Unafraid of fire nowshe lies in a case. Verticalin a sheath of stucco and canvasher paws swaddled in bandagesher muzzle rolled in linen.Like human mummiesshe has no heart, liver, or kidneys.Every last liquid has been drained with care.We are somewhere between 664 and 332in the valley of a time that boggles the mindyet with our same darknessand the desert sand seen paling.Did she have a painful past? Was she a stray?What does it matter. Death disappears—each time we look, each time more quickly—into the green-black felt of her stitched-up eyes.
[Unafraid of fire now]
Antonella Anedda
Translated from the Italian by Alex Andriesse
Materials
fabric—stuccoed fabric—other material
Techniques
painting—general techniques
Description
animal—cat—feline
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“[Unafraid of fire now]” from At the Louvre: Poems by 100 Contemporary World Poets: by Antonella Anedda.
Published by New York Review Books on Nov 26, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Antonella Anedda.
English translation copyright © 2024 by Alex Andriesse
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Antonella Anedda was born in 1955 to a Sardinian family in Rome, where she lives today. She is the author of six books of poetry, including Residenze invernali (Winter Residences, 1992), Il catalogo della gioia (Catalog of Joy, 2003), and Salva con nome (Save As, 2012), for which she received the prestigious Viareggio Prize. Among her books of prose are La vita dei dettagli, a study of details in works of art, and Isolatria, a book about La Maddalena, her family’s native region of Sardinia. She is a lecturer in Italian modern literature at the University of Lugano, Switzerland, and is also well-known as a translator of classical and French literature.
Alex Andriesse’s writing has appeared in Granta, Southwest Review, and Salamander. Among his translations are Cristina Campo’s The Unforgivable, François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, and Jacques Dupin’s Échancrés. He is an associate editor at New York Review Books.
Of the world's great museums, the Louvre is the most encompassing, a sumptuous collection that includes not only some of the most celebrated works of art of all time, but fascinating, perplexing, splendid, and beautiful objects of all kinds, all housed in a building, itself monumental, that was once the seat of the kings of France. In the grand corridors and multiplying backrooms of the Louvre, the history of the world and the history of art and the history of how we look and think about art and its place in our lives challenge and delight us at every corner. Few other public spaces are at once so haunted and so alive.
A unique collaboration between New York Review Books and the Louvre Museum, At the Louvre presents a hundred poems, newly commissioned exclusively for this volume, by a hundred of the world's most vibrant poets. They write about works from the museum's collection. They write about the museum and its history. They write what they see and feel, and together they take us on a tour of the museum and its galleries like no other, one that is an irresistible feast for the ear and mind and eye.
Some of the poets in At the Louvre: Simon Armitage; Barbara Chase-Riboud; Hélène Dorion; Jon Fosse; Fanny Howe; Kenneth Goldsmith; Lisette Lombé; Tedi López Mills; Precious Okoyomon; Charles Pennequin; Blandine Rinkel; Yomi Şode; Krisztina Tóth; Jan Wagner; Elizabeth Willis.
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