Posted on November 23, 2009 by Scott Esposito

(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.

Posted on November 17, 2009 by Scott Esposito

This piece by translator Christy Rodgers starts off our coverage of the authors in the Web Exclusive supplement to Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed. It covers Carmen Boullosa’s first novel, Just Disappear. Boullosa is a much-acclaimed author in her native Mexico, where she’s been praised by such standard-bearers as Carlos Fuentes, Alma Guillermoprieto, and Elena Poniatowska.)

From Just Disappear by Carmen Boullosa

Mejor Desaparece is Mexican author Carmen Boullosa’s first novel. It was originally published in 1987, when Boullosa was 33. She had already been recognized and honored in Mexico as a poet and dramatist, and was the co-owner of a theater-bar called El Hijo del Cuervo in Mexico City’s bohemian Coyoacán district. Boullosa, who now lives in New York City, has since written 13 novels and a number of critical essays, and continued to write and publish poetry as well. Her international reputation as an author of challenging, complex work continues to grow.

Mejor Desaparece, which Boullosa has described as “a strange montage of giddy monologues” is a surreal story of childhood as a horrific and grotesque state of subjection, beginning with the travails of seven sisters (all bearing the names of flowers) at the hands of their unstable and domineering father after the death of their mother, when an unnamed presence invades their home. Two (or possibly more) of the daughters narrate the first three sections of the novel as they pass from childhood to adulthood. A woman whose relationship to the family is implied but unspecified narrates the sole vignette of the fourth section. The next section, the excerpt presented here, is an extended monologue by an unnamed, isolated woman on the border of madness who some have suggested is the father’s second wife, others the dead mother herself, although the family particulars are left deliberately unclear.

Carmen Boullosa’s work, particularly her early work, deserves more of an audience in the U.S. She has extended the boundaries of the novel and raised concerns of personal and political history in new and inventive ways. She is part of a post-Boom generation of Latin American authors who are continuing to experiment with narrative forms and challenge and delight us with their skill.

For the translator, the primary challenge in this work is the high level of ambiguity in its situations and characterizations. The translator must fight the desire to explain and clarify so as not to be thought guilty of a poor understanding of the text, and simply try to transmit its expressionistic tone to the fullest extent. Spanish syntax permits subjects to be far more unspecified than English does, and Boullosa often makes use of this lack of specificity to give the novel the haunted feeling of nightmare, where presences come and go, and personalities shift in a boundary-less interior landscape.

Posted on November 16, 2009 by Scott Esposito

We’re very proud to announce the Web Exclusive supplement to our latest anthology, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed.

The site features 12 writers in translation, ranging from classic authors like Rainer Maria Rilke to up-and-comers like Mahmoud Darwish’s literary descendant, Ghassan Zaqtan. The Web Exclusive is a great opportunity for us, since we had so much great material this year that there wasn’t a way to get it all into print.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be shining a spotlight on the translators on Two Words, so that they can explain in their own words why they’ve championed the work that appears in the Web Exclusive edition of Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed. For now, enjoy.