Anne Carson: Antiquity 9781350174757, 9781350174788, 9781350174764

Citation preview

‘Thin voice’ by Anne Carson.

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ANNE CARSON/ ANTIQUITY

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Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception presents scholarly monographs offering new and innovative research and debate to students and scholars in the reception of Classical Studies. Each volume will explore the appropriation, reconceptualization and recontextualization of various aspects of the Graeco-Roman world and its culture, looking at the impact of the ancient world on modernity. Research will also cover reception within antiquity, the theory and practice of translation, and reception theory. Also available in the series: ALEXANDER THE GREAT IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TRADITION: CLASSICAL RECEPTION AND PATRISTIC LITERATURE by Christian Thrue Djurslev ANCIENT MAGIC AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN THE MODERN VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS edited by Filippo Carlà and Irene Berti ANCIENT GREEK MYTH IN WORLD FICTION SINCE 1989 edited by Justine McConnell and Edith Hall ANTIPODEAN ANTIQUITIES edited by Marguerite Johnson CLASSICS IN EXTREMIS edited by Edmund Richardson FAULKNER’S RECEPTION OF APULEIUS’ THE GOLDEN ASS IN THE REIVERS by Vernon L. Provencal FRANKENSTEIN AND ITS CLASSICS edited by Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens and Brett M. Rogers GREEK AND ROMAN CLASSICS IN THE BRITISH STRUGGLE FOR SOCIAL REFORM edited by Henry Stead and Edith Hall GREEKS AND ROMANS ON THE LATIN AMERICAN STAGE edited by Rosa Andújar and Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos HOMER’S ILIAD AND THE TROJAN WAR: DIALOGUES ON TRADITION by Jan Haywood and Naoíse Mac Sweeney IMAGINING XERXES by Emma Bridges JULIUS CAESAR’S SELF-CREATED IMAGE AND ITS DRAMATIC AFTERLIFE by Miryana Dimitrova KINAESTHESIA AND CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY 1750–1820: MOVED BY STONE by Helen Slaney iv

ANNE CARSON/ ANTIQUITY

Edited by Laura Jansen

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 This edition published 2023 Copyright © Laura Jansen and Contributors, 2022 Laura Jansen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © ‘Thin voice’ by Anne Carson All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jansen, Laura, author. Title: Anne Carson / Antiquity / Laura Jansen. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: Bloomsbury studies in classical reception | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021018844 (print) | LCCN 2021018845 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350174757 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350174764 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350174771 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Carson, Anne, 1950–Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PS3553.A7667 Z74 2021 (print) | LCC PS3553.A7667 (ebook) | DDC 818/.5409—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018844 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018845 ISBN:

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CONTENTS

List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Timeline of Anne Carson’s Works and Distinctions Introduction: On Anne Carson/ Antiquity Laura Jansen

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The Beginning of Now Anna Jackson

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Chimeras: Empty Space and Melting Borders Phoebe Giannisi

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Carson for the Non-Classicist Rebecca Kosick

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Écriture and the Budding Classicist Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi

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Erring and Whatever Gillian Sze

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The Gift of Residue Laura Jansen

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Carson Fragment Sean Gurd

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Shades Elizabeth D. Harvey

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The Paratextual Cosmos Paschalis Nikolaou

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10 An Essay on An Essay on Irony Yopie Prins

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11 The Stesichorean Ethos P. J. Finglass

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12 Cunning Intelligence Ian Rae

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13 Mythopoetic Immersions Vanda Zajko

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14 Deadly Erotic Tangos and Animal Affinity Hannah Silverblank

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15 Poetry and Profit Ella Haselswerdt and Mathura Umachandran

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16 More Spectres of Dying Empire Kay Gabriel

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17 Translation, Transcreation, Transgression Susan Bassnett

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18 Translating the Canon, Filling the Absence Eugenia Nicolaci

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Contents

19 Translation Catastrophes: Pinplay Grace Zanotti

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20 There It Lies Untranslatable Elena Theodorakopoulos

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Bibliography Index of Terms Index of Textual References

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FIGURES

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Costas Varotsos, The Runner (1988). P. Oxy.2289 Oxyrhynchus Papyri fr. 3. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society and the University of Oxford Imaging Papyri Project. Diego Velázquez, Pope Innocent X, 1650. Galleria Doria Pamphilj. Wikipedia. Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 2–3). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 5–6). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 7–8). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 10–11). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 12–13). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 14–16). P. Oxy 1787, Oxyrhynchus Papyri XV (detail from Plate II, and transcription from page 28). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, p. 17). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, p. 18). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, p. 19). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, p. 23). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 48–9). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 51–2). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 87–8). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 95–6). Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 108–9). Elliott Hundley, The Lightning’s Bride, 2011. Wood, sound board, inkjet print on Kitakata, pins, paper, plastic, magnifying lenses, metal, photographs, wire, found paintings. Overall dimensions: 99 x 289¼ x 19 inches (251.5 x 734.7 x 48.3 cm), 6 panels, each: 99 x 48 x 19 inches (251.5 x 121.9 x 48.3 cm). © Elliott Hundley, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

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86 137 138 138 139 140 140 141 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 152 153

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CONTRIBUTORS

Susan Bassnett is a translation theorist and scholar of comparative literature. She served as pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Warwick for ten years and taught in its Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies. As of 2016, she is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Universities of Glasgow and Warwick. Educated around Europe, she began her career in Italy and has lectured at universities in the United States. In 2007, she was elected a Fellow at the Royal Society of Literature. P. J. Finglass is Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol. He has published a monograph entitled Sophocles (2019) in the series Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics; edited Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (2018), Ajax (2011) and Electra (2007), Stesichorus’ Poems (2014) and Pindar’s Pythian Eleven (2007) in the series Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries; co-edited six books, including (with Adrian Kelly) The Cambridge Companion to Sappho (2021) and Stesichorus in Context (2015) and (with Lyndsay Coo) Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy (2020); and edits the journal Classical Quarterly. Kay Gabriel is a poet, essayist and teacher. With Andrea Abi-Karam, she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (2020). Her forthcoming books include Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (2021) and A Queen in Bucks County (2022). She lives in Queens, NY. Phoebe Giannisi is a poet, architect and scholar at the University of Thessaly. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Ομηρικά (2009), published in German as Homerika (translated by Dirk Uwe Hansen, 2016) and in English as Homerica (translated by Brian Sneeden, 2017), and Χίμαιρα (2019). She holds a PhD in Classics (Lyon IILumière), which she published as Récits des Voies: Chant et Cheminement en Grèce archaïque (2008). Her work transverses the borders between poetry and performance, installation, inscription and representation, investigating the poetics of voice and place (http://phoebegiannisi.net/en/). Sean Gurd is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Missouri. He works at the intersection of aesthetics, media studies and classical philology, with a special interest in music and sound culture. He is the author of three monographs – Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology (2006); Work in Progress: Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome (2012); and Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece (2016) – and the editor of Philology and its Histories (2010). Elizabeth D. Harvey is Professor of English at the University of Toronto and a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is the author of Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist x

