Rosselli, Amelia: The Dragonfly: Panegyric of Liberty

Entre Ríos Books, paperback

Publication Date: March 7, 2023

Publisher Marketing: Bilingual edition of post-war Italian writer Amelia Rosselli

La Libellula (The Dragonfly) is Amelia Rosselli's acknowledged first major work and contains all the elements of her mature vision: trilingual wordplay, musicality, and political engagement. With its vertiginous propulsion and rotational structure, this single-long poem, a canto, hovers on the edge of the surreal, where meaning continually multiplies and then negates. The reader must engage her work as she instructs-- intuitively. Her inventive refraction of Italian literary tradition sought a more authentic liberation, "in all the nation's life, in all the dismal / boroughs, in all the putridous world, exists / just one me, exists just one you, -- exists charity." Now recognized as one of the most significant voices of post war Europe, her visceral writing challenges the constriction of language as not only a fascist legacy but also as a critique of the banality and materialism of reconstruction. Our bilingual edition includes an audio download of selections read in Italian and English by translator Deborah Woodard and actor Riccardo Pieri.