Poems between natural and human history, private life and death, and about the crises of our century, from an acclaimed Italian poet.
Tacitus, the brooding historian of the Roman Empire, supplies the title of Antonella Anedda’s Historiae, in which she grapples with a legacy of Mediterranean displacement and violence that stretches from antiquity to the present day. Anedda writes about the aftermath of centuries of colonization, about the ongoing European immigration crisis, and about the wild Sardinian archipelago of La Maddalena and the teeming Roman neighborhood of Trastevere—places between which she has divided her life—in a wonderfully various collection where poems of community frame poems of private life, among them a moving elegy for her mother. With wit, insight, and economy, Anedda reminds us that history is plural and that our perspectives, too, are constituted by pluralities—by events both present and past, both world-shaking and exquisitely mundane.
This bilingual edition includes the original Italian versions of each poem.
"Ceccagnoli and Stewart have preserved the terseness of her idiom, which aspires, as she says in 'Annales,' to the austerity of Latin…Much of the prosodic force of Anedda’s writing comes from the tension that builds between her rhetorical economy and what she calls the 'dripping' of modern Italian, a word that, in its benign sense, suggests the viscous, hypersaturated sound of the language and, more darkly, the water and blood that hug its history and coastline." —Anahid Nersessian, The New York Review of Books
“Antonella Anedda challenges us to confront the mystery that lies at the heart of existence.” —David Cooke, The High Window Press
“These beautiful poems by Antonella Anedda illuminate the correspondences between the flora, fauna and material substance of our mortal, temporal world—birds, bedsheets, constellations, ‘moonlight scratches along the wall’—and the psyche’s dreamscapes. Historiae is precise, inquiring, and urgent, a timely introduction to the work of a major poet of our time.” —Cynthia
"Anedda’s treatment of language and time transcends the typical scope of an historian: her cogent blend of imagery and metaphor, for instance, captures a profound understanding of the relationship between memory, identity, and the written word—a sort of depth that sets her apart from conventional historical perspectives." — The Cleveland Review of Books
Antonella Anedda is an Italian poet, short story writer, essayist, and translator. She was born in Rome to a Sardinian family in 1955. She is the author of nine books and the recipient of the prestigious Viareggio Prize for her 2012 collection of poetry, Salva con nome.
Susan Stewart is an American poet, literary critic, and professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of a dozen works of criticism and poetry and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Her collection of poems, Columbarium, won a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Patrizio Ceccagnoli is a translator, a managing editor of Italian Poetry Review, and a professor of Italian at the University of Kansas. He has edited multiple unpublished manuscripts by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, for which he was nominated for the Marino Moretti Award. He has also been nominated for the American Literary Translator’s Association Annual Award for his work co-translating Milo de Angelis.
Poems between natural and human history, private life and death, and about the crises of our century, from an acclaimed Italian poet.
Tacitus, the brooding historian of the Roman Empire, supplies the title of Antonella Anedda’s Historiae, in which she grapples with a legacy of Mediterranean displacement and violence that stretches from antiquity to the present day. Anedda writes about the aftermath of centuries of colonization, about the ongoing European immigration crisis, and about the wild Sardinian archipelago of La Maddalena and the teeming Roman neighborhood of Trastevere—places between which she has divided her life—in a wonderfully various collection where poems of community frame poems of private life, among them a moving elegy for her mother. With wit, insight, and economy, Anedda reminds us that history is plural and that our perspectives, too, are constituted by pluralities—by events both present and past, both world-shaking and exquisitely mundane.
This bilingual edition includes the original Italian versions of each poem.
Praise
"Ceccagnoli and Stewart have preserved the terseness of her idiom, which aspires, as she says in 'Annales,' to the austerity of Latin…Much of the prosodic force of Anedda’s writing comes from the tension that builds between her rhetorical economy and what she calls the 'dripping' of modern Italian, a word that, in its benign sense, suggests the viscous, hypersaturated sound of the language and, more darkly, the water and blood that hug its history and coastline." —Anahid Nersessian, The New York Review of Books
“Antonella Anedda challenges us to confront the mystery that lies at the heart of existence.” —David Cooke, The High Window Press
“These beautiful poems by Antonella Anedda illuminate the correspondences between the flora, fauna and material substance of our mortal, temporal world—birds, bedsheets, constellations, ‘moonlight scratches along the wall’—and the psyche’s dreamscapes. Historiae is precise, inquiring, and urgent, a timely introduction to the work of a major poet of our time.” —Cynthia
"Anedda’s treatment of language and time transcends the typical scope of an historian: her cogent blend of imagery and metaphor, for instance, captures a profound understanding of the relationship between memory, identity, and the written word—a sort of depth that sets her apart from conventional historical perspectives." — The Cleveland Review of Books
Author
Antonella Anedda is an Italian poet, short story writer, essayist, and translator. She was born in Rome to a Sardinian family in 1955. She is the author of nine books and the recipient of the prestigious Viareggio Prize for her 2012 collection of poetry, Salva con nome.
Susan Stewart is an American poet, literary critic, and professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of a dozen works of criticism and poetry and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Her collection of poems, Columbarium, won a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Patrizio Ceccagnoli is a translator, a managing editor of Italian Poetry Review, and a professor of Italian at the University of Kansas. He has edited multiple unpublished manuscripts by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, for which he was nominated for the Marino Moretti Award. He has also been nominated for the American Literary Translator’s Association Annual Award for his work co-translating Milo de Angelis.