Contributors

Theory and Renaissance Texts (1992), editor of Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (2003), has co-edited several collections of essays and has published many essays on early modern literature, the phenomenology of the body, the senses, the emotions and psychoanalysis. She is currently finishing a monograph called John Donne’s Physics (with Timothy M. Harrison) and a book on mourning in the writings of Anne Carson. Ella Haselswerdt is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Epistemologies of Suffering: Tragedy, Trauma, and the Choral Subject. She has also written on the tragic sublime and the dreamscapes of the ancient Greek body, and is engaged in an ongoing project called ‘Deep Lez Philology’, an approach to reading Sappho’s fragments and queer identity via contemporary art. In 2015 she co-organized a conference at Princeton called ‘Decreations: A Graduate Symposium on the Work of Anne Carson’ that drew academics, artists and performers from across the US and abroad. Anna Jackson is a New Zealand poet whose most recent collection of poetry, Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems (2018), brings together work from seven books including Catullus for Children (2004) and I, Clodia (2014). She is an Associate Professor in English Literature at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, with research interests in the Gothic and children’s literature as well as poetry and poetics. Actions and Travels: How Poetry Works (2021) looks at 100 poems, including translations of Sappho by Anne Carson and others (www.annajackson.nz). Laura Jansen is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol. She is author of Borges’ Classics: Global Encounters with the Graeco-Roman World (2018), editor of The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers (2014) and general editor of the monograph series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing (Bloomsbury). Her next books are on Italo Calvino: Classics between Science and Literature (Bloomsbury) and Susan Sontag: From Plato’s Cave to Sarajevo. She is originally from Buenos Aires. Rebecca Kosick is Senior Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol and co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute. Her work addresses twentiethcentury and contemporary poetry and poetics in the American hemisphere. She is the author of Material Poetics in Hemispheric America: Words and Objects 1950–2010, which addresses a number of poets including Anne Carson, Ferreira Gullar and Juan Luis Martínez. Her new work, supported by a visiting fellowship at the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies, investigates the intersection of multilingual and multimedia strategies in contemporary poetry in the Atlantic region. Eugenia Nicolaci earned her BA in Classics at the University of Siena and Palermo (Italy), where she also completed an MA thesis on the influence of Catullus’ poems on modern English literature. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol, where she is completing a thesis on Anne Carson’s Catullan translations. Nicolaci has research interests in the reception of classical literature in poetry and translation, and especially women translators. She has translated into Italian parts of Anne Carson’s Decreation in xi

Contributors

the Nuovi Argomenti review, and recently published an article on The Glass Essay in the journal L’Ulisse. Paschalis Nikolaou is Assistant Professor in Literary Translation at the Ionian University, Corfu. He is the co-editor of Translating Selves: Experience and Identity between Languages and Literatures (2008) and Nasos Vayenas, The Perfect Order: Selected Poems 1974–2010 (2010). He has co-translated 12 Greek Poems After Cavafy (2015) and guestedited ‘Recomposed: Anglophone Presences of Classical Literature’ (Synthesis 12, 2019), as well as editing Encounters in Greek and Irish Literature: Creativity, Translations and Critical Perspectives (2020). Nikolaou’s monograph, The Return of Pytheas: Scenes from Greek and British Poetry in Dialogue, was published in 2017. He currently holds a Fulbright Fellowship for 2020–1 at Ohio State University. Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi is Professor of Classics at Stanford University, California. She writes on issues of aesthetic perception and judgement, ancient and modern lyric poetry, Plato, dance, and the relationship between the verbal and the visual. Her publications include Frontiers of Pleasure: Models of Aesthetic Response in Archaic and Classical Greek Thought (2012) and (as editor) Performance and Culture in Plato’s Laws (2013). Yopie Prins is the Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Victorian Sappho (1999) and Ladies’ Greek (2017) and co-editor of Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Feminist Critics (1997) and The Lyric Theory Reader (2014). Prins has published on classical reception studies, comparative poetics and lyric theory, nineteenth-century poetry and prosody, and critical translation studies. Currently she is completing Voice Inverse, a book on metre and music in Victorian poetry, and preparing to present the 2025 Sather Lectures at UC Berkeley. Ian Rae is an Associate Professor at King’s University College at Western University, Canada. He is the author of the monograph From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada (2008) and editor of the special issue, ‘George Bowering: Bridges to Elsewhere’, in Open Letter (2010). He is currently working on the SSHRC-funded project ‘Mapping Stratford Culture’. Hannah Silverblank teaches at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. She is currently revising her Oxford doctoral thesis on monstrous soundscapes in Greek epic, lyric and drama for publication. Silverblank also writes on disability in antiquity and comparative literature and is at present completing articles on Homeric epithets of the god Hephaestus, Anne Carson’s ‘Decreation (An Opera in Three Parts)’, and the goddess Thetis as queer mother in Homeric epic. Gillian Sze holds a PhD in Études anglaises from the Université de Montréal. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral project examines the classical inheritance in Anne Carson’s poetry, with particular interest in the fragment, translation and the Sapphic ‘afterlife’. Sze is the author of multiple poetry books, including Peeling Rambutan (2014) Redrafting xii

