If the Sky Darkens: Mental Illness, Poetic Difficulty, & Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations

I first encountered the work of Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) in 2006. I had been a loyal customer of Green Integer Editions, which publishes pocket-sized books by a range of international poets. I purchased Rosselli on a whim, not knowing her work but interested in learning more about modern Italian poetry. In the black and white cover photo, Rosselli wears a white sweater and has a somewhat vacant expression. She looked to me a little like my grandmother. The poems themselves startled me. They were raw and had a visionary intensity reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud and Sylvia Plath. Rosselli struck me then and still strikes me as one of the most remarkable practitioners of the postwar lyric. I place her alongside Jack Spicer, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Paul Celan as a poet for whom the lyric has an ontological force, pitched toward attuning language, via an extinction of the self, to possibilities beyond everyday discourse.

A recently released edition of Rosselli’s War Variations (1964) from Otis Books / Seismicity Editions (trans. Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti) updates the 2005 Green Integer edition of the same translation, and includes an introduction by Re detailing key aspects of Rosselli’s biography, historical context, and reception. It is the latest in a list of Rosselli translations released over the past five years, among them Impromptu (trans. Diana Thow and Jean-Charles Vegliante), Locomotrix: Selected Poery and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (trans. Jennifer Scappettone), and The Dragonfly: A Selection of Pomes, 1953-1981 (trans. Giuseppe Leporace and Deborah Woodard).

The question of biography has been both especially relevant and problematic in the case of Rosselli. At the age of seven, Rosselli’s father, Carlo Rosselli, a hero of the Italian Fascist resistance, was assassinated by Mussolini-financed paramilitary. With new anti-Semitic laws soon to be enacted, the Rosselli family was forced to flee Italy, precipitating what Re describes as “…years of nomadic existence and exile [as]…a political and war refugee in France, Switzerland, England, and the United States.” Rosselli’s trilingualism (she wrote primarily in Italian but was also fluent in English and French) is an important aspect of her work and is tied to this time.

After the war, Rosselli chose to return to Italy, where she soon suffered the loss of her mother and, in 1954, her grandmother, an event that precipitated the first of a series of breakdowns. Around this time, she began to write the poems that would later be included in Primi scritti, and by 1963 she had completed her first book, War Variations. Rosselli had shown poems to the critic Bobi Bazlen, who was encouraging, but wider recognition first came when Elio Vittorini brought her work to the attention of poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who published twenty-four of her poems in Vittorini and Italo Calvino’s journal Il Menabò, along with a note of commentary (written by Pasolini), “A Note on Amelia Rosselli.”

Focusing on the “slip” or “lapsus,” a Freudian term indicating an involuntary mistake in speech or writing, Pasolini (here in Jennifer Scappettone’s translation) finds Rosselli’s difficult language “mechanical: an emulsion that takes form on its own, nonmastered,” that is, a symptom “of the ideological type,” namely of the desire to “be liberated from the weight of institutions—which burden the whole length of the soul—and, at the same time, to respect them.” He sees War Variations based in “the great European liberal culture of the twentieth century,” and its author as a cosmopolitan (that is, a bourgeois, a voluntary exile) “from the great familial traditions of the Cosmopolis.” War Variations’ “great themes” are “Neurosis and Mystery,” and it represents the “best product” of the “Myth of Irrationality.”

The lapsus itself is a “linguistic deformation,” excluding “every real possibility of reform or linguistic (and institutional) revolution.” In its attempt to “deride institutions without eating into them [where ‘revolutionary ideology,’ in contrast, is a ‘corrosive’ to institutions],” it instead succeeds only in “inoculat[ing] them with the illness of mystery, in an unconscious reification.” The deformed word is indeed “more resistant to the corrosives of a revolutionary ideology than a normal word is” in so far as deformity “bears a more integral capacity for resistance if it creates an indominable sphere of death and sacrality around itself.”

