Anna Ayanoglou (France)

(b. 1985) is a poet and radio producer from France. She is a graduate of Sorbonne University where she studied Russian literature. Later, she spent three years in Lithuania and Estonia as a French teacher. This experience led her to write her first collection of poetry, Le fil des traversées (Gallimard, 2019), which was awarded the Apollinaire Discovery Award and the Poetry Revelation Award from La Société des Gens de Lettres in 2020.

Her second collection, Sensations du combat, was published in 2022 by Gallimard.

A resident of Brussels since 2014, Anna writes and hosts the radio show “Et la poésie, alors?” (a non-literal but accurate translation would be: ‘Cut to the Poetry!’) on Radio Panik, a programme dedicated to poetry from around the world, where the poems are read in the original language together with their French translation. In 2023, an episode of the radio program was dedicated to Georgian contemporary poets, featuring poems by Lia Sturua, Nato Ingorokva, Maya Sarishvili, Thea Topuria, and Lela Tsutskiridze with their French translations by Bachana Chabradze.

Her third poetry collection, Appartenir, was published in March 2024 by Le Castor Astral. Some poems from Appartenir in Bachana Chabradze’s Georgian translation appeared in Indigo magazine.

 

Symptoms, night

 

Try as I might to bandage, bind

it pisses out from all over

—I plug a hole

right away the soul pierces three more

—flows out with even stronger force

 

Out in the garden, at night—cloudless sky

so many stars they become uncountable—a little

what? comfort is stupid—forgetting

—just the bounded time

of a gaze at the night—respite.

 

Translated by Lenaig Cariou and Shira Abramovitch