Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize for Literature for innovative, myth-rooted writing

The distance between classical literature and contemporary life shrinks thoroughly and repeatedly across her work.

Poet, novelist, and professor Anne Carson, who won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, is sure to reawaken interest in Greek classics just as the movie Homer has done this year. So, we are all going Greek and Latin, Korean and Hungarian, while English looks for a truly original writer—especially with many of the recent Nobels going for translated novels. English literature is being taught a lesson, rightly so. Carson lives at the intersection of different roads, and it is difficult to get a handle on her. She has double citizenship of Canada and Iceland of all countries, knows better Greek than she knows English, and uses poetry and prose as if these are easily interchangeable genres. She mostly scoffs at contemporary literature, saying she only reads books written beyond 500 BC. Carson is the third Canadian to receive the globally powerful 1.2 million-pound prize after Saul Bellow (1976) and Alice Munroe (2013).Greek Myth As A Source Of InspirationGreek myth is her home, and her “reinterpretation turns myth into the recording and surviving of pain through the viewfinder of poetry,” a critic says. Carson mostly takes incidents from Greek myths and turns them into something more recent. Like in the Autobiography of Red, in which her concern is a moody teenager, she uses fragments from Greek myth to explain present-day foibles. Her main contribution is that she has made poetry approachable and likeable, and many of her poetry collections have sold over a lakh of copies each, an impossible task in an age where the mind is instructed not to work at all. No subject is off-limits to her; one poem in Wrong Norma is about the Roget’s Thesaurus.Revisiting The Classics In Modern LiteratureCarson’s work as a teacher and writer and classicist brings into focus the state of contemporary literature. Are there no stories to be told anymore that we have to hark back to 500 BC and recreate the illegible fantasies of a forgotten age? The fact that the year of AI is also the year of classic Greek literature reveals that in many ways we value what is old and fear what the future holds. Carson gives the impression “of someone from another world, either extraterrestrial or ancient,” a critic writes.A Writer Confronting Parkinson’s DiseaseCarson is old-fashioned not just in her writing but in other ways as well, unconnected with any of the technological wonders of this world and seeking sanctuary in the long-forgotten stories. She is used to taking reams of notes and now complains that she cannot write, as her hands have been overtaken by Parkinson’s disease.“The upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, and the slant loses its smooth smart angle; it all looks embarrassing. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame,” Carson said a few years back.What matters to us is that her poetry need not be scrubbed away in shame.

The French author discovered Carson on a bus while stranded in a snowstorm and has been enthralled by her fearless imagination ever sinceWhere to start with Anne Carson‘Delights await!’: Margaret Atwood and other writers on Nobel winner Anne Carson1. Anne Carson is one of the greatest writers of our time. I discovered her work on a Peter Pan bus from New York to New England. I’d bought Antigonick in a bookstore a few days earlier, almost randomly. From the very first lines, I was enthralled. While we were on the bus, a snowstorm suddenly blanketed the roads, and the other passengers and I found ourselves stuck for 10 hours in rural America, surrounded by an entirely white landscape. I took my computer out of my backpack and started to translate Antigonick into French. Spontaneously. I was so absorbed by the power of Carson’s text that I didn’t notice the hours pass.2. One of Carson’s greatest strengths is that, unlike so many other contemporary writers, she doesn’t try to “make literature”. She writes. Sometimes clouds do the speaking, in her work, and sometimes monsters do; sometimes, in the middle of a collection of poems, she lets an imaginary Catherine Deneuve take over the narration. Sometimes she writes a letter to her own sleep and sometimes she publishes notes she’s scribbled on her hand. She writes about Homer, but also Rosalía; about Brecht, but also Marilyn Monroe.Translated by Josh Cohen Continue reading...

When her sons died, the Book of Goose author turned to Grief Lessons, Carson’s translation of four plays by Euripides. She reflects on the ‘life sustaining’ work of an extraordinary writer • Where to start with: Anne Carson• ‘Delights await!’: Margaret Atwood and other writers on Anne CarsonIt is preposterous to agree to write a short piece on Anne Carson’s work. The task is impossible, akin to that of solving the mathematical problem of dividing zero by zero. If one had the power to solve it, perhaps one would have some confidence in attempting to write about Anne Carson’s work. Attempting, I say, not succeeding. In attempting to do so, I shall emphasise that all words fall short in extreme situations, which not only include unfathomable losses (of children, in my case) but also include articulating anything about Anne Carson’s work.One could start with Carson’s words. “Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” (Autobiography of Red) But to let the words exist in their own desires and yearnings and frustrations and confusions, to let the words scream with inarticulable pain or tell a riddle with a twinkling smile or make love to one another – how many of us have achieved that kind of mastery of words? But, oh no, mastery is the wrong word here. Only the minor and the greedy and the power-thirsty writers want to be the masters of the words. Carson does not subjugate or manipulate her words. She lets them be; and lets herself be led by the words – hers, and the ancients’ translated into unforgettable English by her. Continue reading...