Contributors

Winter (2015) and Panicle (2017), which were finalists for the QWF A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She currently teaches literature and creative writing in Montreal. Elena Theodorakopoulos is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Birmingham. She has research interests in Roman poetry and its reception in contemporary film and literature and has published widely on these topics in journals, edited volumes and companions. She is the author of Ancient Rome at the Cinema: Story and Spectacle in Rome and Hollywood (2010) and is currently completing a book on Catullus: A Roman Poet. Mathura Unmachandran is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Humanities and Visiting Lecturer, the Department of Classics, Cornell University. She is currently working on a monograph entitled ‘Critical Mythologies: the Frankfurt School and Antiquity’. Her research in classical reception studies has appeared in Classical Receptions Journal, Ramus and Eidolon. She is particularly interested in how classical reception can partake in critical race theory, decolonization practices and anti-colonial solidarity. Unmachandran holds an MA in Reception of the Ancient World from University College London and a PhD from Princeton University (2018). In 2015 she co-organized a conference at Princeton called ‘Decreations: A Graduate Symposium on the Work of Anne Carson’ that drew together academics, artists and performers from across the US and abroad. Grace Zanotti is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She works on Greek tragedy and political theory, with a special interest in chorality, subjectivity and justice. Her dissertation, ‘Beyond Retribution: Re-theorizing Justice through Greek Tragedy’, examines the actions of female protagonists and choruses in Greek tragedies in order to theorize justice from their marginalized structural positions. Zanotti’s article ‘κυνὸς σῆμα: Euripides’ Hecuba and the Uses of Revenge’, was published in Arethusa in 2019. Vanda Zajko is Reader in Classics at the University of Bristol. She has wide-ranging interests in the reception of classical myth and literature in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, in feminist thought and in literary empathy. She is currently working on two projects: one on contemporary mythopoiesis and participatory cultures and the other on translation and creativity in the work of Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The proceedings of Anne Carson/ Antiquity have in great part been made possible by the auspices of Bristol’s Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition (IGRCT). The editor is most grateful to the IGRCT for sponsoring ‘The Anne Carson Postgraduate and Early Career Scholars Reading Group’, which took place in May 2019. The volume has also been informed by activities organized at Spike Island Studios (SI), Bristol, in October and November 2019. Warmest thanks to the IS Director, Carmen Juliá, for her creative collaboration in putting together two events: ‘The Anne Carson Seminar for Artists-inResidence’ and ‘Finding the Edge: The Writings of Anne Carson: Laura Jansen in Conversation with Poets Alice Oswald and Rebecca Kosick’. The University of Bristol’s Faculty of Arts’ Research Fund has most generously financed substantial parts of the production of this volume, as have Michigan University, whose funding has allowed us to present all images in colour. The editor would furthermore like to thank all those who have helped her in the past fifteen months to produce this book. At Bloomsbury Publishing, Alice Wright and Georgie Leighton have been incredibly supportive throughout the project. Lily Mac Mahon has been an ideal Assistant Editor and a pleasure (and so much fun!) to collaborate with on a daily basis. Lottie Brown continues to be an excellent proofreader as she completes her doctoral studies at Bristol. The editor could not have hoped for a more receptive and capable group of contributors: poets, artists, intellectuals and academics able to combine their collective expertise to great effect. Deepest thanks to each of them for their unfailing enthusiasm, intellectual ambition and timely work during the most difficult year of 2020. In particular, Yopie Prins and Ian Rae have been a source of knowledge and practical support, always ready to help with kindness, good humour and generosity of mind. The editor’s final gratitude is to Anne Carson herself for being so accommodating and for gifting her own artwork, ‘Thin Voice’, for the book cover.

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TIMELINE OF ANNE CARSON’S WORKS AND DISTINCTIONS

Poetry, essays and translations 1986 Eros the Bittersweet 1992 Short Talks 1995 Glass, Irony, and God 1995 Plainwater 1998 Autobiography of Red 1999 Economy of the Unlost 2000 Men in the Off Hours 2000 The Beauty of the Husband 2000 Electra 2002 If Not, Winter 2005 Decreation 2006 Grief Lessons 2009 An Oresteia 2010 Nox 2013 Antigonick 2013 Red Doc> 2013 Nay Rather 2014 Iphigenia Among the Taurians 2014 The Albertine Workout 2015 Antigone 2015 Bakkhai 2016 Float 2019 Norma Jeane Baker of Troy

Prizes, awards, fellowships and honorary degrees 1984 Quarterly Review of Literature Betty Colladay Award for ‘Canicula di Anna’ 1986–7 Rockefeller Scholar-in-Residence at the 92nd Street Y (New York) xv

Timeline of Anne Carson’s Works and Distinctions

1996 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry 1996 QSPELL Award – A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry for Glass, Irony, and God 1997 Pushcart Prize for ‘Jaget’ 1997 Rockefeller Bellagio Center Fellowship 1998 QSPELL Award – A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry for Autobiography of Red 1998 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry 1999 American Academy of Arts and Sciences International Honorary Member 1999 Modern Library: 100 Best Nonfiction Books (Reader’s List) for Eros the Bittersweet 2000 MacArthur Fellowship 2000 New York Times Notable Books of the Year List for Men in the Off Hours 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize for Men in the Off Hours (Canadian winner) 2001 T. S. Eliot Prize for The Beauty of the Husband 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry for The Beauty of the Husband 2001 QWF Award – A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry for The Beauty of the Husband 2005 Member of the Order of Canada 2007 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellowship, The American Academy in Berlin 2010 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for An Oresteia 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Judge 2011 Creative Scotland/ Cove Park Muriel Spark Fellowship 2011 American Academy of Arts and Letters Foreign Honorary Member 2012 Honorary degree from the University of Toronto 2012 Criticos Prize (London Hellenic Prize) for Antigonick 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize for Red Doc> (Canadian winner) 2014 Honorary degree (Doctor of Letters) from the University of St Andrews 2016 Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prize for lifetime achievement 2018 Inga Maren Otto Fellowship, The Watermill Center 2019 Manuel Acuña International Poetry Prize 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature 2021 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature

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INTRODUCTION: ON ANNE CARSON/ ANTIQUITY Laura Jansen

I’m conserving the past – it’s what classicists are supposed to do, [. . .] but there are ways to conserve it. One way is to say, ‘Nothing new is any good.’ But you don’t learn anything when you’re still up on the window ledge, safe. The other way is to jump from what you know into empty space and see where you end up. I think you only learn things when you jump. Melanie Rehak, 2000: 36 Indeed, jumping into the unknown in a daring attempt to explore anew what previously felt safe is one apt way to capture Anne Carson’s approach to a core subject in her oeuvre – antiquity.1 For Carson (Canada, 1950–), the preservation of the classical past – a practice which the discipline of Classics has come to associate, for better or worse, with the project of Classical Reception Studies – takes a specific turn. Whether her focus is Sappho and Simone Weil, Homer and the American tax office, Geryon and Quechuan Peru, Catullus and her brother Michael, or the Cycladic people of the Neolithic period and the creation of the modern handbag, Carson’s mode of recalling classical antiquity – that is, of ‘conserving’ its relevance and force on her page – is to probe its afterlife somewhere off-centre from its mainstream traditions (even if her classicism responds in philosophical terms more consistently to certain European and Anglophone schools of thought, as the essays in this volume predominantly show). Of course, such a turn on the Classics is by no means unique to Carson’s work. Readers may be already thinking of examples of (near-) contemporary authors around the globe, whose artistic drives operate in a similarly alternative fashion. I myself have in mind authors whom I’ve recently discussed with my students, and whose classicisms are the product of similarly daring leaps found in Carson – for example the shifting structures shaping classical myth in the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina, 1936–72); the multimedia experiments with Homeric forms in the poetry and performative art of Greek classicist and architect Phoebe Giannisi (contributing with Chapter 2 on ‘Chimeras’ in this volume); or the creative translations by British poet, translator and classicist Josephine Balmer, who has recently reimagined the ‘paths of survival’ of the few remaining fragments of Aeschylus’s lost tragedy, Myrmidons, as they passed through the hands of unknown actors in history (scribes, book makers, tyrants and thieves).2 In this sense, the present volume does not attempt to portray Carson’s engagement with classical antiquity as an unprecedented phenomenon, a label which Carson herself 1

