Photo © Dino Ignani

Amelia Rosselli

Born in Paris in 1930, Amelia Rosselli was the daughter of English activist Marion Cave and Carlo Rosselli, a Florentine Jewish intellectual who became a hero and eventually a martyr of the European anti-Fascist Resistance. Rosselli grew up as a refugee between France, England, and the United States. She eventually settled in Rome.

A self-described "poet of research" as well as a translator, musician, and musicologist, she was the author of eight poetry collections, including the Italian volumes Variazioni belliche, published by Garzanti in 1964 with her manifesto on a new prosody and an afterword by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Serie ospedaliera (Mondadori, 1969), and Documento (Garzanti, 1976), the English volume Sleep (Rossi e Spera, 1981; Garzanti, 1992), and Primi scritti: 1952-1963 (Guanda, 1980), containing prose poems and lyrics in Italian, English, and French.

Her prose writings are collected in Diario ottuso (Istituto Bibliografico Napoleone, 1990) and Una scrittura plurale: saggi e interventi critici (Interlinea, 2005). A bilingual edition of her selected poetry and prose, Locomotrix, edited and translated by Jennifer Scappettone, was published in 2012 by University of Chicago Press. Scappettone was awarded the Raiziss/ de Palchi Prize from the Academy of American Poets for her translation.

Rosselli translated several poets, including Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, and is widely considered one of the most important Italian poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Rosselli took her own life at her home in Rome in 1996.