The Dragonfly

“I rhyme classically with a modernity I didn’t suspect in my imbroglios.” — Amelia Rosselli

La Libellula (The Dragonfly) is Amelia Rosselli’s acknowledged first major work and contains all the elements of her mature vision: trilingual wordplay, musicality, and political engagement.

"This translation by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard magnificently mimics the clotted wordplay and knotted rhymes of Amelia Rosselli’s free verse. They also follow the Surrealist and Symbolist techniques and the incantatory repetitions with which Rosselli investigates religion, love, the self, justice, and injustice. Second-rate Surrealists baffle with unredeemed nonsense. Rosselli, in the hands of her translators, startles with unexpected connections and revealing disconnections."
— Judge's Note for the ALTA National Translation Award.

With its vertiginous propulsion and rotational structure, this single-long poem, a canto, hovers on the edge of the surreal, where meaning continually multiplies and then negates. The reader must engage her work as she instructs — intuitively.

Her inventive refraction of Italian literary tradition sought a more authentic liberation, “in all the nation’s life, in all the dismal / boroughs, in all the putridous world, exists / just one me, exists just one you, — exists charity.”

Now recognized as one of the most significant voices of post-war Europe, her visceral writing challenges the constriction of language as not only a fascist legacy but also as a critique of the banality and materialism of reconstruction.

Our bilingual edition includes an audio download of selections read in Italian and English by translator Deborah Woodard and actor Riccardo Pieri.

Audio

A downloadable file of this audio can be found on our audio page. Be sure to also check the recordings for Obtuse Diary.

Film

Here's a video by Brian Dang made for the Seattle performance of this book at Hugo House on June 9, 2023.

Reviews