Anne Carson/ Antiquity

would arguably find indelicate, even hard to live up to.3 Instead, one of our central concerns is to highlight, from a variety of interrelated thematic foci and directions, the erudite indiscipline of her classicism as it emerges in her poetry, translations, essays and visual artistry. ‘Indiscipline’ becomes an important term in this case and for the meaning it acquires in our project. It refers to Carson’s non-conformist, resistant-todefinition approach to the traditional methodologies and forms of exegesis which tended – and still tend – to sustain the mainstream of the discipline of Classics and, in particular, Classical Philology, for which Carson received her academic degrees. In turn, this kind of indiscipline sheds light on the refreshing contribution that Carson has made to the cross-disciplinary circulation of academic ideas, as well as the reception of those ideas in more capacious and, dare one say, ambitiously creative venues for publication. Here, Carson’s scholarship becomes, perhaps paradoxically (and without citing specific works and scholars), quite influential. For her erudite indiscipline not only has been attractive to the more progressive corners of research in classical texts and authors but has also made a significant intervention in discussions of even the most intransigent forms of philological analyses, whether these engage with or reject aspects of her work. In the contributions that follow, readers will encounter this understanding of Carson’s approach to Classics in several interrelated forms, as chapters deal with matters of her poetics, evolving classical profile, fragmentary and residual thought, paratextual strategies, treatment of myth, philosophical thought and translation practice. Above all, our interest has been in the poetics and praxis of a classically-trained scholar whose instinctive and consistent impulse has been to position her academic profile and knowledge on the edge of her field – and jump. How this occurs, and to what effects, are questions which guide the twenty contributions by Anglophone and nonAnglophone poets, artists, translators and scholars that make up Anne Carson/ Antiquity. From a multi-praxis, cross-disciplinary approach, this diverse selection of contributors with experience in different fields, including the artistic and technical, are better positioned to appreciate Carson’s leaps across conceptual, disciplinary, medial, lexical and temporal gaps. In this sense, the book’s central ambition is to offer a study that speaks closely to Carson’s own vision and reading strategies, as well as an interpretative model that puts classicists and non-classicists in productive, far-reaching conversation. *

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To be sure, standing off-centre on the edges of things has been something of a precept for Carson the classical educator: ‘I’d like to add a piece of wisdom from Gertrude Stein,’ Carson says at the conclusion of her interview with Will Aitken, “Act so that there is no use in the center.” That’s what I try to teach my students.’4 This dictum also governs the qualitative feel and reasoning of Carson’s entire oeuvre, including her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, published in 1986, in part based on her 1981 Toronto PhD thesis ‘Odi et amo ergo sum’, a highly lyrical essay in which she ruminates on lack’s key role in the dynamics of desire from Sappho to Lacan and beyond. This groundbreaking project was received with mounting success, not just by academics, essayists and poets, but also increasingly 2

Introduction

by readers of non-fiction at large. The book, now translated into multiple languages, has been particularly praised for its innovative redefinition of the boundaries of the academic essay. Here, Carson blends Greek scholarship with the essayistic styles of a Seneca, Montaigne or Emerson, in a manner that attracted acute readers such as Susan Sontag and Annie Dillard.5 It is in this work regarding the forms, movements and temporalities of desire that the notion of the edge becomes a key idiom in Carson’s writings: ‘Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do.’6 This reasoning, which amounts to a realization of who we are vis-à-vis the external force that, like eros, demarcates our sense of self in the world, speaks intimately not only to Sappho’s or Lacan’s sense of desire but, also pointedly, to Carson’s own classical vision. The essays by Anna Jackson (Chapter 1), Phoebe Giannisi (Chapter 2), Gillian Sze (Chapter 5), Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi (Chapter 4) and my own (Chapter 6) discuss this aspect of Carson’s writing from the perspectives of time and temporality, the shift of spatial forms, fragmentation and the residual, and the French tradition of écriture. After Eros the Bittersweet, Carson continues to blur and undo the boundaries of erotic experience. One can cite as examples the daring leaps that she takes in Decreation (2005), in which she traces commonalities amongst the spiritual forms of desire found in Sappho (Lesbos c. 630–570 bce), Marguerite Porete (Belgium, 1250–France, 1310) and Simone Weil (France, 1910–England, 1943), or Carson’s experiment with the structural and paratextual borders of Catullus 101 in her acclaimed Nox (2010, Rebecca Kosick, Chapter 3; Paschalis Nikoloau, Chapter 9; and Eugenia Nicolaci, Chapter 18), or her breaking out of book form in the classically inspired chapbooks which make up Float (2016) (Haselswerdt and Umachandran, Chapter 15). In fact, Carson’s entire oeuvre to date (see Timeline), from Eros the Bittersweet (1986), Short Talks (1992), Plainwater (1995), Glass, Irony, and God (1995) and Autobiography of Red (1998) to Men in the Off Hours (2000), Red Doc> (2013) and the recent Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), can be understood in part as an exercise in ‘melting the borders’ of form (Phoebe Giannisi, Chapter 2). The most significant effect of this de-framing strategy is a ‘dazzling hybridity’ (Ian Rae, 2000: 17–41), which makes her engagements with antiquity not only highly experimental in tenor but also nearly unclassifiable as a category. Carson’s practical mode of working on her scholarly and creative projects may well be an underlying reason for the unclassifiable character of her classicism. As Carson explained to Will Aitken in 2004: I work at three different desks, with a different project open on each, let’s say, so one is academic, one writerly, and one art. I go at these erratically, sometimes to all three desks within an hour. They cross-pollinate one another.7 Indeed, cross-pollination is an intrinsic element edifying the hybridity of Carson’s classical production. The practice combines physical (moving from desk to desk) and intellectual/artistic erring (discussed below), as she simultaneously tackles various projects at once. Already in an early interview with John D’Agata in 1997, Carson gave a glimpse of how her cross-pollinating practice began at some point after Eros the 3

Anne Carson/ Antiquity

Bittersweet (1986). As Carson put it, that first work was ‘possibly the last time I got those two impulses to move in the same stream – the academic and the other [i.e., the creative]. After that [. . .] I realized that I couldn’t do it again.’8 In Chapter 4, Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi concentrates on this early stage of Carson the classicist’s cross-pollinating approach to her poetics of composition, from Carson’s more strictly academic PhD thesis to the growing hybridity that marks her early writings. Carson’s cross-pollinating composition practice equally explains the stereoscopic effects one finds in her hybrid poetics.9 In Chapter 1, poet-scholar Anna Jackson traces this inflection in Carson’s writing with a specific reference to the temporal dimensions and depths which Carson finds in Sappho, Simonides and Kafka. *

