A Brawl of Angels

Nothing could be stranger for the Anglophone reader than to hear a poet one knows solely in translation suddenly speak in her own English voice. It’s as if an archangel stepped through the window—bright-winged, dressed for war, and bearing confidential news just for you.

Such an arresting experience arrives with the long-awaited release of Amelia Rosselli's Sleep (New York Review Books, 2023), the first complete US edition of this refulgent postwar poet’s English-language poems. The trilingual Rosselli wrote mostly in a charged, multivalent Italian; with Sleep, she somersaults backwards to alight in the English lyric. She deploys with playful and perfect aim an angelic armament of diction, sonics, brevity, and form, not to defeat a foe but to further extend the field of battle—that is, poetry itself—under her celestial aegis.

Sleep has heretofore been available only in Italy, where complete or partial versions appeared in 1992 and 2012. The new US edition reflects the longtime advocacy of poet and critic Barry Schwabsky, who, in his congenial, precise introduction, relates Rosselli's dramatic biography: the daughter of celebrated antifascists, she was raised in exile, first in France then in New York State, where she later became interested in English-language poets. (She was drawn to—and caught the attention of—John Ashbery, who, as co-editor of Art and Literature, published six poems from Sleep in a 1966 issue, the earliest known appearance of these poems.)

Unusually for a woman poet of any period, Rosselli's Italian poetry has been available to US readers for decades, thanks to a phalanx of English-language translators: from the comradely abundance of Jennifer Scappettone's Locomotrix (2012), a comprehensive sampling of Rosselli's entire oeuvre; to the exquisite night-writing of Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti's War Variations (2005); from the lepidopteral levitation of Diana Thow's Hospital Series (2017) to the flooded watercourse of Deborah Woodward, Roberta Antognini, and Dario de Pasquale's Obtuse Diary (2018)—and more besides.

Yet there has always been something of the archangel to Rosselli: an unearthly pugnacity, a capacity for song and war. She wrote assiduously from the 1950s until her suicide in 1996, constantly renovating her own strict sense of form, moving among languages, arranging her “variations,” as she called them, in series and ranks as if for battle. Like Alice Notley’s work, Rosselli's exhibits the convulsive virtuosity of a woman poet laying claim to the would-be masculine vigor implied by virtuosity’s etymologically virile roots. Rosselli's lifelong contestation of lyric form is continually refreshed by her multilingualism, in which each language frets and twins for its sister; by her childhood of upheaval and exile; by her notoriety as the daughter of a political martyr and as the ambivalent protege of Pier Paolo Pasolini; and by her decades-long experience of mental and physical illness, hospitalization, and electroshock therapy.

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The daughter of the antifascist Italian political leader Carlo Rosselli and the English activist Marion Cave, Rosselli came up against state power in utero. After her father escaped from exile on the island of Lapari, where he was being held with other political prisoners for his role in assisting a fellow dissident flee to France, Italian authorities briefly detained Rosselli’s pregnant mother. Her parents reunited in Paris, where Rosselli was born in 1930. (She was named for her paternal grandmother, Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, a Venetian Jewish playwright.) Rosselli was first raised in French, the language of refuge and exile. When she was seven, French fascists assassinated her father and uncle; the family tumbled around the world before ending up in, of all places, Westchester County. It was during this time that Rosselli expanded her English mother tongue, broadened by Americanisms and coastal vowels.

In 1945, Rosselli graduated from Mamaroneck High School and, shortly after, returned to Europe. Following a pivotal period studying music composition in England, she settled on Italy and the Italian language as a matter of aesthetic and political commitment, taking her lifelong fight with patriarchy and paternalism right to the fatherland, the father tongue. When Pasolini endorsed her with his 1963 “Note on Amelia Rosselli,” Rosselli objected to his reading of her work through the lens of the Freudian “lapsus,” or unconscious error. For Rosselli, there can be no accident or error, only decisive action. As she later insisted, “Mine is a ‘trilingual language’ with which I had to fight in order to choose the language in which I wanted to write, and the country I wanted to live in, simultaneously.”

As she began devising her distinctively compressed yet incandescent style, Rosselli also developed an idiosyncratic theory of poetic form based on her study of music—a box-like, standardized format enabled by monospace typewriters such as the IBM Selectric, introduced in 1961. Her vision of these so-called “metrical spaces” captured the lyric present as a visual, horizontal snapshot of an array of vertical historical exigencies: “My meter was, if not regular, at least total: all possible imaginable rhythms filled my square meticulously.” This method allowed her to reconceive the narrow aperture of the individual lyric as an ample threshold of political and aesthetic possibility, a fixed weft that captured the fullness of her warp. As she explained in “Spazi Metrici” (“Metrical Spaces,” 1962):

I noted strange thickenings in the rhythmicity of my thought, strange arrests, strange coagulations, and changes of tempo, strange intervals of rest or absence of action; new sonorous and ideal fusions in accordance with the changing of practical time, of graphic spaces and of the spaces surrounding me continually and materially.

