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The Christ (Easter 1971)






Why do you make us rejoice by dying? If anything
it was the other side that had to be rewarded
and you didn’t refuse that unripe food
festive vinaigre and shouldered cask

bounty and grandiose constructions for the
turbid mind: the five senses are

thus of so little account or weight that you

rave on an elegant wooden cross?

If of wood you rot don’t complain about
that ache in your shoulders: they ensure
that hardworking dissatisfied nonetheless
you rhyme as before: and also you give

lessons of your most costly work, in
raving at tasteless and digested things

as well as the end of all things
as well as the festive and rhyming count when

you rush the balcony, from the balcony
to see yourself walking.





Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris on March 28, 1930, and died in Rome, taking her own life, on February 11th, 1996. She was the daughter of the antifascist Italian political leader and philosopher of Jewish descent Carlo Rosselli and the British political activist Marion Cave. After her father’s assassination in Paris at the hands of the fascists, the family moved to England and then to the United States. At the end of the war, in 1946, she relocated to Europe, first briefly to Florence and then to London to complete her studies. In 1948, Rosselli was back in Florence prior to moving permanently to Rome, where she would remain until her death. Rosselli was the author of eight collections of poetry: War Variations (1964), Hospital Series (1969), Document (1966–1973) (1976), Impromptu (1981), First Writings (1952–1963) (1980), Notes Scattered and Lost 1966–1977 (1983), Obtuse Diary 1954–1968 (1990), Sleep: Poems in English (1992). She was a translator of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, and an accomplished musicologist and musician who played the violin, the piano and the organ. Document was first published in 1976 in Milano by Garzanti. 

Roberta Antognini is originally from Canton Ticino in Switzerland, where she currently resides. She is Associate Professor Emerita of Italian Studies at Vassar College, where she taught for over twenty years. Her research interests lie in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and twentieth-century Italian literature, and literary translation. After retiring she has continued to read, write, and translate poetry. She is the author of a monograph on Petrarch’s letters, Il progetto autobiografico delle Familiares di Petrarca (2008), and co-editor of the collection of essays Poscritto a Giorgio Bassani (2012). With Deborah Woodard, she has translated into English Amelia Rosselli’s collections, Hospital Series (2015), Obtuse Diary (2018), The Dragonfly (2023), Notes Scattered and Lost (forthcoming 2024), and Document (forthcoming 2025). With Peter Robinson, she has edited and translated Giorgio Bassani’s The Complete Poems (2023).

Deborah Woodard’s books include Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star Press, 2006), Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012) and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). With Roberta Antognini she has translated Amelia Rosselli’s Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015), Obtuse Diary (Entre Rios Books, 2018) and The Dragonfly (Entre Rios Books, 2023). Woodard and Antognini’s translation of Rosselli’s Notes Scattered and Lost completes their translations of Rosselli’s short texts and is forthcoming, also from Entre Rios Books, in the fall of 2024, while World Poetry Books will bring out their translation of Rosselli’s longest collection, Document (winter, 2025). Woodard co-curates the literary series Margin Shift: Friends in Poetry and teaches at Hugo House, a literary center in Seattle, Washington.