“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 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.

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