This passage, in Scappettone's close and trenchant translation, suggests that the strange, warping, coagulating, shifting experience Rosselli sought to capture in poetry could also register as an experience of multilingualism itself. With its competing temporal signatures, its suspended and opposing logics of cause-and-effect, its sonic broadness and diffident punctuation, and its consequential play of articles, prepositions, and pronouns, multilingualism offers an account of the world expanded by contradiction.

Ironically, the concrete, squared-off form that allowed Rosselli to stage her poetry's metrical spaces is not reproduced in any present-day English or Italian version of her work that I have encountered. Yet, it is detectable to the contemporary reader when we consider her oeuvre as entailing this scrolling, continuous field, where the lightning strike of the lyric reveals an array of historical contingencies. In this way, Rosselli's vision may be seen as singular despite of and because of its avowed variation, from her trilingual Primi scritti 1952-1963 (1980) to the tessellated Italian of Variazioni belliche (1964) to the English of Sleep. 

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Rosselli's first published book was Variazioni belliche (War Variations), an initial series of roughly 30 ingeniously compressed marvels that expand via “variations” into a fusillade. Like the shot from a pistol, many of these short, piercing volleys hang from a single syllable—in this case: “se,” Italian for “if”:

But if in love I glimpsed a glimmer of joy; if in
the night suddenly rising I saw the sky was all
a brawl of angels; if from your happiness I sucked
mine; if from our eyes coming together I foresaw the
disaster if in the melancholy I fought the hard dragon
of desire; if for love I did somersaults if for your
songs I stayed deluded: it was to better hide the prize
of goodness you did not give. Not all acts of goodness
can we answer.

Here, in Re and Vangelisti’s vivid translation, we witness the strange temporality of War Variations. Lyric time is subjunctive, puffing out from the pistol shot of “if,” but this is a subjunctive that almost never lands at its “then,” i.e., at its temporal completion. Instead, the poem continually launches more “if” clauses, as if to reload its subjunctive proposition incessantly. Yet, like the brief wraith of smoke an incendiary leaves on the sky, this volley of temporal conjecture also conveys the backwards glance of the past tense—“I saw,” “I sucked”—an intimacy that can be touched on but not sustained. Instead, in the fiery “somersault” of Rosselli's verse, each fuse burns down and forces the turn of the page, like an infernal engine.

Reading Rosselli's work in these previous bilingual editions makes for sublime instruction because it restores some of the material and temporal qualities of her own multilingualism—strange, delayed, thickened, revelatory. Consider the odd, playful, attention-getting “somersaults” in the middle of the aforementioned stanza; somersaulting from across the gutter, the paired Italian phrase reads “se per l'amore facevo salti mortali.” “Salto mortale” is indeed the Italian idiomatic phrase for “somersault,” but it literally translates as “deadly leap.” In the canniness of Rosselli's Italian, an acquired father tongue, such a leap, however playful, links what is at stake in all this rising and falling, from the sky which is a “brawl of angels” to, elsewhere, “Angels that don't know how to fall, armies that don't / know how to fall!” (“Gli angioli che non sanno cadere, gli eserciti che non / sanno cadere!”) For Adam, the Fall from Eden is total; for the angels, as Milton teaches, Satan's Fall comes, structurally, in the middle of things (Paradise Lost starts in medias res). It is a temporary setback, the fiery lake from which the next, and eternal, battle will be launched. To fall—to become, etymologically, a cadaver (from the Latin cadere, to fall)—is not to be defeated but to assume the proper position for angelic battle. This is the case even when one's fallen state is that of Death's twin, Sleep.

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With its title, Sleep marks out for itself a nocturnal battlefield adjacent, perhaps, to that of war. In Shakespearean dramatic structure, sleep may be the space of action and the reversal of power, as in Hamlet; or mystical somnambulant motion, as in Henry IV; or a state of posthumous transit and communication, as in Macbeth, however anathema to the warrior-king. Rosselli's sleep seems not so much the opposite of war as its continuance by other means: a space where the lines of battle warp and distend, as in her metrical spaces, allowing “strange thickenings in the rhythmicity of my thought, strange arrests, strange coagulations, and changes of tempo, strange intervals of rest or absence of action; new sonorous and ideal fusions.”

