On Revisiting Amelia Rosselli’s The Dragonfly: Panegyric to Liberty (1958)
“A problem is an inquiry in respect to an object which the self apprehends in an exterior way without thinking of the self; a mystery is a question in which what is given cannot be regarded as detached from the self. I cannot define the question’s answer without defining myself.” — Gabriel Marcel
Revisiting Amelia Rosselli’s The Dragonfly: Panegyric to Liberty (1958), Amelia Rosselli’s longest poem and early ars poetica, has given me an opportunity to polish a text that is one of my favorite poems in the world; to establish a through-line more clearly; and to fix errors that had haunted me. On the practical level, I now had the chance to rethink the minute particulars of the piece thanks to my current co-translator, Roberta Antognini. It also made pragmatic sense to republish this important early work of Rosselli since my earlier translation, The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems: 1953-1981 (Chelsea Editions, 2009), was out of print. For the record, Roberta and I have also revisited other collections by Rosselli: we cleaned up Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015) and completed and retranslated Obtuse Diary (Entre Rios Books, 2018). And we’re currently completing one more short collection, Notes Scattered and Lost (Entre Rios Books, 2024). I’m grateful to Knox Gardner, publisher of Entre Rios, for saying, “The more Rosselli the better!” and to Seattle artist Lisa Buchanan for the cover art — it’s perfect for Rosselli: nonrepresentational yet suggestive of representation — for what I think of as a trio of hermetic Golden Books.
And yet, looking back, I realize that my relationship to Dragonfly goes beyond refining with Roberta and reprinting with Knox. I have a special allegiance to this poem. I vividly recall working on Dragonfly nearly a quarter of a century ago at my favorite coffee place at the time, The Queen Anne Coffee House, working in longhand on yellow legal pads, with my Cassell’s Italian dictionary at my side (this was before ubiquitous iPhones and easy access to online dictionaries). Much of the page on each sheet was devoted to lists of vocabulary found in the cascading stanzas, their definitions duly noted. With that translation completed, I chose to bring out The Dragonfly in Yale Italian Poetry when my then co-translator, Giuseppe Leporace, and I were offered 20-odd pages for Rosselli in an upcoming issue. I also recall asking the late Alfredo de Palchi of Chelsea Editions if we could include the entirety of Dragonfly in the Chelsea selected Rosselli, and when he said yes, as it was the title poem, I remember feeling pleased, even relieved. But it’s not the case that all my experiences with the poem have been that reassuring. I haven’t forgotten getting up on a small stage at Gallery 1412, a performance space here in Seattle, as part of a panel on translation, and momentarily confused by my own proofs, riffling through the loose sheets of Dragonfly. Not long after that, up on the stage in another small performance space in Portland, Oregon, for the Spare Room Collective, I was wracked by heartburn from the pre-event Thai dinner.
So what is it about this poem that has drawn me to it for so long, enduring slippery proof sheets and heartburn? The Dragonfly contains some of Rosselli’s most lyrical passages as she quotes and “distorts” (her word) her literary influences: Arthur Rimbaud, Eugenio Montale, Scipione, and, above all, Dino Campana. Few poets are more lushly lyrical than Campana, and Rosselli draws from many of his poems, including “La Chimera,” a piece I’d tried to translate when I was in the MFA program at UC-Irvine. (Somewhat amusingly — and not, I should add, unjustly — Chelsea, the journal that proceeded Chelsea Editions, turned down my Campana translations.) I felt that Dragonfly both suited my voice as a translator as someone more lyrical than experimental while, at the same time, it challenged me to grow. In the end, Rosselli made me more adventurous and hungrier for discordant imagery. Inspired by Dragonfly, I collaged 20 years of my own worksheets and evolved techniques that I use to this day. Rosselli’s stops and starts and her embrace of unexpected juxtapositions sharpened my awareness of creating tension and multiple possibilities, while still clinging to narrative in some fashion or other. To give an example, I loved the jolt I felt when Rosselli stopped and started lines such as these:
… You don’t know if I cry
or despair, you don’t know if I laugh or despair. I
don’t know if among the pale rocks your smile.
