War Variations (Green Integer)

by Amelia Rosselli, Lucia Re (Contributor)

Italian poet Amelia Rosselli grew up in an environment jolted by -assaults of personal and social history. The daughter of one of the heroes of the Italian Resistance during World War II, she suffered her father’s assassination when she was seven. After an adolescence characterized by movement between cities and continents, her mother died, triggering a mental breakdown in the daughter. War Variations encompasses these intense life experiences, terrifying psychological realities that ultimately led to Rosselli’s suicide.

Genres: Poetry, Literature

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Amelia Rosselli (Paris, 28 March 1930 – Rome, 11 February 1996) was an italian poet, organist ed etnomusicologist.

Daughter of the antifascist activist Carlo Rosselli, exiled in Paris, and of Marion Catherine Cave, activist of the British Labourist Party. In 1940, after the murder of her father and his uncle ordered by Mussolini, she lived in exile with her family; this experience had a heavy influence on her poetical works.

Amelia Rosselli lived in Svitzerland and later in USA. She studied literature, philosophy and music in England. In the 40's and 50's she wrote numerous musical and ethnomusical studies and became in touch with the roman intellectual circle and the future members of the avant-garde movement Gruppo 63.

In the 60's she entered in the Italian Communist Party and wrote on several reviews getting the attention of Andrea Zanzotto, Giovanni Raboni and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

In 1964 she published her first book of poems, Variazioni belliche, by Garzanti, and in 1969 Serie ospedaliera, with her famous poem La Libellula. In 1981 she published Impromptu, a long poem after a long period of writer's block. She also wrote poems in french and in english (as her next book, Sleep.

She lived in Rome sharing a house with the poet Dario Bellezza, she died on 11 February 1996 by suicide, the same day of her great ispiration, Sylvia Plath.

Reviews

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the great works of postwar European poetry. If you appreciate, for instance, Antonin Artaud, Paul Celan, Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Leslie Scalapino (who could never otherwise be part of the same list, obviously), you must read this.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

The whole world is a widower if it's true that you still walk
the whole world is a widower if it's true! The whole world
is true if it's true that you still walk, the whole
world is a widower if you don't die! The whole world
is mine if it's true that you are not alive but only
a lantern for my oblique eyes. I remained blind
from your birth and the importance of the new day
is but night for your distance. I am blind
since you still walk! I am blind since you walk
and the world is a widower and the world is blind if you
walk still grasping at my celestial eyes.

[marcella · Rating 4 out of 5]

è la prima volta che mi prendo il mio tempo con un libro di poesie. rosselli è abilissima nel conciliare e spesso fare coincidere tre lingue + il latino, per non parlare dei neologismi, degli errori grammaticali voluti. un must per chi ha studiato le diverse letterature europee al liceo linguistico perché questa raccolta le riunisce tutte in un esercizio poetico (su cui, analizzandolo, ci si potrebbe anche divertire) e all'interno di una cornice tematica per niente banale, autobiografica.

[Arpita · Rating 5 out of 5]

read it along to a friend of a friend's translation and I'm floored by it. Positive that half of my day's pleasure would come from coyly injecting her lines in daily conversation without any of us realizing.

[Erictò · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Colma di ansie io mi misi a scrivere, il girovago delle mie fortune."