A World Without Cicci: Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli, 1940–2016

Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli (Cicci) passed away after a short and sudden illness on 20 March 2016, a little over three years after the death of her beloved husband Marino, whom she had cared for so devotedly ever since he had had a stroke. The loss of Cicci has profoundly moved friends and colleagues all over the globe. Actually, with Cicci there was no distinction between “friend” and “colleague”: everyone who knew her felt close to her.

Certainly Ellen Carol Jones and I did, and we have sadly regretted not having been able to take advantage of her frequent invitations to repeat the one visit we made years ago to Marino’s and her lovely home in Bologna, in the center of town right next to the Two Towers; from the top of one of the towers you can look down to their patio, where we had a wonderful meal that she had prepared for us.

Cicci was a friend and colleague not solely within the Joyce world. Her academic titles impressively show that: she was the founder—and Dean—of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Translation, Language and Culture (Dipartimento di Studi Interdisciplinari su Traduzione, Lingue e Culture) at the University of Bologna-Forli, and, for example (only one example), she served a term on the Executive Board of the Italian Association of English Studies. When Raffaella Baccolini, Delia Chiaro, Chris Rundle, and Sam Whitsitt edited a festschrift in her honor in 2011, they published two volumes, one devoted to Joyce (A Joyceful of Talkatalka from Friendshapes for Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli) and the second, with almost twice as many pages, to a number of her other chief interests, Minding the Gap: Studies in Linguistic and Cultural Exchange.

Among those interests was film. When she came to Ohio State to give a lecture, her argument was surprising and even, to me anyway, heretical: that in presenting a film to an audience in a foreign country, dubbing is preferable to subtitles. Cicci was in Ohio as a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati; she also had that role (just to mention institutions in the U.S.) at Stanford University, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Miami.

Of course her interests even within just (just?) the Joyce world were, to borrow the title of one of her books, no less myriadminded. She was especially though far from exclusively fascinated by the Wake. Her own essay in the volume she co-edited with Paola Pagliatti and Romana Zacchi, Myriadminded Man: Jottings on Joyce, begins, “Among Joyce’s works Finnegans Wake is the least read and certainly the least understood. Intellectuals, insulted by its difficulty, students, frightened by its obscurity and common readers, incapable of coping with the peculiarity of its language, all reject it. And yet this text can be the most enjoyable, stimulating, gratifying of literary works.” (“Insulted” is right on.)

Cicci’s essay in Karen Lawrence’s volume Transcultural Joyce, “Anna Livia Plurabelle’s Italian Sister,” comes out of her central interest in questions of translation. Specifically, it is about the Italian “translation” of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” that Joyce helped prepare; the quotation marks around “translation” reflect her argument that “although it originated as a ‘translation,’ it became more and more creative along the route, by adopting strategies that one would hardly recommend a translator to follow. More than a (partial) reading of an original, as every translation is for bad and for good, it is the last page of great prose that Joyce left us shortly before dying.”

Of course she illuminated Joyce’s other works as well—as in ReJoycing: New Readings of “Dubliners” (1998), the volume she edited with Harold F. Mosher, Jr., which had its origins in the Joyce Symposia in Copenhagen (1986) and Monaco (1990). Cicci loved to attend all kinds of Joyce gatherings. She was one of the founders of the James Joyce Italian Foundation, and was President of the International James Joyce Foundation and a long-time elected member of its Board—and was on that Board when she died. She co-directed the...