Deborah Woodard on Translating Amelia Rosselli for Thirty Years

Our distributor Asterism Books has published a new essay by Deborah Woodard, “On Translating Amelia Rosselli (For Thirty Years),” reflecting on three decades of reading and translating one of the most singular poets of twentieth-century Italy.

Woodard has translated Rosselli across much of her career, including her translations with Roberta Antognini, published by Entre Ríos Books in Obtuse Diary, The Dragonfly, and, most recently, Notes Scattered and Lost.

Looking back over those decades, Woodard writes:

“Sometimes I think about how things could have gone differently, how my translating life, and, to a certain extent, my life, would have been different, if I hadn’t stumbled upon Amelia Rosselli’s first collection, Variazioni belliche (War Variations)...”

That sense of contingency runs through the essay: how a translator encounters a poet, how one project leads to another, and how sustained attention to a body of work can become a life’s work in itself.

Woodard and Antognini’s work on Rosselli has received significant recognition; their translation of The Dragonfly was long-listed for the National Translation Award, whose judges praised the translators for capturing Rosselli’s “clotted wordplay and knotted rhymes.”

Read Deborah Woodard’s full essay, “On Translating Amelia Rosselli (For Thirty Years),” at Asterism Books.