Recensione al volume di Daniela La Penna, "La promessa d'un semplice linguaggio". Lingua e stile nella poesia di Amelia Rosselli, Carocci 2014

Since Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo’s inclusion in his anthology Poeti del Novecento (1978), Amelia Rosselli has been, slowly but unrelentingly, recognized not only as one of the most relevant voices of Italian twentieth century’s poetry, but also one of the few Italian poets who can reasonably be defined cosmopolitic. That is, undoubtedly, due to her tragic biography: daughter of the Italian Carlo Rosselli, murdered because of his antifascist engagement, and the English Marion Cave, Rosselli was raised between France, Switzerland, United States and England, eventually moving to Italy in 1946. Linguistic experimentalism is intrinsic in her work, which, along with her massive Italian production, includes also several writings — both in prose and poetry — in English and French. But Rosselli’s reflections on language(s) do not derive exclusively from her polyglot education: as most of the critics underline, languages competence works in Rosselli as a substratum as well as her dramatic biography, never transposed into poetry in a confessional way, but somehow developed in a tormented personal research. Sharply, Daniela La Penna states that in Amelia Rosselli “l’ovvio dato biografico viene sottoposto a decantazione letteraria, messo in circolo insieme a tanti altri dati, come, ad esempio, le tappe della propria educazione estetica e letteraria” (15). La Penna collects and revisits in this volume a large part of her long-dating study of Rosselli’s linguistic experimentalism, style and themes, focusing particularly on the collections Variazioni belliche (1964), Primi scritti (published in 1980; composed between 1952 and 1963) and La libellula (1963- 1964); the last section considers also Serie ospedaliera (1969).