*

*

The logic of preserving antiquity from the edge also forms a steady pattern in Carson’s statements about her translation praxis. Whenever Carson is invited to comment on what motivates this process, her reply remains the same: she envisages herself on some edge between what she knows and does not know, and then takes a leap. Note, for instance, how she conceives of the transference of words from one language to another, whether her project is rendering Sophocles’ Electra for academic audiences, or Mimnermus’ fragments for experimental works such as Plainwater (1995): [Translation] gives one to think, in a way that no other practical exercise does, because you come to a place where you are standing at the edge of a word and you can see across the gap to the other word, the word you are trying to translate and you can’t get there, and that space, between the word you are at and the word you can’t get to is unlike any other space in language – and something there is learnt about human possibilities, in that space, I am not sure what, but I like to test it. It’s humbling.10 In this instance, the space in between words in the translation process seems to be in sight as we stand ‘on the edge of a word’. It gives way to an activity charged by vertigo and anxiety, but also promising exhilaration, as one attempts to see ‘across the gap’ to another word and inhabit a space ‘unlike any other space in language’. But while, for Carson, the exercise of translation rests uniquely in the gap between words, it is what this space can potentially offer in terms of ‘human possibility’ that is worth exploring. Here, she speaks in terms of ‘possibility’ because the exercise demands that one focuses intently on the task at hand, for example, when rendering a dialectical Greek word from an archaic Greek poet, an onomatopoeic cry from Greek tragedy, or when adapting a line from Euripides into a creative ‘short talk’. Whichever the task, the possibilities presented by the space in between lexica lie in one key artistic ambition: keeping one’s attention from settling into complacency. This methodology is explicitly stated in Economy of the Unlost (1999), one of Carson’s most stimulating dialogues between antiquity and modernity, in which she ignites an unexpected spark between the Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–468 bce) and 4

Introduction

German-speaking poet Paul Celan (Romania, 1920–France, 1970). As Carson puts it in her ‘Note on Method’ heading this work: Attention is a task we share, you and I. To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling. Partly for this reason I have chosen to talk about two men [Simonides and Celan] at once. They keep each other from settling. Moving and not settling, they are side by side in a conversation and yet no conversation takes place. Face to face, yet they do not know one another, did not live in the same era, never spoke the same language. With and against, aligned and adverse, each is placed like a surface on which the other may come into focus. Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky.11 This passage is significant both in terms of the importance Carson gives to intent thought in her poetics and praxis and the value she grants to errancy as a mode of organizing her connections between ancient and modern texts and authors. As she comments in her interview with Kevin McNeilly, ‘I like that space between languages because it’s a place or error or mistakenness [. . .] And that’s useful [. . .] for writing because it’s always good to put yourself off balance, to be dislodged from the complacency in which you normally go at perceiving the world [. . .] And translation continuously does [this.]’12 We have already seen that, for Carson, erring is part of her physical and intellectual practice at the time of composition between desks. In the comment above, erring comes to mean a sense of straying from the accepted or expected course or standard of things and, pointedly, what happens as one stands on the edge of certain matter and jumps into the unknown. Erring also explains the chance factor in Carson’s approach to classical (and modern) authors, a topic brilliantly pursued by Canadian poet Gillian Sze in Chapter 5. Indeed, the connection between Simonides and Celan has a purpose: to cast light on ‘striking commonalities’ in both poets’ use of word-economy, as they articulate their sense of alienation between two worlds, gift and monetary systems (Simonides) and preand post-Holocaust existence (Celan). Yet, according to Carson, such a reading emerges a posteriori – the rest is simply chance, and emphatically not a process that begins in a deliberate matching of ancients and moderns. This is the position Carson takes when asked how she put these poets together, or what made her think of their unlikely association: You know, I could list things I saw, but that’s not why I put them together, that would be an afterthought. I put them together by accident. And that’s fine, I’m happy to do things by accident. But what’s interesting to me is once the accident has happened, once I happen to have Simonides and Paul Celan on my desk together, what do I do with the link? What I do with it depends on all the thoughts I’ve had in my life up to that point and who I am at that point. It could be Simonides and celery, it doesn’t matter; it only matters insofar as I am going to make a work of art out of it. It seems totally arbitrary on the one hand and on the other, totally particular about who I am as a thinker.13 5

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This reasoning speaks intimately to what may be identified as the aleatory character of ‘Carson’s Classics’: her topic is Simonides and Celan but ‘it could be Simonides and celery, it doesn’t matter’. Making ‘arbitrary’ connections between antiquity and modernity amounts to the fabric of her creative and academic enterprise and, one could add, to the unfolding of a history of untold commonalities between ancients and moderns usually bypassed in more historically linear forms of reception. Furthermore, Carson’s aleatory classicism forms part of the author’s deep interest in the question of how classical fragments circulate and fall randomly through space and time. The final paragraph in the first chapter of Autobiography of Red, on how Carson conceives of both the fragments of the Geryoneis poem by the Greek lyric poet Stesichorus (c. 630–555 bce) and the numbering which gives a sense of their order in modern editions, is eloquent when it comes to this issue: [T]he fragments of the Geryoneis itself read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box [. . .]. The fragment numbers tell you roughly how the pieces fell out of the box. You can of course keep shaking the box [. . .]. Here. Shake.14 ‘Here. Shake’ could well be a key rhythm in our reading of Carson’s own fragmentary style, as Sean Gurd, a former student of Carson at McGill, explores in Chapter 7, as well as a significant factor in the ‘Stesichorean ethos’ that punctuates the project of Autobiography of Red (P. J. Finglass, Chapter 11). It also crucially conveys the tenor of Carson’s most structurally ambitious projects, such as Float (2016), a collection of chapbooks whose themes are substantially classical. Here, Carson’s reading logic is equally Stesichorean in spirit, at least in the manner she reads Stesichorus in Autobiography of Red. The collection, distinctive for its lack of pagination (like the Geryoneis pieces circulated before numeration) contains twenty-two singles pieces housed in a transparent box, together with a Table of Contents (no chapter number or pagination featured in that document either) and a loose title page which reads as follows: Float A collection of twenty-two chapbooks whose order is unfixed and whose topics are various. Reading can be freefall.

