[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_41

Requiem, Anna Achmatova, 1935

I’ve always loved the total absence of frills in Anna Akhmatova's poems. There are no metaphors, comparisons, or anaphors—everything that I used to consider constitutive of poetry. Her writing seems like lines escaped from prose that find themselves one after the other, holding hands in a thin and exquisiteverse.

The elegance of the form is difficult to obtain because it is a fragile balance based on knowing what to keep and remove. Sometimes, when I write a text or make a drawing, everything seems essential to me: removing a detail is like eliminating a part of the story, losing a part of my message, or silencing a voice. Akhmatova manages to make silence speak. And she succeeds with apparent ease: "No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face.

I stand as witness to the familiar lot, a survivor of that time, that place."Through her mouth speak hundreds of other women's mouths, all lined up outside the Leningrad prison waiting for news of their loved ones who the Regime imprisoned. Her poetry is testimony, and her testimony is resistance. Resistance to injustice, to time, to pain. I think that Akhmatova's elegance is precisely due topain. It is the pain that decides for her which words are to be kept and which are to be removed.

All the tears, cries, and screams she doesn't write can be heard. Her silences are deafening.