Two Poems

Amelia Rosselli | translated by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard

[I don’t know about you or your death but the soul . . . ]

to Adriana

I don’t know about you or your death but the soul
can be victorious in its unheard
labor while you gathering the last
remains remain helpless awaiting the
worst. I don’t know which precipice
in life held for you such regret
but at each hour you stood firm and convinced
of not having tasted fullness, or
nothingness, or was it just rebellion, compromise
or was it true understanding between you two
you just now discover as he’s dying?

A sustained favor can’t change the course
of events: luck in life never had
a heart so doubtful.

But death has come: and has wide
stairs to a permit: that I can’t give you
apart from your revenge.

[Non so di te e della sua morte ma vittoriosa . . . ]

a Adriana

Non so di te e della sua morte ma vittoriosa
può essere l’anima nel suo travaglio
inaudito mentre tu assembrando gli ultimi
resti rimani indifesa ad aspettare il
peggio. Non so quale fu il tuo precipizio
nella vita che ebbe tanto rammarico in
te ma ad ogni ora tu eri ferma e convinta
di non aver assaggiato il pieno, o il
nulla, o era sola ribellione, compromesso
od era vera intesa fra voi due che tu
scopri ora che egli muore?

Un favore sostentato non può mutare corso
di eventi: fortuna nella vita mai ebbe
il cuore così dubitoso.

Ma è venuta la morte: ed essa ha larghe
scale ad un permesso: ch’io non so darti
fuori della tua rivincita.

[The forks of glory. Emphatically . . . ]

The forks of glory. Emphatically
you translate into prose your journey to hell
well-tamed as is the custom and in the end
enhanced too.

Tamed the ox made use of its own
pointed horns and saw from the sky that up there
it didn’t dare tempt fate a fateful
extra misogynist.

[I forchettoni della gloria. Enfaticamente . . . ]

I forchettoni della gloria. Enfaticamente
traduci in prosa il tuo viaggio all’inferno
addomesticato come si usa bene e infine
anche valorizzato.

Addomesticato il bovo fece uso delle sue
corna appuntite e vide dal cielo che lassù
non osò provocare la sorte una sorta di
misogino in più.

Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris on March 28, 1930, and died in Rome, taking her own life, on February 11, 1996. She was the daughter of the antifascist Italian political leader and philosopher of Jewish descent Carlo Rosselli and the British political activist Marion Cave. After her father assassination in Paris at the hands of the fascists, the family moved to England and then to the United States. At the end of the war, in 1946, she relocated to Europe, first briefly to Florence and then to London to complete her studies. In 1948, Rosselli was back in Florence prior to moving permanently to Rome, where she would remain until her death. Rosselli was the author of eight collections of poetry: War Variations (1964), Hospital Series (1969), Document (1966-1973) (1976), Impromptu (1981), First Writings (1952-1963) (1980), Notes Scattered and Lost 1966-1977 (1983), Obtuse Diary 1954-1968 (1990), Sleep. Poems in English (1992). She was 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. Document was first published in 1976 in Milano by Garzanti.

Roberta Antognini is Associate Professor Emerita at Vassar College, where she taught for over twenty years. She is co-editor of the collection of essays Poscritto a Giorgio Bassani (LED, 2012) and co-translator, with Peter Robinson, of Giorgio Bassani’s poetry, In Rhyme and Without (Agincourt Press, 2023).

Deborah Woodard’s books include Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star Press, 2006), Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012) and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). Antognini and Woodard have co-translated Amelia Rosselli in Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015), Obtuse Diary (Entre Rios Books, 2018) and The Dragonfly (Entre Rios Books, 2023.) Their translation of Rosselli’s Notes Scattered and Lost is forthcoming in the fall of 2024, also from Entre Rios Books. And World Poetry Books will bring out their translation of Rosselli’s Document in the winter of 2025.

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