The coupling of Stesichoros and Carson here is made possible by appeal to Carson’s explicit statements, which link Float with Autobiography of Red. Yet, the non-classicist may already be following a different set of associations, as Rebecca Kosick does in her exploration of Carson’s classics for the non-classically trained reader in Chapter 3. With regard to Float, one can recall the Stesichorean ethos, or instead join dotted lines between

6

Introduction

Carson and the cultural history of the chapbook, or between her use of the chapbook form and the humble origins of the format as an inexpensive means of circulating the work of poets and other authors. Each logic of reading is equally valid in the ‘arbitrary’ business of plotting connections between different texts, people and/or cultural phenomena. It amounts to an aleatory poetics of reading in which ‘things fall together’ according to our reading habits, tastes and experiences.15 *

*

*

‘Here. Shake’ is a dictum which, in our view, applies equally to readers of Carson and her engagements with antiquity and modernity. It stands firmly enough in the twenty contributions that this book presents, which frustrates attempts to characterize our collective exercise solely in terms of Classical Reception, however much we continue to welcome a much-needed rethinking of its theoretical and methodological ambitions.16 Hence the rationale behind the title of this volume: ‘Anne Carson/ Antiquity’.17 The use of the slash ‘/’ bears closely in mind Carson’s own mode of interpreting literary and cultural interactions across space and time, a style of reading which, as she puts it, can end up putting Simonides in unexpected conversation with Celan or a piece of celery. The appeal to the slash, which here replaces the more typical insertion of the conjunction ‘and’ or the preposition ‘in’, invites readers to consider the study beyond the notions of ‘antiquity and Carson’, ‘antiquity in Carson’, or even ‘antiquity according to Carson’, a move that can reduce the classical content in the volume to a single vision, or Anne Carson as decisively and solely influenced by antiquity, something most unlike the author’s own practice of reading. Indeed, we prefer to leave the two categories deliberately separate, yet potentially open to a productive dialogue which can serve to illuminate aspects of Carson as well as of antiquity itself. From this perspective, the collection should not be viewed as a study of Carson’s classical receptions per se, but, rather, as an interdisciplinary exploration of antiquity and modernity (and vice versa) in Carson’s oeuvre. *

*

*

Carson’s aleatory encounters with antiquity likewise explain two central aspects of her classicism. One of these is the degree of relevance of antiquity from the modern viewpoint: I don’t feel much direct relevance of ancient things to modern things. It was the temper of the times, in the seventies and eighties when I was getting my degree and teaching, to claim that the project of being a classicist was to find relevance in antiquity and invent courses that convinced students you could learn everything you needed to know about modern life from studying the ancient Greeks. Well, that’s bizarre, to say the least. What’s entrancing about the Greeks is that you get little glimpses of similarity, embedded in unbelievable otherness, in this huge landscape of strange convictions about the world and reactions to life that make no sense at all.18

7

Anne Carson/ Antiquity

This statement raises the important question of how we use examples of antiquity in our present, and whether relevance in our own time should be the guiding value for studying the Classics in the twenty-first century. For Carson, the justification of using antiquity as a relevant model in our modern educational, cultural or even political world seems artificial, even nonsensical in the context of markedly different cultures and times. It is rather the ‘glimpses of similarity’ between the two which spark the unexpected subjects of her writings, as one finds, for instance, in her Antigonick (2012), Carson’s brilliantly playful translation of Sophocles’ Antigone: ‘How is a Greek chorus like a lawyer?’ ask the chorus, ‘They’re both in the business of searching for a precedent . . . so as to be able to say / this terrible thing we’re witnessing now is / not unique you know it happened before / or something much like it.’19 Such are the glimpses which emerge from a deliberately random mode of seeing similarities between an ancient tragic play and aspects of our modern life, like practising law or applying for research funding, as Zeus does in ‘Zeusbits’.20 The key is in the spark, not in the need to claim relevance. *

*

*

While, for Carson, the interplay of antiquity and modernity emerges in the form of glimpses of similarity which she plots from the edge, her position on classical languages, especially ancient Greek, takes a different direction. Here, the impact of antiquity on her modernity has to do with a sense of originality Carson finds in the Greek language, which she learned along with Latin in her final year of high school and perfected later at university and in postgraduate work.21 When asked what is intrinsic about Greek, her appeal is to the more traditional root/tree metaphor, a metaphor that emerges in tension with her aleatory perspectives: AC When you’re traveling around Greek words, you have a sense that you’re among the roots of meaning, not up in the branches [. . .] they’re older, they are original. I

Even though there are older languages?

AC [B]ut they are older in a continuous line [. . .] But as far as we can take any language back there is always a thing called Greek. And you can feel the sense of beginning from these people [like Sappho or Homer] who were stumbling around in the world saying, ‘The name for this is blank and it’s just the right name for it.’ [. . .] Sappho is the best example, in my experience, of that original thing coming into the world [. . .]. It’s like if you had a world of people who couldn’t see colour and that world were just a black and white TV to them. Then someone came into that world and clicked on colour.22 One could give Carson the benefit of a doubt and contend, at best, that the sense of origin portrayed here is not based on a linear model, by which all things we say and think, at least in languages which have derivations in Greek, have a root in ancient Greek. Arguably, by ‘original’, Carson could be taken to mean a sense of first experience at a time 8

Introduction

of radical change, whereby phenomena and human experience of all kinds come to a ‘click’, or to an acute revelation point, as when colour TV originates, in the sense of ‘is born’ out of our habit of seeing it in black and white. Yet, in my opinion, this take on the original power of ancient Greek emerges as an important contradiction in Carson’s thought and poetic praxis when it comes to her classicism: on the one hand, she emphasizes aleatoriness and non-relevance in her engagement with antiquity, and on the other, a simultaneous sense of the originary status of Greek and the Greeks (arguably not unconnected to the lesser role played by Latin works and the Romans in general in her oeuvre, despite Nox and some of the Short Talks). This book takes the opportunity to probe this sense of tension in Carson’s classical vision productively. In Chapter 16, Kay Gabriel explores a contradictory impulse in Carson’s classicism which Gabriel characterizes as a kind of ‘philosophical primitivism’ inspired by a philhellenism which Carson mediates via modernist aesthetics and continental philosophy. *

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My introduction to the theme of Anne Carson/ Antiquity has deliberately left a variety of angles on the topic untouched (not least due to matters of space and word-limit!), although I hope to have covered sufficient ground to prepare readers for the chapters that follow, in which they will be able to find more specific strands and substantiation of the ideas that I have presented here. The twenty chapters were commissioned specifically to cover a wide range of topics and perspectives from experts in different fields and practices. As can be seen in the list of Contents, I have not arranged the essays under separate rubrics, so as to allow readers to make multiple and organic connections between the material introduced and, potentially, invite new responses on the topic. Within this scheme, readers can nevertheless follow a rationale for the book’s organization. The volume features six interrelated thematic directions which revolve around discussions of (1) Carson’s academic and artistic profile as a classicist; (2) the character of her classical poetics and ethos; (3) the traditions and contexts of her classical thought; (4) her experiments with form, including paratextual materials; (5) her classical translation praxis; and (6) her creative dialogue with classically inspired visual and installation art. Within this scheme, chapters can also be explored in the following groups. Chapters 1–5 deal with questions relating to Carson’s poetics of reading and writing, such as her logics of narrative beginnings, which can be understood as being based on the notion of movement (Anna Jackson, Chapter 1), the Chimeric or hybrid nature of her work (Phoebe Giannisi, Chapter 2) and her artistic profile as a classicist and non-classicist (Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, Chapter 4 and Rebecca Kosick, Chapter 3, respectively). If viewed as a unit, these chapters offer a concerted mode of reading Anne Carson as a writer whose classicism cannot be pinned down to a single perspective but requires an open-ended framework of interpretation which bears in mind the ever-shifting character of her work. Chapters 6–9 can also be treated as a unit. They are concerned with the metaphors which occupy a central role in Carson’s thought: namely, her appeal to concepts such as the residual existing in gaps, fragmentation and lacunae (my own essay, 9

