FrançaisConference : National literary fields and European space
Translation, poetical invention, self legitimation. The case of Amelia Rosselli
Author/s : Sarah Ventimiglia
The case of Amelia Rosselli can be considered as an example of fertile possibilities, difficulties and misunderstandings normally involved in the trajectories developed between several countries, languages, literatures, educational methods and different intellectual fields. Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris in 1930. Her father Carlo Rosselli was the leader of the Italian movement “Giustizia e Libertà”. He was exiled in France and assassinated by the Fascists in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne in 1937, with his brother Nello. Her mother, Marion Cave, came from Ireland and was a politically engaged teacher. Amelia spent most of her childhood – between 1939 and 1948 – in Great Britain and United States, where her Jewish, antifascist family escaped during the Second World War, and finally she settled in Italy when she was nineteen. Her fame was primarily due to the importance of her father’s position rather than to a veritable recognition by critics and readers for her poetical work. A stimulating anglophone background characterized her cultural growth and allowed her to assimilate American literary experiences, nearly unknown or ignored by most of Italian writers of the time. Moreover, this fact explains her disposition to cross cultural borders and her attitude to defy the categories of comprehension and appreciation which were in force in Italian literary field, when she aspired to take part in it. Her work as a translator is a veritable example of appropriation, transposition and self legitimation, as her translation strategies of Dickinson’s and Plath’s poems are showing. Thanks to the symbolic capital of her name, she found no difficulty in taking part in the Roman literary field. She was still very young when her first collection of poems was published into Il menabò (the review started by Vittorini and Calvino in 1959), with a preface by Pasolini. Nevertheless, Amelia Rosselli’s poetical language – resulted from her eccentric background, completely unrelated to Italian writer’s background – rejects any attempt of classification. The misreadings characterizing the reception of Rosselli’s poetry can be understood only through the reconstruction of the gap between the history of her poetry as the result of her peculiar trajectory, and the history of the Italian literary field between 1950-1970.
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