Historiae

Historiae is a bilingual collection of Antonella Anedda’s lucid new poems translated from Italian and Sardinian by Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart. The book revolves around language and its parts—vowels, pronouns, and adjectives—and the risk of their dissolution, as the speaker who “is so poor I only own a pronoun,” “bleach[es] the stains from / a bedsheet that it may fade the initials” and observes a “book rotted by the rain,” the first warning of a house’s disintegration.

Anedda’s “history” references Lucretius, Virgil, and Tacitus, the Roman historian from whom she borrows the Latin title and whose second century AD volumes memorably record the first century’s changing empire. “Rereading Tacitus” amid 21st century violence, the speaker compares two versions of Tacitus’s other major text, Annales (or Annals). The original Latin is direct (“the near absence of adjectives, / the gerund that avoids useless turns of phrase”), whereas the Italian translation wanders, “dripping more slowly on the page,” grammar proving a tool of domination as “syntax acted as a tourniquet.” Addressing today’s continuing European imperialism, Historiae offers critique, as well as faith that “Once / archives are destroyed, everything is lost / only to come back in other forms.”

In indexing natural and human laws—of light, proximity, time—Anedda’s observations are bifurcated by her “political mind,” focused on the structural causes of death and dominion, and her “mathematical mind,” which seeks to measure, project, and protect “the childish dream of a theorem, / a graft of the world slipped into a segment of root.” Both minds are limited, too, by what the collective and the individual is allowed to maintain: “We see the world in the right amount, / no more no less than we can bear.” Narrating the reality of a colonized region and its flattening of language (“The most barbarian sounds endure”), Anedda offers a poetry not of witness but of a gray avowal, “the color of ash and smoke.”