I don’t know if among the pale rocks your
smile appeared to me, o deity of the resplendent manes …
In “Ghismonda in Calabria,” a long poem in sections that I put together from notes and which appeared in my first full-length collection, Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star Press, 2009), I embraced fragments and felt exhilarated by the possibilities of restraining a narrative while reiterating key points:
And if it were the wrong path, it would still be lit
by desire, so that the fork in the road was not
the lightning of the irrevocable, but merely an …
And if it were the wrong path, it would still
be lit.
But I was influenced by more than disjunction. Of all of Rosselli’s works, Dragonfly traffics the most in emotional saturation, or even satiation. It’s her most ecstatic and, consequently, her most addictive text. It’s characterized by an extreme volatility held in suspension. As translator, I am tasked with conveying that volatility, creating my own addictive fare — the English text. And, by translating Rosselli’s improvisations, I, too, get to feast on Campana, Scipione, Montale, and Rimbaud. In the case of Dino Campana, I’m able to return in the active role of translator to a poet I took an early stab at translating and who ends up playing a central role in this poem. In short, I get to partake of the mystery in the terms suggested by Gabriel Marcel while, at the same time, I am simply the problem solver, the translator.
With my own stake in the matter brought to light, at least to an extent, let me touch upon the theme of the poem. A playwright friend of mine, Dickey Nesenger, questioned the need for the revamped version after I told her that, sure, the first translation might suffice for the general reader. Then why do it, she asked, reasonably enough. But when next she wrote, she said that she’d read the new version and that Dragonfly was a dramatic monologue. Aha! So perhaps that through-line is clearer now, I thought. And the subject of this dramatic monologue is the speaker’s ongoing tussle with doubt, underscored time and time again in the Campana passages by the refrain: “I don’t know.”
Rosselli’s lifelong struggle with doubt was quite understandable given her family history. In 1930, when Amelia was only seven years old, her father, the anti-Fascist writer and activist Carlo Rosselli, along with Amelia’s uncle, Nello Rosselli, was assassinated by order of Mussolini in the south of France. Rosselli never recovered from this trauma, which, in her later life, morphed into nightmarish delusions of persecution. On February 11, 1996 — the anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death — she committed suicide in Rome. But in her late 20’s, when she wrote Dragonfly, Rosselli was coming into her powers as a writer and reveling in a youthful hubris she was able to convert into some of the best writing to come out of post-war Italy. And she made the reiteration of doubt the fulcrum of her ars poetica. Again and again she comes up against doubt and creates the hanging curtain, the arras of language, only to reach the next alcove of doubt and set about weaving yet another arras. Slay or be slayed. In Dragonfly, Rosselli will not be denied. In English, we could say that she slays the “dragon” portion of the word, and soars.
My next step with Dragonfly is performance. While I wouldn’t mind taking on the dramatic monologue singlehandedly (bring on each and every arras, bring on the dragons of doubt!), I’m saving that one for another, admittedly hypothetical, day. For the launch, I’ve invited, among others, a singer of jazz standards; an opera singer; a French horn player to bridge the passages we have to leave out; a bass player to accompany the singers; and a neo-Beat chanter who wants to move the center of gravity from the stage down into the audience. Given that Rosselli deliberately distorted and reconfigured her sources, we can do the same, in the spirit of Rosselli, as opposed to being bound to the letter of the text. I have no idea how the show will come across to an audience, and to me, the translator, but I’ll surely learn something, and that has always been the great gift I’ve received from translating Amelia Rosselli.
— Deborah Woodard
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Dawn shades to gray in the distance. I don’t know
if among the pale rocks I met the glance,
I don’t know if among monotonous cries I met
your glance, I don’t know if between mountain
and sea, there is also a river. I don’t know if
between coast and desert a river approached revives,
I don’t know if in the mist you approach. I don’t
know if you stumble or tremble, you don’t know if I cry
or despair. Despairing, despairing, despairing, it’s
all a fabricating. You don’t know if I cry
or despair, you don’t know if I laugh or despair. I
don’t know if among the pale rocks your smile.
