A LANGUAGE FOR EVERY LATITUDE: ROSSELLI CONVENINGS AT BARNARD/COLUMBIA
I am finishing the lecture I've written on Amelia Rosselli's composition of a cubic stanza, or chamber, as receptacle for a post-Fascist poetics—to be delivered this Friday into Saturday at the conference on her work.
Those in New York City, please join us uptown from that frenzied Square for discussions of a poet who dreamt a civil society.
A Language for Every Latitude: The Poetry of Amelia Rosselli--an international conference Friday, May 6 – Saturday, May 7, 2011 Barnard College, Event Oval, The Diana Center
Amelia Rosselli is widely recognized as one of the most innovative and exciting Italian poets of the past half-century. As she was both a poet who wrote in three languages—Italian, English and French—and a translator, questions of translation are central to her work. This international conference brings together the major critics and translators of Rosselli to discuss her poetry and read some of the finest translations of her work. This event is sponsored by the Barnard Center for Translation Studies thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Featured Speakers and Translators Laura Barile, Università di Siena Lucia Re, University of California, Los Angeles Jennifer Scappettone, University of Chicago Emanuela Tandello, Christ Church, Oxford
Conference Organizer Nelson Moe, Barnard College, Columbia University
http://www.barnard.edu/events/language-every-latitude-poetry-amelia-rosselli
Information (212) 851-5979 translation@barnard.edu
Program The venue for all lectures is the Event Oval, on the lower level of the Diana Center, on the Barnard College campus.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Opening Remarks 1:00 p.m. Peter Connor Nelson Moe
Session 1: 1:30-3:30 p.m. Moderator: Rebecca Bauman Emanuela Tandello, “The Poetic Legacy of Amelia Rosselli” A reading of selections from War Variations, translated by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti (Green Integer, 2005) Chiara Carpita, “Plurilingualism and Intertextuality in Primi Scritti ” 3:30-4:00 p.m. coffee break – Event Oval
Session 2: 4:00-6:00 p.m. Moderator: Phillip Usher Jennifer Scappettone, “Stanza as Prison, Homicile, Cube, Parterre: Amelia Rosselli's Construction of a Postfascist Ambient Poetic” Diana Thow, “Constructing Illness: Serie Ospedaliera in English.” A reading of translations from Serie Ospedaliera. Elizabeth Leake, “Rosselli, Writing and Mental Illness” Saturday, May 7, 2011
Session 3: 9:00-11:00 a.m. Moderator: Brian O’Keeffe Paolo Valesio, “Opening Remarks: Overdeterminations and Expatriations” Lucia Re, “Rosselli’s Hunger” A reading of selections from Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, edited and translated by Jennifer Scappettone (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2012) 11:00-11:30 a.m. coffee break – Event Oval
Session 4: 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Moderator: Peter Connor Daniela La Penna, “Authoriality in Poetic Translation: The Case of Amelia Rosselli’s Practice” Silvia De March, “Voices from Creatures in Chains: Amelia Rosselli Listening to Ingeborg Bachmann” Gian Maria Annovi, “Amelia’s Cinematic Vision: a Reading of Impromptu” 1:30-3:00 p.m. Lunch break
Session 5: 3:00-5:00 p.m. Moderator: Ariella Lang Laura Barile, “Poetry and Enigma: Amelia Rosselli Translates Emily Dickinson” Emanuela Tandello, “Rosselli’s ‘Other Book’: Sleep, Translation(s), and Self-Translation” A reading of selected poems and translations from Sleep 5:00-5:30 p.m. coffee break – Event Oval
Session 6: 5:30-6:15 p.m. A reading of Impromptu in different voices, translated by Jennifer Scappettone, Gian Maria Annovi, and Diana Thow Amelia Rosselli reads Impromptu
Closing Discussion 6:15-6:45 p.m. Moderator: Nelson Moe
Notes on the Speakers Gian Maria Annovi is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian studies at Columbia University. He received a Laurea in Philosophy and a Doctorate in Contemporary Italian Literature from the University of Bologna. He published Altri corpi: Poesia e corporalità negli anni Sessanta (Gedit, 2008) and edited a forthcoming collection of poetry by Antonio Porta (Seismicity, 2011). He is currently editing a trilingual edition of Amelia Rosselli’s Impromptu.
Laura Barile is professor of Italian Contemporary Literature at the University of Siena. Her last collection of essays was Oltreconfine: Incursioni nella letteratura europea (Pacini, 2008). Her essay on Montale and Anglo-Saxon poetry, Adorate mie larve, appeared in 1990 (Il Mulino), and she edited Montale’s Quaderno Genovese (Mondadori, 1983). Her works of fiction include Il resto manca (Aragno, 2003) and "El Alamein — un reportage," in California Italian Studies Journal I:1 (2010). She received the 2010 Edinburgh Gadda Prize and the Accademia dei Lincei Tartufari per le Letterature straniere Award (2007).
