Amnesia of the Movement of Clouds / Of Red & Black Verse
By Maria Attanasio
Translated by Carla Billitteri
$18.00
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.
Maria Attanasio
Carla Billitteri
Praise for Amnesia of the Movement of Clouds / Of Red & Black Verse
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
Carla Billitteri’s confident translations of Amnesia of the Movement of Clouds and 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
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.
— Erica Mena, American Literary Translators Association Blog
[T]his first full-length English translation of contemporary Sicilian poet Attansio bears the stamp of her studies in German Expressionist and French Surrealist poetry.
— Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal