Readings: 'Alle I had Thought, in alle my Life, I now Descant'

Poetry readings of the work of Amelia Rosselli with Isabella Livorni, Andrea di Serego- Alighieri en Emmanuela Tandello Book launch of Amelia Rosselli’s October Elizabethans (The Last Books, 2026), a sequence of 24 poems in English that constitutes the original nucleus of her English-language collection Sleep (1992), but was ultimately not included in the published volume. Now brought together in a book of their own, the poems appear for the first time for an English-speaking audience. This program is an extention of the exhibition ‘In the / babbler / that lives I ask to be inscribed’: The Work of Amelia Rosselli at the Alphabetum of West Den Haag. The event will feature readings by Andrea di Serego Alighieri and invited guests Isabella Livorni, poet, translator, choral singer, and scholar of experimental and translingual literature, as well as Faculty Fellow in NYU’s Department of Italian Studies; and Emmanuela Tandello, Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford, and a scholar, editor, and translator of Amelia Rosselli’s work. Amelia Rosselli (Paris, 28 March 1930 – Rome, 11 February 1996) holds an irreducible place within twentieth-century poetry. Daughter of the anti-fascist intellectuals Carlo Rosselli and Marion Cave, she grew up across geographical and linguistic borders, shaped by exile and by the experience of moving between discrete histories and biographies. A trilingual poet writing in Italian, English, and French, and a musicologist with a rigorous engagement with sound, rhythm, and form, Rosselli was well attuned to the debates and transformations of twentieth-century musical modernism, such as atonality and serialism. This engagement informed a body of work that resists affiliation with any single linguistic or literary tradition. As she wrote towards the end of Variazioni belliche: ‘I rhyme for another century’. Isabella Livorni is a scholar of experimental and translingual literature, with a focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italy, translation, and linguistic and cultural difference. Her current book project explores Amelia Rosselli’s transnational intellectual networks across Italy, France, and the United States during the Cold War, examining how Rosselli’s multilingual and experimental writing engages with questions of language, cultural difference, and the legacies of fascism, genocide, and colonialism. A native bilingual speaker of Italian and English, she received her Ph.D. in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2023 and is currently a Faculty Fellow in New York University’s Department of Italian Studies. She is also a literary translator, poet and choral singer. Andrea di Serego Alighieri is a writer, editor and teacher. He is a lecturer in writing and typography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and a PhD candidate in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford with a thesis on Amelia Rosselli and Kamau Brathwaite. He has edited works by American poets Lyn Hejinian and Alice Notley, and his first poems will appear this November in the 35th issue of Ludd Gang. Emmanuela Tandello is an Italian literary scholar and Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford, whose research has focused on modern and contemporary Italian poetry, with particular expertise in the work of Amelia Rosselli. A friend of Rosselli and one of her principal translators, Tandello has played a pivotal role in establishing Rosselli’s reputation as one of the most important Italian poets of the twentieth century. She translated and edited Rosselli’s English-language poems in Sleep (1992) and October Elizabethans (2015), and co-edited L’opera poetica (2012), the comprehensive edition of Rosselli’s poetical works. Her wider research interests include, amongst others, Giacomo Leopardi, and twentieth-century dialect poetry.