Two Poems by Amelia Rosselli (Translation from the Italian by Maurizio Brancaleoni)

 

*All rights reserved. No part of the following translations may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior authorization. For information, send an e-mail to mbmbrancaleoni@gmail.com.*

 

[Amelia Rosselli, “Le poesie”, Garzanti, p.520]

 

A face of yours does have human contours

a gesture of yours is really springlike and

a looking at me of yours is the first of the things

I think of when – in the vivid excelling

of the afternoon clouds – very slowly I

look for you.

And if dying is an everyday thing

your glance too has evil lights

and a sign of shyness or of love of yours

does nothing but delay the horror

of a day.

 

 

[Amelia Rosselli, “Le poesie”, Garzanti, p.612]

 

Hunger blew and it was extreme, the symptom

or the (singular) single fit of an extreme

passion, sincere – with its spreading

iconoclastic clothes on the ground and on the

sidewalk – of a lost value and remotely

what I’d have wanted to do. Sincerity

(oh fit of the last passion), sincere

it was, in its waking up at the forbidden hour

and in taking out, from each brush or toothpaste

what could be the good hour

the ungraspable moment now that the matter

is delicate; and you would count the hours, of a

possible prize of yours, and you would count the future

as if it were coins!

 

Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) is considered one of the most important Italian poets of the past century. Born in Paris in 1930, she had to flee to Switzerland and then to the U.S. after the murder of her father and her uncle at the hands of Fascist militias. Back in Italy in the late 40s, in 1950 she settled in Rome, where she would spend the rest of her life. While her early literary experiments were in French and English, most of her output was in her father's native language.

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