Description
Poetry. Italian Studies. Translated from the Italian by Diana Thow. In Amelia Rosselli's first book of poetry, WAR VARIATIONS, violence and war become the canvas for her dynamic experimentation. In her second book, HOSPITAL SERIES, Rosselli turns her attention inward to the landscape and language of illness. In HOSPITAL SERIES, illness is not a metaphor but a lens, a mode of perception, a dual structure of constraint and release: "here madness you arranged/ a kind of party," she writes: "you set me free."
In this bilingual edition, HOSPITAL SERIES is preceded by a long early poem by Rosselli from 1958, entitled The Dragonfly (La Libellula), a playful and radically revisionary meditation on the subject of liberty. The Dragonfly revisits moments of the poetic canon that were formative for Rosselli (in particular work by Rimbaud and Montale) from the point of view of a female subjectivity, making this poem an important work of postwar Italian feminism. This edition presents The Dragonfly alongside HOSPITAL SERIES, as it appeared in the first Italian edition of HOSPITAL SERIES in 1969, for the first time in translation.
Author Bio
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. Raised in exile, in France, Switzerland, England, and the United States - in interviews, Rosselli remembers her years in the US with great fondness. She finally settled in Italy after the war, first in Florence and then in Rome. Except for a year she spent in London in the mid-seventies, Rosselli never left Rome, where she took her own life in 1996. The tragedy of her father's death and the loss of her mother when she was only nineteen were central to Rosselli, defining her in many different ways: from her "trilingual language" and cosmopolitan upbringing - though she thought of herself more as a refugee - to her political engagement and deep social consciousness. Rosselli was the author of seven collections of poetry (one, Sleep, in English), a translator of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, among others, and an accomplished musicologist and musician who played the violin, the piano, and the organ.
Author City: BOSTON, MA USA
Diana Thow's co-translation with Gian Maria Annovi of Amelia Rosselli's long poem Impromptu was published in 2014 by Guernica Editions. Her co-translation, with Sarah Stickney, of Elisa Biagini's The Guest in the Wood (Chelsea Editions, 2013) won the Best Translated Book Award in 2014. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa, and is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley where she specializes in Italian Literature and Translation Studies.
Author City: USA