“Sonorous and ideal fusions” could describe Rosselli's tongue itself. In the sonic spell of Sleep, the notorious vagaries of English orthography allow vowels to roll like eggs along the poem's enjambments—an egg held in the mouth:

             The wind cries oof!
and goes off. We were left alone with our sister
navel. Good, so we’ll learn to
ravish it. Alone. Words in their forge.

Here, the shift from oof to off signals a hidden word: œuf, French for egg. That egg-shape is mirrored in the ovoid navel, an umbilicus or omphalos (there's that oof again) that roots one not in the sureties of the fatherland or the mother tongue but to the sister, that is, the secret sharer of a generation, twin or likeness of the self. Meanwhile, the “o” rolls visually from word to word, “Alone” but with a sleepy clutch of o sounds like doves for company—long, short, diphthonged, broadening or rounding or lowering in tone as it's joined to an “u” or an “o” or a “r.” The last phrase suggests that “or,” with its capacity for variation, is written into every “word,” and that words are made, like swords, in a “forge.”

Rosselli applies the fungible resource of sound along the scaffolding of word order, leaning on the priority of the English sentence to enable the lowly to do battle with ultimates: “My Soul does rise in Silence / up the Sordid Moon,” and “The leaves are crushing / the wind.” Rather than more decisive or conclusive verbs such as “rises” and “crush,” Rosselli's insistence on helping verbs—“does rise,” “are crushing”—lengthens and distends these verbal effects and affects, opening up a drag, a dream interval. The battle is a dream ballet.

Where War Variations feels intensely Miltonic in its obsession with rising and falling, one could say there is something Pre-Raphaelite about the English poems of Sleep, with their medieval personnel of knights, maidens, and kings, and with the verbs somehow simultaneously agential and inertial. One even senses Ophelia, that Pre-Raphaelite icon, not waving but drowning in this uncanny vignette, with its hint of Keats's Autumn:

Hangs water in your mouth to
signify you may mellow, all things
within, outdoors, in the tremulous
wave of the hand.

The depersonalized way everything hangs from that oddly placed “hangs” does not erase the violence from this composition; instead, the enjambments force us downwards on the odd turns of this sentence's screw. Enlisted by the second person to imagine ourselves as the body in the scene, we become, at least momentarily, the drowned girl openmouthed, and now we see a hand rise on the tremulous wave: Is it alive? Is it ours? (And there's that Keatsy triad again: water, reader, dead hand.) In fact, like the dead, or like the Archangel Michael who can narrate both the beginning and ending of time, Rosselli claims double, contradictory qualities for her verse, spraining the English verb, especially until, like Hamlet, it has a forced capacity for both action and inertia, agency and withdrawal: “Actions in my brain: these verbs, whose celerity / resists all pain.” In this sense the sleep (of death) becomes the theater of war, a space of endlessly restaged acts of vengeance and vanquishment:

            I am the danger of
a court massacre, exclaimed the virgin
on the tree top as the tree fell, swarmed
down to putritude. Sleep fell on, the reason
went, and the host remembered he had forgotten
the power and the glory.

The repetition of Rosselli's keyword, “fell,” indicates this to be a crucial episode, and while individual poems in Sleep are largely untitled, it is to this verse that Rosselli awards the victorious title “Sleep,” like a medal for valor. For here, in the vexed and reclaimed matrilineal realm of English—the language of sleep—the virgin's fall is finally fortunate. Here the anachronistic (that is, dead but revived) “putritude” speaks its secret, nearly homophonic name, “pulchritude,” from the femme lowliness of the grave, and it's the male “host” who discovers himself to be at the short end of the dream's—and the lyric's—relentless wave of substitutions. He remembers what he has forgotten to have begotten—“the power and the glory”—that is, his Kingdom, his Son, his Reign. (His toy, his dream, his rest, as another ill Shakespearean would have it.) This accounts for the triumphant note throughout Sleep:

And then she left the convent (the interminable sick-
bed). Then she left charity! Then she found hope.
Then she left.

It is typical of Rosselli that, despite the American-eared, comic finality of this exit line, this is not at all the final poem in the sequence. Instead, the page turns to the next scene, the next skirmish. A fall might be fortunate, but, like all fortunes, it is also temporary. As a poem in this volume concludes, contra conclusion: “Joy then / is the liberty i take with dogs, trains, paupers / or my mind's flight.” Sleep is that double territory where the mind can fly, not out of the battle, but into it, into its warped theater of dreamlike, forgotten-yet-remembered, crucial yet evaporating scenes. Such is Rosselli's claim, a war she prosecuted all her life: fighting History's patriarchal victor-time with an arsenal of sister rhymes, syntaxes, interruptions, enjambments, abrupt exits, echoes, and ghosts.