Pasolini doesn’t venture a clinical diagnosis of Rosselli, but he does provide a Marxist-scientific diagnosis of the historical and ideological conflicts underlying War Variations. In effect, he adopts Freudian terminology to play Marxist physician to War Variations, determining that the book (and Rosselli herself) is ideologically unsound. Pasolini’s noteworthy political commitments are here articulated in a rhetoric that implicitly valorizes legible and healthy (vs. deformed and symptomatic) texts and subjects. For Rosselli, diagnosed schizophrenic, Pasolini’s note must have been not only personally hurtful, but destabilizing to her sense of her own work, her political commitments, and her integrity as a subject. Re observes that Pasolini’s claim that Rosselli “was only transcribing directly onto the page the weird language of her unconscious and her mental disorder” shaped the reception of her work “well into the 1990s, even though Rosselli herself refuted it repeatedly.” In 1978 she was subject to yet another dismissive mischaracterization by Pier Vicenzo Mengaldo, who included her (as the only female poet) in the influential anthology Poeti italiani del Novecento, writing that her difficult language was, for all intents and purposes, the language of madness.

Despite Pasolini’s note, Rosselli was invited to the meetings of the Novissimi and “Gruppo 63,” which included poets such as Nanni Balestrini, Antonio Porta, and Edoardo Sanguineti. Rosselli kept to the margins of these groups, but did form a friendship with Antonio Porta that lasted until his death in April 1989. Rosselli committed suicide on February 11^th, 1996 (the thirty-third anniversary of Plath’s death), jumping from her window into the courtyard of her apartment building. In addition to War Variations, she published Hospital Series (1969), composed in the years just prior to and after one of her most serious breakdowns, and Document (1976). These three books are in Re’s words “Rosselli’s essential trilogy, a milestone of contemporary poetry in any language.” She would later write Impromptu (1981), a return to writing after an extended period of debilitating illness, and her early work would be revised and collected as Primi Scretti (1980). She also published a book of poems in English, Sleep. Poesie in inglese (1991).

How did mental illness play a part in Rosselli’s work? Re remarks that Rosselli’s poems were at once an occasion “to heal herself and emerge from her suffering and isolation,” but also “not in any way a direct expression of her illness.” She reads Rosselli’s work as a counter weight to her illness: “Only her intense, demanding work on poetry saved her from what eventually turned into devastating paranoia.” Poetry kept “illness and disability at bay, though she always fought against the label and the very notion of being disabled, and even declined to accept a disability pension from the Italian government.” It was the act of “painstakingly and ruthlessly editing, revising and polishing” that allowed Rosselli to “emerge from her suffering and isolation.”

The evidence of Rosselli’s “deliberate, conscious creation” is seen to be illustrated conclusively with the publication of her last four books, revisions of earlier unpublished manuscripts that testified to Rosselli’s serious poetic research in the years preceding War Variations. Crucially, they “[brought] to light the labor that went on in Rosselli’s poetic workshop…[and] contributed to dismantling the myth of the ‘lapsus’ created by Pasolini and picked up by so many after him.”

Re’s rhetoric of rigor and agency—of painstaking and ruthless work, where work is tied to poetry and poetry to health in the battle against illness—is a key strategy in the effort to rehabilitate Rosselli from the damage caused by Pasolini’s note and to present the case for Rosselli to English-language readers. While this is a vital effort, it is nevertheless possible to hear in Re’s rhetoric traces of the anxieties and demands of present-day discursive and disciplinary fields whose values in many ways echo Pasolini’s.

What becomes apparent in Re’s distancing of Rosselli from Pasolini and determining that her work is “not in any way a direction expression of her illness” is the unique problem mental illness poses to establishing artistic legitimacy in so far as artistic legitimacy is tied to the artist’s agency and intention, which are called into question in the case of mental illness. With mental illness the reader is forced to ask (in line with Pasolini’s ideological critique): Is this work the product of a stable subject, one generating meaningful, intentional speech, or is it merely a symptom, an insubstantial byproduct of illness?

