Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian by Carla Billiteri. Finalist for the 2015 National Translation Award in Poetry. AMNESIA OF THE MOVEMENT OF CLOUDS & OF RED AND BLACK VERSE, two books published in a single volume, is the first full-length English translation of work by contemporary Sicilian poet Maria Attanasio. Drawing on her training as a philosopher and deep reader of German Expressionist and French Surrealist poetry, her visionary work dwells on contemporary selfhood in a technologically driven age, reflecting how such selfhood is set against the desolate political and existential void of a new century, one she describes as the god of...indifference, the great amnesia. Attanasio's landscapes are as dreamlike as they are realistic, darkened by poverty, death, inequality and illegal immigration, carved by a sculptural language that seeks to uncover the historical and political strata of everyday life.
These spiked, analytic lyrics are coiled against the turbulence of everyday life: talismans of acidic cognition against a culture that rewards forgetting. In this bilingual edition of two books of Maria Attanasio, Carla Bilitteri hews to the poet's knotted chiaroscuro, giving us a labyrinthine series of viscerally charged, haunted studies.--Charles Bernstein
'Flash of pomegranate / flame of malvasia / in a globalized stanza / red of poesia / Darkness now, a moment ago I was Maria.' Two sharp, glinting collections of poetry from Sicilian poet Maria Attanasio appear in English for the first time, in a lucid and haunting translation by translator and critic Carla Billitieri. The chances Billitieri takes as a translator are constantly poised to remind us of Attanasio's inquiry into sound, memory, loss, and the results in English echo and linger. The translator has also included a substantial introduction to Attanasio's poetics in this beautiful edition by Litmus Press, and her translations are followed by endnotes that elucidate many layers of this complex and unsettling poetry.--Erica Mena
Carla Billitteri's confident translations of AMNESIA OF THE MOVEMENT OF CLOUDS & OF RED AND BLACK VERSE, two of Maria Attanasio's most recent collections of poetry, offer English language readers the verses of a poet whose eyes see the sound of verse and feel its dispersal. The expression of impermanence communicated by these poems is balanced by the acuity of a language that is poetic exactly because it is amnesiatic. The pairing of AMNESIA and OF RED AND BLACK VERSE sheds light onto our daily struggles with sense, memory, perception, and 'disobedient writing' in translations that complement the originals.--Pasquale Verdicchio
Attanasio's poems are succinct but wide-ranging condensations, and these inventive versions by Carla Billitteri are welcome additions to the body of contemporary Italian poetry in English.--Geoffrey Brock
