Lady Anne

A Chronicle in Verse

Antjie Krog

Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse by Antjie Krog is the first English translation of an award winning book published in Afrikaans in 1989. It engages critically and creatively with a key moment of colonial history—the time Lady Anne Barnard spent at the Cape of Good Hope, from 1797 to 1802. Usually mentioned merely as a witty hostess of fabulous parties, Anne Lindsay Barnard, the daughter of a Scottish Earl and the wife of a colonial administrator, was an independent thinker and a painter and writer of genius. She left diaries, correspondence and watercolors documenting her experiences in this exotic land, the contact zone of colonizers and indigenous peoples. Antjie Krog acts as bard and chronicles an epic about this remarkable heroine’s life in South Africa, and intertwines it with life two hundred years later in the same country but now in the throes of anti-apartheid anger and vicious states of emergency. Krog’s powerful and eloquent bringing together of the past and the present, and the historical and the poetic embodies an experience that is as pertinent and compelling today in a democratic but still turbulent South Africa, as it is in the USA and other places where the intersections of race, identity, power, and language lie at the center of civic life.

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 126 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61148-815-9 • Paperback • January 2017 • $29.99 • (£25.00)

978-1-61148-816-6 • eBook • January 2017 • $28.50 • (£19.99)

Subjects: Poetry / African, Literary Criticism / African, Literary Criticism / Poetry

Lady Anne

A Chronicle in Verse

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse by Antjie Krog is the first English translation of an award winning book published in Afrikaans in 1989. It engages critically and creatively with a key moment of colonial history—the time Lady Anne Barnard spent at the Cape of Good Hope, from 1797 to 1802. Usually mentioned merely as a witty hostess of fabulous parties, Anne Lindsay Barnard, the daughter of a Scottish Earl and the wife of a colonial administrator, was an independent thinker and a painter and writer of genius. She left diaries, correspondence and watercolors documenting her experiences in this exotic land, the contact zone of colonizers and indigenous peoples. Antjie Krog acts as bard and chronicles an epic about this remarkable heroine’s life in South Africa, and intertwines it with life two hundred years later in the same country but now in the throes of anti-apartheid anger and vicious states of emergency. Krog’s powerful and eloquent bringing together of the past and the present, and the historical and the poetic embodies an experience that is as pertinent and compelling today in a democratic but still turbulent South Africa, as it is in the USA and other places where the intersections of race, identity, power, and language lie at the center of civic life.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 126 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61148-815-9 • Paperback • January 2017 • $29.99 • (£25.00)

978-1-61148-816-6 • eBook • January 2017 • $28.50 • (£19.99)

Subjects: Poetry / African, Literary Criticism / African, Literary Criticism / Poetry

Author

Antjie Krog is professor at the University of the Western Cape.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

PART I
On board Sir Edward Hughes 23rd Feb. – 1797
2.30 South latitude / 17 West longitude / 9th Mar. – 1797
The Country of the Lindsays of the Byres
(a letter from Fife, 1300, writer unknown)
Song written before the birth of Lady Anne Lindsay (1750)
“two years next month / since my last poetry volume”
“once more / before an empty page”
Kroonstad March ’86
hail Lady Anne Barnard!
Cape of Good Hope 4th May – 1797

PART II
Cape of Good Hope 10th July – 1797
Castle October 1797
Castle 12th Oct. – 1797
Castle 1798
Auld Robin Gray written by Lady Anne Barnard
Gossip from diaries and letters
Old Lady Lindsay from Scotland
To Windham 1st Nov. – 1793
St Wolstans near Dublin 10th Dec. – 1793
Dublin 12th July – 1794
Kroonstad first state of emergency July 1985
first Christmas weekend under the second state of emergency 1988
II
“because among mine I feel more and more ill at ease”
to have or to be
gnome
parole
cape of good hope
Lady Anne as guide because a hero needs a bard
“I think I am the first” – Lady Anne on Table Mountain

PART III (V)
The Drup Kelder Tuesday 8th May – 1798
Farm of Jakob van Reenen Sunday 13th May – 1798
Monday 14th May – 1798
Tuesday 15th May – 1798
Tuesday 22nd May – 1798
St Andrew’s Fife Scotland 25th Aug. – 1987
visit to Balcarres
the ballad of Andries Dundas-Dekker
Genadendal 10th May – 1798
Thursday 31st May – 1798

PART IV
20th Nov. – 1798
Paradise November 1798
1789
1793
“given line: macho men give me the creeps”
plea to be liberated
“one day my husband feels I do indeed deserve”
slaughtering cattle for the Dutch Reformed Church fête
Lady Anne at the microwave oven
“I smell him young behind the breadcutting machine”
ma will be late
III
I will always remember
“strategically I do my best”
ballad of the power game
illness
Castle of Good Hope 14th Dec. – 1799
Vineyard 14th May – 1800
Journal (“This sets loose so many images.”)
Journal (“empty lies the interior of the land”)
Vineyard 16th Feb. – 1801

PART III (end)
January 1802
new alphabet
transparency of the sole
the heart is the toughest part of the body
Lady Anne Barnard: remembered for her parties in my history book
a poem about guilt
Gothic House Wimbledon 1806
Wimbledon May 1807
Cape of Good Hope June 1807
Cape of Good Hope August 1807
Wimbledon November 1807
Wimbledon 1808
neither family nor friends
epitaph
End
end

Sources

About the Poet

Reviews

Throughout Lady Anne there is a rugged, gripping quality to Krog’s language, digging deep into the nature of South African life and her own self-challenging relationship to it…. There is a substance here, a regard, a responsibility, a creative response which is in keeping with the original nature of the volume when it was first published during the turmoil of the last decade of apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s. This is an extraordinary opportunity to present a writer of tremendous significance to a wholly new realm of readers.
— Stephen Clingman

Lady Anne is far from being a collection narrowly fixed in two particular historical moments — eighteenth-century colonial life and late 1980s resistance to apartheid. Like all great poems its reach is wide and deep. In this masterly English translation it speaks to new circumstances, in particular renewed attacks by young South Africans on what they register as a still repressive colonial legacy. It also speaks to conditions of power in many other places, including the United States, where issues of belonging, identity, speech and silence, are alive and active. There too writers and thinkers are challenged to address the moral, intellectual and creative challenges these themes generate. Alert to the dangers of complicity and despite her view that it is impossible “to hone truth with the pen /to live an honourable life within so much privilege,” Antjie Krog engages these difficult subjects with originality and power, in poetic language of great beauty, passion and complexity.
— Ingrid De Kok

Lady Anne

A Chronicle in Verse

Antjie Krog

Lady Anne

A Chronicle in Verse

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