I don’t know if among the pale rocks your
smile appeared to me, o deity of the resplendent manes
o cypress in the sun I don’t know if among the pale
rocks of your glance lay in wait youth and
enchantment. I don’t know if between the rough cheeks
of your glance lay in wait farewells or mercy.
I don’t know how to thank you and don’t know your
dwelling and don’t know if this cry reaches you. I don’t
know if the infant who seeks you is the old woman who
binds you. I don’t know if the riverbank is wide
or the infant is dead, I know not, see not, am not,
for you, who are who live who vibrate who remain
beyond sweetness. I wouldn’t play the rattles
if I knew how swiftly you enter the heart.
I wouldn’t play this dance if I knew
I wasn’t alone. I wouldn’t play any dance if you
were singing. We don’t cry if youth goes astray,
we don’t laugh if the father’s an idle aristocrat,
we don’t laugh if mirth’s an idle merry-go-round.
We don’t laugh and we don’t regret and we don’t know if
crying or laughing, we aren’t janitors for grown-ups,
we don’t break the little ones’ tails, we let
everything be as it can. Don’t fall.
Don’t win! Don’t lose, — don’t annoy. Don’t
break out in solemn laughter; don’t spill out in revolt!
Saddened you soften, lover of power you toughen up.
from Amelia Rosselli’s The Dragonfly: Panegyric to Liberty (1958)
* * * * *
L’alba si muove a grigiori lontana. Io non so
se tra le pallide rocce io incontravo lo sguardo,
io non so se tra le monotone grida incontravo
il tuo sguardo, io non so se tra la montagna
e il mare, esiste pure un fiume. Io non so se
tra la costa e il deserto rinviene un fiume accostato,
io non so se tra la bruma tu t’accosti. Io non
so se tu cadi o tu tremi, tu non sai se io piango
o dispero. Disperare, disperare, disperare, è
tutto un fabbricare. Tu non sai se io piango
o dispero, tu non sai se io rido o dispero. Io
non so se tra le pallide rocce il tuo sorriso.
Io non so se tra le pallide rocce il tuo
sorriso m’apparve, o deo dalle fulvide chiome
o cipresso al sole io non so se tra le pallide
rocce del tuo sguardo riposavano l’incanto e
la giovinezza. Io non so se tra le ruvide guance
del tuo sguardo riposavano gli addii o la pietà.
Io non so ringraziarti e non so la tua dimora
e non so se questo grido ti raggiunga. Io non
so se l’infante che ti cerca è la vecchia che
ti tiene in balìa. Io non so se la sponda è larga
o l’infante è morta, non so, non vedo, non sono,
per te, che sei che vivi che vibri che rimani
al di là della dolcezza. Io non suonerei le sonaglie
se sapessi che tu entri nel cuore con facilità.
Io non suonerei questo ballo se sapessi che non
sono sola. Io non suonerei nessun ballo se tu
cantassi. Non si piange se la gioventù si è fuorviata,
non si ride se il padre è un nobile disoccupato,
non si ride se la gioia è una giostra disoccupata.
Non si ride e non si rimpiange e non si sa se
piangere o ridere, non si fa il bidello ai grandi,
non si rompe la coda ai piccoli, si lascia stare
tutto così come potrebbe essere. Non cadere.
Non vincere! Non perdere, — non stancare. Non
prorompere in risa solenni; non spanderti ribelle!
Addolorata tu addolcisci, amante del potere t’indurisci.
from The Dragonfly: Panegyric to Liberty (1958) / La Libellula: Panegirico della liberta’ (1958)
To acquire a copy of Deborah Woodard’s and Roberta Antognini’s revised version of The Dragonfly, published by Entry Rios Books on March 7, 2023, and distributed via Small Press Distribution (SPD), click here.
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Of related interest: for Ron Slate’s On The Seawall review (2010) of Deborah Woodard’s earlier translation of The Dragonfly, click here.