Amelia Rosselli

Gravestone, in Rome.

Amelia Rosselli (March 28, 1930 in Paris – February 11, 1996 in Rome) was an Italian poet. She was the daughter of Marion Cave, an English political activist, and Carlo Rosselli, who was a hero of the Italian anti-Fascist Resistance—founder, with his brother Nello, of the liberal socialist movement "Justice and Liberty."

He and his brother were assassinated by La Cagoule, secret services of the Fascist regime, while the extended family was living in exile in France in 1937. The family then moved between England and the United States, where Rosselli was educated. She continued to speak Italian with her grandmother, Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, a Venetian Jewish feminist, playwright, and translator from a family prominent in the Italian Risorgimento, the movement for independence. Rosselli returned to Italy in 1949, eventually settling in Rome.

She spent her life studying composition, music, and ethnomusicology and taking part in the cultural life of postwar Italy as a poet and literary translator. Her extraordinary, highly experimental literary output includes verse and prose in English and French as well as Italian. She committed suicide in 1996 by jumping from her fifth floor apartment near Rome's Piazza Navona.^[1]

Rosselli has been translated into English by Lucia Re, Jennifer Scappettone, Gian Maria Annovi, Diana Thow, Deborah Woodard, Paul Vangelisti, and Cristina Viti.

Poetry collections in English

• Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, edited and translated by Jennifer Scappettone (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
• The Dragonfly, translated by Giuseppe Leporace & Deborah Woodard (Chelsea Editions, 2010)
• War Variations, translated by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti (Green Integer, 2003)
• Impromptu. A Trilingual Edition, translated by Gian Maria Annovi, Diana Thow, Jean-Charles Vegliante (Guernica, 2015)
• Sleep: Poesie in Inglese, translated by Amelia Rosselli (Garzanti, 1992)

Poetry collections in Italian

• Primi scritti (1952–63) (1980)
• Variazioni belliche (1964)
• Serie ospedaliera (1969)
• Documento (1976)
• Impromptu (1981)
• Appunti sparsi e persi (1966–1977) (1983)
• La libellula (1985)
• Antologia poetica (1987)
• Sleep. Poesie in inglese (1992)

Creative Prose

• Prime prose italiane (1954)
• Nota (1967–1968)
• Diario ottuso (1968)

Critical writings

• Spazi metrici (1964)
• Una scrittura plurale. Saggi e interventi critici (2004, posthumous)

References

1. ↑ Associated Press