Anne Carson/ Antiquity

Chapter 6) and doublings and pairings as structural, strategic, poetic, philosophical and psychological features that govern her art (Elizabeth D. Harvey, Chapter 8). Within this unit, connections can also be made between chapters, for example Carson’s constant use of form, including paratextual features, as a means to articulate alternative modes of grasping textual and world phenomena (Paschalis Nikolaou, Chapter 9); and her appeal to fragments and lacunae to remediate a postwar aesthetics (Sean Gurd, Chapter 7). Chapter 10 by Yopie Prins and Chapter 11 by P. J. Finglass deal specifically with two key figures in Carson’s oeuvre: Sappho (Prins) and Stesichorus (Finglass). Although markedly different in focus and methodology (Prin’s discussion arises from her work on comparative poetics and lyric, while Finglass’s speaks from the perspective of a modern editor of Stesichorus), both chapters stress the integral part these ancient authors play in Carson’s artistic vision, strategies and ethos, while recognizing that this influence does not reduce her aesthetics to an exclusively classical mode of writing. Instead, the chapters draw attention to the sense of modernity brought to bear in Carson’s reading of these archaic lyric and myth writers. While myth emerges ubiquitously in the book, three essays concentrate more fully on the subject. They explore specific questions such as how the concepts of language, time and the possibilities and limits of representing experience play a key part in Carson’s ‘immersion’ in classical myth (Vanda Zajko, Chapter 13); how her revisionist translation of metis as a ‘mode of intelligence’ can reveal the activity of the writer as an exercise in metis itself ‘that liberates figures – usually women, but sometimes gay men – who are disempowered in other myths’ (Ian Rae, Chapter 12); and how Carson’s configuration of the bodies of Geryon and Hephaistos can be plotted as ‘cross-wired with her work on the abjection of the sexual body’ (Hannah Silverblank, Chapter 14). The essays also have points in common with question of gender, as discussed by Hannah Silverblank in Chapter 14, which explores the themes of sexual abjection and queerly organized bodies, with particular focus on Geryon and Hephaistos, in Autobiography of Red (1998), and its ‘sequel’, Red doc> (2013). The volume opens a deliberate space for essays of a critical tenor on different subjects in Carson’s oeuvre (15–16). Two chapters address points of tension at the heart of Carson’s thought: the ways in which the author could be seen to: (1) apply an ‘exapting’ strategy of interpretation to avoid, for instance, a ‘contemptuous reading of the Odyssey as epic of colonia’ (Ella Haselswerdt and Mathura Umachandran, Chapter 15); and (2) present spectacles of transfeminine gender configuration which betray a ‘philosophical primitivism’ of the American ‘philhellenist’ school (17). On the whole, the aim of these discussions is not to object to Carson’s thought per se, but to draw attention to her approach as a situated practice arising at a given point in the history of ideas and classically oriented creative practices. As with the other groupings in the volume, the reader will find discussions of translation of Greco-Roman texts passim, yet the final four essays can be grouped together as more specific explorations of translation poetics and practice in Carson (Chapters 17–20). In line with recent rethinking of translation theory, Chapter 17 by Susan Bassnett discusses the possibility of capturing Carson as a ‘transcreator’ rather 10

Introduction

than a translator, while Chapters 18 and 20 by Eugenia Nicolaci and Elena Theodorakopoulos, respectively, engage with Carson’s translations of Catullus as vehicles to explore absence and death (Chapter 18) and questions of time and gender that dominate both Catullus’ and Carson’s translation of the Roman poet (Chapter 20). Last but not least, Chapter 10 by Yopie Prins and Chapter 19 by Grace Zannoti concentrate on Carson’s less explored profile as a visual artist, as well as Carson’s responses to artistic productions in her own writings. Yopie Prins explores in essayistic manner an unpublished hand-painted mini-book by Carson (see Figures at the end of Prin’s essay), in which the author of Eros the Bittersweet and If not Winter: Fragments of Sappho invites the viewer to reflect on the irony instantiated within the ‘now then’ paradoxes at the heart of reading and translating Sappho. Grace Zanotti instead focuses on Pinplay, Carson’s creative translation of Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae (2012), an epically scaled, wall-hung collage inspired by Euripides (Figure 21). In this study, Carson’s translation of Euripides’ play via Hundley’s artwork is presented as a deliberate set of ‘catastrophes’ or ‘sudden turns’ in which Carson confounds the expectations of readers of Pinplay, as they attempt to plot familiar motifs in Euripides’ play such as retribution and justice. *

*

*

‘ANNE CARSON teaches at the University of Michigan [followed by a brief listing of works]’ reads Grief Lessons. Fours Plays. Euripides, 2006. ‘ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living’ reads the back cover of Euripides: Iphigenia amongst the Taurians, 2013 and the jacket of Red Doc>, 2013. All of Carson’s works, especially in their original English-language editions, offer similarly economic and understated bios, which speak powerfully to her desire for remaining private and offcentre when presenting her oeuvre to the reader. In this introduction, I would like to respect that sense of privacy, and will not attempt to plot aspects of her personal biography vis-à-vis her work. Yet perhaps more crucially, I have attempted to respect an authorial aesthetics in which the work speaks for the author and not the other way round. Readers of this book will find that Carson herself gives minor glimpses into her life within her oeuvre and, more reticently, in interviews. Readers can also consult brief biographies in various spaces, including entries in 15 Canadian Poets x 3 (2001) and the Poetry Foundation online, whose page is regularly updated. Most authoritative are the prefaces to interviews with Carson by John D’Agata (1997), Stephen Burt (2000) and Will Aitken (2004). I have opted instead to offer a more factual timeline of her publications to date (see the ‘Timeline’, p. xv), including her prizes and awards, the last two of which Carson received during the production of this book – the 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. It is highly reassuring to discover that the jury for both these prestigious awards recognize similar traits in Carson’s classicism found in this volume, including the notion that she is poikilos, ‘scintillat[ing] with change and ambiguity’ (PEN/Nabokov) and/or the way in which ‘[in her] study of the Greco-Latin world, [Carson] has built a body of innovative poetics in which the vitality of great classical 11

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thought acts as a map to invite the reader to elucidate the complexities of the current moment in time’ (Princess Asturias).

