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[Victorious in nothing over nothing]






Victorious in nothing over nothing, the
room covert awoke
the biting cold,
that hell of a winter
abandoned itself, to the wall
with its small violet ray violet
fake corset,
of the poor and their vows,
poor in itself and in themselves.

Artificial lake cast there by chance
between closed flowers,
rough windows,
with their absurd clasp of will
poetry obeyed
the instinctive pain of adults,
how it was
that at the synchronized party
we passed the bread from hand to hand
the verse beating its usual way
unforgivable, pleading cunningly.

His white house of a pertinent
gray, staring into her eyes
that wall appeared to him disinfected
and almost perfected,
invented
by you and for you
in this reversal of a guaranteed
order resounding
in that room the empty step of the
stone setting, paint expressly.





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.