflement” is perhaps most immediate when encountering Atognini and Woodard’s inventiveness at the level of the word. “Hungrymind” is invented to accommodate the phrase “affamata mente.” The condensing of the two words is curious, but perhaps due to the way affamata mente, literally “hungry mind,” sounds in Italian; though not an actual word, if you were to push them into the singular “affamatamente,” if would create a kind of mutant word in Italian, suggesting something done “starvingly” or “famishedly.” The choice might preserve the meaning of “hungry mind” while also nodding to the implied possibility of a merger in Italian. Regardless of their mysterious mechanics, Antognini and Woodard’s translation bears verbal gifts like hungrymind, unhushed, and octoberish.

The rare instances in which Rosselli titles her poems occur when addressing specific people (“to Renato”) or when referencing specific historical or personal events. The latter category includes both “General Strike 1969” and “Snow 1973.” Rather than clarifying context, these titles suggest an almost exclusive intimacy, highlighting significant moments and people in the poet’s life. “Without / you I can’t sense in the air other / than buffoons,” she confesses to Renato, and a sense of longing seeps through the irritation of dealing with anyone other than one’s lover. Reflecting in the snow, Rosselli asserts, “I am not what I appear—and among the beasts / of a beastly cold day I call / on you to recite.” One of the last poems in the collection, Rosselli fights through the numbness of isolation to establish an explicit intimacy with the reader. I imagine she is asking us to not settle for what is given at face value, to look under, behind, and between words for an understanding foreign to our everyday speech.

The translators note in their Afterword that Rosselli once refuted Pier Paolo Pasolini’s interpretation of her poems, specifically her occasional mis-(most definitely innovative)-spellings. “One of the most sensational examples of Amelia Rosselli’s linguistic connectives,” says Pasolini, “is the lapsus or Freudian slip…having taken shape spontaneously, it is immediately accepted, adopted, and stuck by the author under the category of ‘self-made invention.’” But this definition did not track with Rosselli’s self-described poetics. “Mine are not lapsus,” she says. “They are distortion games on words practiced with the overlapping of multiple languages, for it is not about unconscious improvisation.”

I’d like to state openly, then, that all lapses in understanding, meaning-making, or attuned listening are my own. Even if Rosselli’s designs in distortion are orchestrated to lead the reader toward double-takes and meaningful misreadings. To produce green saliva, must one be envious or simply hungry for sweet green apples? To die octoberish, perhaps one simply lets go into the warm autumn wind. When I put the book down (which is not slim), my hand is not empty. Rather, In the hollow of the hand remains / only a fluorescent thinking.

Liliana Torpey is a writer from Oakland, California. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, focusing on poetry and literary translation. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, NACLA, and Euronews Culture.