Peter Connor is associate professor of French and comparative literature at Barnard College and director of the Center for Translation Studies. Silvia De March is completing her Ph.D. in Italian literature at the University of Padua. Her study Amelia Rosselli tra poesia e storia appeared in 2006 (L’Ancora del Mediterraneo). Her current research is on civic engagement in Italian contemporary poetry.
Daniela La Penna is lecturer in modern Italian literature at the University of Reading. Her longstanding research interest in Amelia Rosselli has led to the publication of several articles and to the forthcoming monograph La dinamica delle fonti nella poesia trilingue di Amelia Rosselli (Carocci, 2012). She has co-edited with Daniela Caselli Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation: Literary Cultures in Italian and English (Continuum, 2008) and edited Meneghello: Fiction, Scholarship, Passione civile (special issue of The Italianist, 2011).
Elizabeth Leake is professor of Italian at Columbia University. Her publications include The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone (University of Toronto Press, 2003), which received the Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies; and After Words: Suicide and Authorship in Twentieth-Century Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2011). She is currently working on a manuscript titled “Autopathography: Writing the Pathologized Self in Plath, Rosselli, and Ditlevsen.”
Nelson Moe is associate professor of Italian at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (University of California Press, 2002). He has written on diverse aspects of 19th- and 20th-century Italian history and culture, including Giovanni Verga, Federigo Tozzi, Antonio Gramsci, the Neapolitan canzone, and representations of the Mafia in cinema. His 1992 essay “At the Margins of Dominion: The Poetry of Amelia Rosselli,” drew on his close collaboration with the poet and was among the first critical studies dedicated to her work. He is currently writing a book on Francis Ford Coppola’s film, The Godfather.
Brian O’Keeffe teaches in the French and comparative literature departments at Barnard College, and serves as associate director of the Barnard Center for Translation Studies. Lucia Re is professor of modern Italian literature and culture at UCLA, with a joint appointment in the Department of Women’s Studies. With Paul Vangelisti she co-authored a translation of Amelia Rosselli’s volume of poetry Variazioni belliche, entitled War Variations (Green Integer, 2005), published in a bilingual edition with her introduction and notes (including an essay by Pier Paolo Pasolini in English translation). War Variations was awarded the 2006 Premio Flaiano and the 2006 PEN USA prize for literary translation. Lucia Re is co-founder of the multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed scholarly journal of Italian Studies CISJ (California Italian Studies Journal) and coeditor with Claudio Fogu of the journal’s first thematic volume, entitled Italy in the Mediterranean (2009-2010).
Jennifer Scappettone is a scholar, translator, and poet, the author of From Dame Quickly (Litmus, 2009) and of several chapbooks, including Thing Ode/Ode oggettuale, translated into Italian in dialogue with Marco Giovenale (La Camera Verde, 2008). Her translations of Amelia Rosselli are forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in late 2011 as Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli. She is completing a critical study titled Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, which presents the seemingly obsolete city as a locus of lasting seduction and repulsion for artists in a post-Romantic age. She is assistant professor at the University of Chicago, and the winner of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize for 2010-11.
Emanuela Tandello teaches Italian literature at Oxford University and is a Fellow of Christ Church. She has worked extensively on Amelia Rosselli, having edited the “Elefante” Garzanti edition of her Poesie and several volumes of essays, including, jointly with Giorgio Devoto, a special issue of the journal Trasparenze (San Marco dei Giustiniani, 2003) and the monograph Amelia Rosselli: La fanciulla e l’infinito (Donzelli, 2007). She is one of the editors of the forthcoming edition of Rosselli’s collected poetry, which Mondadori will publish as a “Meridiano” in 2012.
Diana Thow graduated from Barnard College in 2003 and holds an M.F.A. in literary translation from the University of Iowa. She has taught courses on translation as a postgraduate writing fellow at the University of Iowa, and in 2009 was awarded a Fulbright research grant to Italy for her work on Amelia Rosselli. She has published her work in Carte Italiane, The Quarterly Conversation, The Iowa Review, and Words Without Borders, and her co-translation with Gian Maria Annovi of Rosselli’s long poem Impromptu is forthcoming from Guernica Editions. She currently works in Rome, and will begin her Ph.D. this fall in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
Phillip John Usher is assistant professor in the French and Comparative Literature Departments at Barnard College, and serves as Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Translation Studies.
Paolo Valesio, a literary critic, poet and narrator, is Giuseppe Ungaretti Professor in Italian Literature at Columbia University and Editor-in-Chief of the Italian Poetry Review (IPR). The author of many critical essays, articles, poems and a one-act play in verse, Valesio has also published five books of literary criticism (including Gabriele d’Annunzio: The Dark Flame), two novels, a collection of short stories, a novella, and sixteen volumes of poetry, the most recent being Il volto quasi umano (2009). Among other projects, he is currently engaged in the composition of a trilogy of diaristic novels.
Photo courtesy of Dino Ignani