Halie Theoharides on Amelia Rosselli in jubilat

I had never heard of Amelia Rosselli until I began typesetting jubilat 27 but since then I have been wild about her poetry.

Here is a picture of Amelia Rosselli that I made and here are a few things I learned.

Amelia Rosselli was an Italian poet and translator.
She was the daughter of an Italian anti-Fascist Resistance hero and an English political activist.
She was born in 1930 and died in 1996.
The poems of Rosselli's which Diana Thow translated and which appear in jubilat 27 are wild and leave me very alive and wondering!
I can't wait to find out more about her and I am so glad that Diana Thow has brought these poems to jubilat & world.

Here is how one of her poems begins: 

This garden that within my figured
mind seems to want to open new
small horizons for my joy after last night's
storm, this garden is slightly white
maybe green if I wish to color it
and it waits for someone to step inside,
its pacificity is unappealing.

So many things to think about especially once you start to think about a "figured mind" containing a garden "slightly white / maybe green if I wish to color it"...That is a kind of visualization enacted in the poem that can bring things about, make things happen where no things were happening, set a place for a weird magic to inhabit and then to have mixed emotions about. Anyways, below here is that magnificent poem in entirety,  traversing a kind of inner-being-speak into outer-territory-mapping— it "nearly screams" and then it flexes back upon its graceful withholding. It does a thousand other things too... It is clever and seems to unfurl like the smartest tendril-question of a vine, testing the outer reaches of imagination, going into them.

This garden that within my figured
mind seems to want to open new
small horizons for my joy after last night's
storm, this garden is slightly white
maybe green if I wish to color it
and it waits for someone to step inside,
its pacificity is unappealing. A dead corner
a life that descends without caring
to cellars full of meaning now
that death with its effusions has declared
its own importance. And within
the effusion a small dream insists on being
remembered—I am peace it nearly screams
and you don't remember my solemn shores!
But the garden is quiet—paradise, by a trick of fate,
isn't anything that you seek outside of me,
I who am the renunciation; it announces me
first painfully then cautiously in its

creation the firmament I sought.

 

Read more of Rosselli's poems here. Subscribe to jubilat here.

 

Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) is one of the most important experimental Italian poets of the twentieth century. Her poetry collections include Variazione Belliche (1964), Serie Ospedaliera (1969), Documento (1976), and Impromptu (1981). 

Diana Thow holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa.  She lives in Berkeley and is pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Halie Theoharides is the managing editor of jubilat.