One of the Most Important Experimental Italian Poets of the 20th Century

(We continue our coverage of the authors showcased in Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed: Web Exclusive, with translator Diana Thow's discussion of poetry from the major Italian poet Amelia Rosselli. We've made two of Rosselli's poems available in our Web Exclusive.)
Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) is one of the most important experimental Italian poets of the 20th century, often associated with Gruppo 63 and the Italian avant-garde. First trained as a composer and musicologist, she turned to writing in her early twenties. She was fluent in Italian, French and English, and in her early writings, such as Diario in tre lingue (Diary in Three Languages), she reflected this linguistic background by switching from one language to another. Later, Rosselli's poetry came to reflect this multilinguality in a more nuanced way: she began to write primarily in an idiosyncratic Italian that pushed the boundaries of the language to encompass her particular vocabulary. She incorporates syntactical traces of French and English in her Italian verse, and is famous for employing what Pier Paolo Pasolini called a lapsus: a slippage between languages that makes her poetry strange to the Italian ear.
Not incidentally, Amelia Rosselli's multilinguality was the product of a childhood in political exile: she was the daughter of the Italian anti-fascist hero Carlo Rosselli and an English political activist, Marion Cave. Before Amelia was born her father escaped from Lipari, a fascist prison island, and fled to Paris with his family; Amelia, as a result, was born in Paris. Carlo Rosselli and his brother Nello were gunned down by fascist assassins in France when Amelia was seven, which forced the Rosselli family further into exile. They fled first to England and then America, where Amelia spent part of her adolescence in upstate New York and Vermont, and once said that these were some of the happiest times of her life.
Though Rosselli spoke Italian, English, and French fluently she retained a strange accent in each: her English sounded guttural and vaguely French; she had trouble rolling her Rs in Italian (a typical problem among English-speakers) and so on. The sound of her voice, accented in every language (both as metaphor and in vibrant recordings), has been my best guide as I translate these poems. My main concern here is not to smooth her work over, but to try to honor it for its linguistic complexity, density, and peculiar musicality. Additionally, visual poetics were important to Rosselli (as she defined in her essay Spaci Metrici, (Metric Spaces)) and so I have made an attempt to reproduce the visual form of her poem in my English version whenever possible, which occasionally results in unfaithful line breaks.
Amelia struggled with mental and physical ailments throughout her life, which makes the idyllic, created spaces of creativity and regeneration in Sweet Chaos and This Garden all the more poignant. After years of struggle and paranoia, she took her own life in 1996, leaving behind an enormous collection of provocative, inspiring poetry--most of which has not yet found its way into the English language.