Authoriality in poetic translation: The case of Amelia Rosselli's practice

Abstract

This article provides a historical and theoretical contextualization of Amelia Rosselli's practice of translation. Some hitherto neglected Rosselli translations from John Berryman will be examined to ascertain the role played by translation in her multilingual oeuvre. My analysis builds upon recent explorations of translingual authors' translating practice informed by Deleuze and Guattari's seminal Kafka: pour une littérature mineure. It aims to achieve an understanding of the aesthetic of Rosselli's trilingualism and the function of translation within the author's minorizing project.

Keywords:

• Amelia Rosselli
• authoriality
• John Berryman
• multilingualism
• translingualism
• minorizing strategies

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Roberto Cerati for allowing me to consult and publish extracts from the Rosselli files held at the Fondo Einaudi at the Archivio di Stato in Turin, and Professor Maria Antonietta Grignani, Director of the Centro Manoscritti (University of Pavia), for allowing me to consult the Rosselli papers. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the completion of this research. All translations into English are my own, if not otherwise indicated.

Note on contributor

Daniela La Penna is senior lecturer in Italian studies at the University of Reading. She has published articles on modern Italian poetry and fiction, translation and film, and is the author of “La promessa di un semplice linguaggio”. Lingua e letterarietà nella poesia di Amelia Rosselli (2013). She has co-edited with Daniela Caselli Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation: Literary Cultures in Italian and English (2008) and edited Meneghello: Fiction, Scholarship, Passione civile (2012).

Notes

1. For biographical similarities between Rosselli and Plath, see Veschi 2005 and Renda 2007. For Rosselli's engagement with Dickinson, see Pesatori 2008.

2. An unabridged version of the Glossarietto can be read in Rosselli (2004, 69–73). See also Giovannuzzi (2008) for a contextualization of this aspect of Rosselli's autoexegesis.

3. All Rosselli's volumes are now collected in Rosselli 2012a.

4. In 1985, 13 texts of the Nuovi argomenti series were republished in the volume Le muse inquietanti ed altre poesie co-authored with Gabriella Morisco. In 1991, Poesia published five new translations, four of which were from Plath's Juvenilia. These translations are collected in Rosselli 2012a, 1161–1182. In 2003, the variants of Rosselli's unpublished version of “Dark House” were revealed (now in Palli Baroni 2007), bringing to 20 the number of the translations from Plath.

5. The poems excluded by the Garzanti edition are now available in Rosselli 2012a, 1051–1125.

6. In a 1995 interview, Rosselli declared the auto-translation project an “impresa faticosissima” [wearing enterprise]: “alla sola idea di tradurne più di dieci […] mi veniva il ribrezzo” [I would feel sick at the very idea of translating more than ten [poems]] (Rosselli 2010, 158).