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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > Archipelago

Archipelago

Archipelago is a bilingual selection of poems by the leading Italian poet Antonella Anedda drawn from five collections she has published in Italy. Her poetry has a searing, disruptive quality, an honesty that is hard won. Her words have the air of breaking the silence reluctantly, and they keep the silence with them. This stringent, ferrous element sets her at odds with the eloquence and lyricism characteristic of the Italian poetic tradition, and may owe something to an alternative nationality, a different landscape.

Though born in Rome (in 1958), she comes from a Sardinian family and has passed a great deal of her life between the capital and a small island, La Maddalena, off the coast of Sardinia. The languages she was brought up hearing were Logudorese, Catalan from Alghero, and Corsican French mixed with the dialect of La Maddalena – and of late she has found herself also writing a number of poems in Logudorese.

While her poems have a geographical sweep, there is also an insistence on domestic detail – balconies, crockery, sewing, cooking: elements often considered too humble to warrant poetic attention. But even here they are often set against a backdrop of war and insecurity, and a poem in these surroundings, such as her ‘Kitchen’, is as likely to be the site of a haunting.

Her first book, Winter Residences, already posited an elsewhere, that of St Petersburg, and an elective affinity with another culture. With time, and with the emergence of her next four books of poetry, this sense of apartness has increased, as has the force and particularity of her language – and has made her, along with Valerio Magrelli, one of the most valued and original poets of her generation.

Author

Antonella Anedda

Antonella Anedda

Books

Archipelago

Antonella Anedda is a poet and essayist who lives in Rome, and has been a lecturer in Lugano. She has published five collections of poetry, which have won many prizes including the Premio Sinisgalli for a first collection, the International Montale Prize, the Dessi Prize, the Napoli Prize, and the prestigious Premio Viarreggio-Repaci. She has translated Sappho and Ovid from the classics as well as numerous recent poets including Philippe Jaccottet and Anne Carson.

The several books of essays she has published are principally concerned with literature and the visual arts, though her prose piece Isolatria was a study of Sardinia.

Though born in Rome (in 1955), she comes from a Sardinian family and has passed a great deal of her life between the capital and a small island, La Maddalena, off the coast of Sardinia, which has continued to deeply inform both her poetry and her prose. Her work has been translated into many European languages as well as into Japanese, Korean and Hebrew. Her first English edition, Archipelago, translated by Jamie McKendrick, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2014.

Translator

Jamie McKendrick

Jamie McKendrick

Books

Archipelago

Jamie McKendrick, born in Liverpool, 1955, is a poet and translator. His translations include the anthology The Faber Book of Italian 20th-Century Poems, which he edited; The Embrace: Selected Poems by Valerio Magrelli (Faber, 2009), which was awarded the John Florio Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for translation; the bilingual edition Archipelago by Antonella Anedda (Bloodaxe Books, 2014); a verse play by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Fabrication (Oberon, 2010); two novels by Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles and the short stories The Smell of Hay, published by Penguin Classics. His own books of poetry include The Marble Fly (1997), which won the Forward Prize, Sky Nails: Poems 1979-1997 (2000), Ink Stone (2003), Crocodiles & Obelisks (2007), and most recently Out There (2012), which won the Hawthornden Prize.

Published by

Bloodaxe Books, 2014
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Archipelago is a bilingual selection of poems by the leading Italian poet Antonella Anedda drawn from five collections she has published in Italy. Her poetry has a searing, disruptive quality, an honesty that is hard won. Her words have the air of breaking the silence reluctantly, and they keep the silence with them. This stringent, ferrous element sets her at odds with the eloquence and lyricism characteristic of the Italian poetic tradition, and may owe something to an alternative nationality, a different landscape.

Though born in Rome (in 1958), she comes from a Sardinian family and has passed a great deal of her life between the capital and a small island, La Maddalena, off the coast of Sardinia. The languages she was brought up hearing were Logudorese, Catalan from Alghero, and Corsican French mixed with the dialect of La Maddalena – and of late she has found herself also writing a number of poems in Logudorese.

While her poems have a geographical sweep, there is also an insistence on domestic detail – balconies, crockery, sewing, cooking: elements often considered too humble to warrant poetic attention. But even here they are often set against a backdrop of war and insecurity, and a poem in these surroundings, such as her ‘Kitchen’, is as likely to be the site of a haunting.

Her first book, Winter Residences, already posited an elsewhere, that of St Petersburg, and an elective affinity with another culture. With time, and with the emergence of her next four books of poetry, this sense of apartness has increased, as has the force and particularity of her language – and has made her, along with Valerio Magrelli, one of the most valued and original poets of her generation.

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