«Fleurs are not flowers». Linguistic (mis)correspondences in Amelia Rosselli’s writing

Abstract

Amelia Rosselli’s entire production unfolds under the sign of a plurilingualism that constitutes one of the fundamental elements of her writing, not only in works explicitly composed in different languages, as in her early production, but also within the predominantly Italophone poetic idiom of her mature years. This study traces the linguistic and formal development of Rosselli’s writing, focusing particularly on Impromptu (1979) and its 2014 trilingual edition edited by Gian Maria Annovi. Rosselli’s own biography, shaped by French, Italian, and English, produces a “linguistic dissociation” reflected throughout her work in different forms of plurilingualism, mixed-language writing, and translingualism. Beginning with the Diario in tre lingue, Italian progressively acquires a dominant position without eliminating interference from the other languages. The result is the “plurilingual monolingualism” characteristic of her mature production, in which an apparently single language retains traces of the others. Following the gradual crisis of Rosselli’s rigorous formal structures and the increasing rarefaction of writing culminating in Documento, Impromptu represents a renewed creative explosion that recovers and transforms the tensions of the preceding phases. The analysis identifies three principal linguistic phenomena: lexical fusion and neologisms, interference from English and French in Italian, and lexical shifts generated by semantic or phonetic proximity. Italian, English, and French thus merge into an unstable and almost inseparable code, creating a new language that rejects the supremacy of any individual idiom. Formally, repetition, variation, and extensive enjambment create continuity while attempting to organize this proliferating linguistic material. Impromptu therefore emerges as the extreme expression of a poetics founded on linguistic (mis)alignment: an amalgam in which form and language generate one another and the multiplication of expressive possibilities approaches the impossibility of meaning and, ultimately, silence.