Western approaches to mental illness have changed over the centuries, ranging from a dialogic approach—a willingness to listen to and affirm certain forms of divinely inspired madness (e.g. Socrates’s “If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses…he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman”) to a number of disciplinary approaches examined most notably by Michel Foucault, who argued that from the mid-seventeenth century forward the work of silencing madness and the mentally ill was essential to consolidating a range of discursive and disciplinary domains.

In her essay “Poetry and Madness,” identified by Jennifer Scappettone as a crucial intervention in Rosselli’s characterization as a “mad” poet, Re presents a more nuanced portrait of the relationship of Rosselli’s language to madness, positing that her writing (in Document [1976]) “on the edge of madness” (where madness is here, after Foucault, an irrecuperable limit whose rupturing intrusions serve only to highlight the contingency of discursive systems and subjects) is also “a kind of spiritual exercise, a return to a form of mysticism which is the attempt to go beyond the reason-unreason opposition and through writing to find a truth that may transcend their contradiction.” She writes that “Only the powerful antinomical and dialogical logic of [Rosselli’s] poetry allows her paradoxically to configure the possibility of a space of freedom where the loss—of self, of writing—becomes il dono [the gift].” Rosselli as such stands alongside Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Federico García Lorca, and Jack Spicer as a poet for whom the poetic event coincides with a disciplined relinquishing of agency and intention that clears a space for undisclosed potentialities to emerge in language. The poet here, to borrow a phrase used to describe the design process of Junya Watanabe, is “subjugated to the act of making,” that is, participates in an encounter with the unknown and approaches a space of freedom through a resolute submission to the event of making. While such a practice isn’t necessarily related to or made possible by mental illness, it does emphasize a disruption of discourse that can be read productively in relation to the chaotic, undisciplined discursive interruptions seen in certain types of mental illness. Rosselli herself, in an article on Sylvia Plath, noted (here in Re’s translation) that “artistic research at the highest level of intensity, such as Plath’s, is in and of itself a mortal risk,” and perhaps especially so when, through distinct but analogous processes, madness and artistic intensity coincide to pitch the subject toward what Scappettone (citing Rosselli) calls “‘an exit from the I’ and eventually even from the rapport between the I and the thou.”

As Pasolini and Mengaldo’s assessments of Rosselli illustrate, the question of mental illness is closely related to the question of poetic difficulty. The critic W. R. Johnson has observed that difficulty has vexed the lyric’s reception since the Romans, who selected texts for Advanced Rhetorical Training, their equivalent of high school, based on their ability to reinforce civic virtues and serve as models of rhetoric and eloquence. The Greek lyric poets (and particularly the women) were largely excluded from these lists because of their difficulty, their transgressive subject matter, and their use of regional dialects.

Rosselli’s lyric is “difficult” in so far as it does not treat the poem as a vehicle of a rhetorical transaction—her language does not proceed via narrative or rational argument and does not advance an explicit moral or political program. It is instead associational, anaphora driven, syntactically surprising, rich with alliteration, internal rhyme, neologisms, solecisms, portmanteau words, and puns, broad in its deployment of different dictions and dialects, allusive, inflected by the syntactic and etymological structures of other languages, and filled with vivid, idiosyncratic imagery. Such characteristics, often ascribed to difficult texts, become particularly problematic when reading and evaluating the work of artists with mental illness, where the question of intentional vs. symptomatic expression (and thus the discursive provenance of the artifact) is at stake.

Reading Rosselli’s work is an immersive and exhilarating but also anxious experience, one that challenges normative reading practices. Here, for instance, is the beginning of [“Roberto, mother calls out, toying to and fro on the white”], the first poem from War Variations (in Re and Vangelisti’s translation):

Roberto, mother calls out, toying to and fro on the white
divan. I don’t know
what God wants of me, serious
intentions rending eternity, or the frank laughter
of the puppet hanging from the
railing, railing yes, railing no, oh
postpone your heartfelt prayer with
a moving babble; car the dry and yellow leaves ravish
the wind that stirs them. Black vision tree tending
toward the supreme power (pasture) which in fact I
believe bleaches instead the ground beneath my feet, you are
my love if the sky darkens, and the shiver
is yours, in the eternal forest….

