Document
Document
Selected from the opening section of Amelia Rosselli’s 1976 collection, Documento, Document is translators Lucia Re’s and Paul Vangelisti’s work-in-progress, presenting this vital, later book of this major Italian poet. Of Re’s and Vangelisti’s award-winning translation of Rosselli’s first book, War Variations (Variazioni belliche, 1964), Poetrymagazine’s on-line journal, Harriet, in 2016, noted that “Re and Vangelisti’s excellent translation of War Variations reveals Rosselli to be… perennially contemporary.” Drawings by Giuliano Della Casa.
Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) is one of the most important Italian poets of the post-War. Her extraordinary voice and compositional mode made her a leading, if unique member of the Italian neo-avantgardes. Plagued by mental illness for a good part of her life, Rosselli’s comments on Sylvia Path, whom she translated, are certainly germane to her own work: “artistic research at the highest level of intensity…is in and of itself a mortal risk.”