The poem begins with the mother calling out a proper name, Roberto, a gesture whose intimacy and lack of preamble is reminiscent of Frank O’Hara. The words that follow, “toying to and fro on the white / divan,” seem almost self-reflexive, collapsing into a single unit elements of Rosselli’s faux-naïf tendencies and her modernist starkness. The occasion is a crisis, a drama of self division that unfolds through a series of existential and spiritual questions—whether God demands “serious / intentions” or the relinquished agency of a “puppet hanging from the / railing.” Rosselli establishes motifs and develops them throughout the poems, so that “to and fro” returns through “railing yes, railing no, oh.” Her distinct imagistic facility can be seen in “car the dry and yellow leaves ravish / the wind that stirs them.” This quotidian image of a car tearing through leaves is made vivid and strange through the peculiar word choice of leaves that “ravish” the wind. Such quotidian moments often precipitate or are folded into moments of spiritual or hallucinatory intensity: “Black vision tree tending / toward the supreme power (pasture)….and the shiver / is yours, in the eternal forest…”

The moods of War Variations are at different times ecstatic, inquisitive, outraged, manic, and resigned. Rosselli’s particular idiom consists of incongruous adjectives, exotic proper nouns, religious references, and phrases of infernal strangeness and severity (“the children of hell grew sporadically”). The poems seek out potentials for transcendence, tracing the wonder of its tenuous emergence and the aftermath of its retreat. We hear, for instance, in “[That violent rustling of birds, their flirtatious”]:

That violent rustling of birds, their flirtations
rising in swarms from the hardest trees
(the tender lion roars in a flight of thought
and my faith lights up) their perching on the thinnest tops
their abandonment to distracted gazing, this
is your desire, flying over my mountains of anxiousness
this is your hot thread of unknowning
anxiousnesss.

While the birds may be “flirtatious,” we also recognize that the speaker’s slippage (flirtations of birds to the flirtations of love) is taken up and, in the context of desire and anxiety, developed into a sketch of proximity to the divine: “the tender lion roars in flight of thought / and my faith lights up.” Later, in [“The queer flower that I was took care of chance. Man…”], love is situated in relation to madness:

Man

isn’t free!
. . .

Madness blossomed. If by chance I was in the service of a
king it was impossible to fool him. If because of difficulties
        I couldn’t
go mad if because of joy I couldn’t love convenience
        remained;
love! impossible love cultivated as a prank. Always for
the love I had for you I resolved the doubts…

The speaker here is confronted by her being tethered to a law (a king impossible to fool) that delimits her sense of the possible. Madness, which has “blossomed,” is nevertheless contained by “difficulties,” and love is prohibited by “joy.” “Convenience” is what remains, and love, absent amid convenience, can only be cultivated as a prank, a trick whose absurd commitment (“Always for / the love I had for you I resolved the doubts…”) seeks to shatter limits and test freedom: “Man / isn’t free.”

To go mad is to “blossom,” a surging forth (vs. collapsing in) and testing of the quotidian, affective, and symbolic barriers that render love “impossible.” Love may also, in a more familiar formulation, be a species of madness that seeks access to the impossible. An affirmation of the rupturings of madness and love would require a risk and a “resolution of doubts” in the face of the destabilizing path to the impossible, perhaps related to Rosselli’s comment on Plath that “artistic research at the highest level of intensity…is in and of itself a mortal risk.” Madness thus provides the speaker with a rhythm and a domain whose processes offer context for the question of how love can confront law and pass from the impossible to the possible.

Re and Vangelisti’s excellent translation of War Variations reveals Rosselli to be, like O’Hara, perennially contemporary. War Variations itself stands alongside Stevens’s Harmonium as not only one of the twentieth century’s most important books of poetry but one of its most exceptional first books. It should have the iconic status among younger American readers of, say, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Plath’s Ariel, or O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, and Rosselli’s entire body of work furthermore deserves the wide-spread critical and philosophical attention afforded contemporaries like Paul Celan, who also struggled with and succumbed to mental illness.