Notes 1. I would like to thank James Porter and Luke Roman for their comments and suggestions to improve this introductory piece. Warm thanks also to Lottie Brown for her proofreading and support. Finally, I am grateful to Ian Rae, who has helped me grasp multiple aspects of Carson’s biography, including those in the Montreal and New York scenes not easily found in accounts of the author’s career. 2. Balmer (2017). 3. Carson (2004: 221). 4. Carson (2004: 226). 5. D’Agata (2000). 6. Carson (1986: 30). 7. Aitken (2004: 205). 8. D’Agata (1997: 9). 9. Fisher (2015: 10–15). 10. Mullins (2003). 11. Carson (1999: viii). 12. McNeilly (2003: 14). 13. Aitken (2004: 207). 14. Carson (1998: 6–7). 15. Rahak (2000: 36–9). 16. Butler (2016) 17. Readers should bear in mind that, while the title on the book cover uses ‘/’ for Anne Carson/ Antiquity, the press has decided to facilitate online searchability by changing the ‘/’ to ‘:’ on the volume’s Bloomsbury webpage, i.e. Anne Carson: Antiquity. While I have found this change problematic when it comes to the very logic of reception presented in the volume, I accept the point made by the press. It is hoped that readers will take this detail into account when considering the project’s intellectual premises and goals. 18. Aitken (2004: 199). 19. Carson (2012: 33). 20. Carson (2016). 21. D’Agata (1997: 3). 22. D’Agata (1997: 7–8).

12

CHAPTER 1 THE BEGINNING OF NOW Anna Jackson

If you run backwards down the staircase of a day, can you make novelty grow? Or freeze desire? Anne Carson, 1986: 114 Anne Carson doesn’t begin with beginnings, either in Eros the Bittersweet or in Economy of the Unlost. Both begin with a preface about thought as movement. Eros the Bittersweet begins with an account of Kafka’s story ‘The Top’, about a philosopher spending his time around children so he can grab their spinning tops: ‘The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love,’ Carson explains, ‘Beauty spins and the mind moves.’1 Economy of the Unlost begins with a preface written on a train: ‘We flash past towers and factories, stations, yards, then a field where a herd of black horses is just turning to race uphill.’2 Explaining the organizing principle of Economy of the Unlost, Carson emphasizes again the importance of movement in maintaining attention: ‘To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling. Partly for this reason I have chosen to talk about two men at once. They keep each other from settling.’3 Whether bringing together twentieth-century writer Paul Celan and the ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos or introducing a study of Sappho’s word glukupikron with a story from Kafka and going on to talk about eros and the bittersweet with reference to Tolstoy, Aristophanes, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Velazquez and other writers and theorists from antiquity through to the present, Carson keeps ideas always on the move. This seems a very different project from the classical philologist’s project to ‘roll back the years and reveal to us the original in all its gleaming, pristine purity’, as Charles Martindale puts it to emphasize the absurdity of such an enterprise, as if the original were ever ‘pristine’, outside of history and free of competing interpretations. For a reception theorist like Martindale, concepts are always multivalent, and changes in meaning and interpretation across time are what keep a text alive.4 Yet Eros the Bittersweet does begin with philology, and both Eros the Bittersweet and Economy of the Unlost share a focus on beginnings. Carson is fascinated with Simonides as ‘the first to professionalize poetry’5 at the time when coinage was first beginning to circulate; this is the beginning of the commodification that, she writes, ‘marks a radical moment in the history of human culture’.6 Sappho’s lyric poetry arises from an even earlier intervention in the history of human culture, the alphabetization of the Greek language which allowed poetry to be not only heard but read, involving an entirely new form of attention, making the reader newly ‘aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action’.7 These are the radical beginnings of states 13

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that have persisted: Carson returns us to the point at which what has become so known as to be invisible was so new as to be pristine and gleaming.

now – then Bittersweet is the title of the first chapter of Eros the Bittersweet, and the question which opens the chapter opens up the multifaceted exploration of desire that it takes the whole book to follow through. The question is one Carson had asked before, in almost the exact same words, in the abstract for her 1981 doctoral thesis, Odi et Amo Ergo Sum, from which much of the material of Eros the Bittersweet is drawn: ‘It was Sappho who first called eros “bittersweet”. No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?’8 There is a curious sleight of hand here, in Carson’s assurance that ‘No one who has been in love disputes her.’ The claim that the original readers of this remark, the examiners of a thesis, might have been expected to dispute is the claim that Sappho was the first to call eros ‘bittersweet’, not the nature of love itself. It is so brazen a sleight of hand it is hardly a sleight at all, as if a stage magician were to startle the audience by performing real magic in place of the expected card trick. No one who has been in love is likely to object to this shift in attention. The whole book is constructed around shifts of attention, with thirty-four short chapters offering first one take then another on the question, looking at Eros from thirty-four different perspectives, seeing it now in terms of lack, now division, now yearning, now translation, now time, now space. The question itself is kept in motion, spinning like the philosopher’s spinning tops in the preface. The movement is sustained across chapters that look backwards and reach ahead: they end with questions – the first chapter ends ‘Why?’;9 invitations – the chapter ‘A Novel Sense’ ends ‘Let us see what we can read from the ruses of the novelists about the blind point and its desirability’;10 promises – ‘Alphabetic Edge’ ends ‘The fact that eros operates by means of an analogous act of imagination will soon be seen to be the most astounding thing about eros.’11 The chapter ‘Midas’ ends with a riddling reference to unnamed creatures who appear in the Midas dialogue, ‘and who share Midas’ dilemma in its main outlines as well as in its attitude to want’,12 and the following chapter gives us the answer to the riddle in its title, ‘Cicadas’.13 A word that plays one role, concluding a thought followed through in one chapter, will be picked up again to play a starring role in the next chapter: ‘Tactics’ ends by concluding, ‘Odi et amo intersect; there is the core and symbol of eros, in the space across which desire reaches’;14 the next chapter takes the idea of ‘The Reach’ as its title, and picks up the word ‘space’ too as it begins, ‘A space must be maintained or desire ends.’15 Anyone who has been in love will welcome the space held open in and between chapters for such sustained attention to the paradoxical, bittersweet nature of desire. A paradox by its nature cannot be resolved, only reached beyond, as a way of staying with the riddle of it. The problem of experiencing love as both sweet and bitter has been worried away at, generating fiction and philosophy, for centuries; it is a paradox, as 14

The Beginning of Now

Carson admits in her first chapter, ‘that is almost a cliché for the modern literary imagination’. Here she gives the example of Anna Karenina whispering to herself, ‘and hate begins where love leaves off ’.16 Several chapters later, Carson turns again to Anna Karenina in approaching the question of desire from another angle, asking now what the lover wants from love. Anna’s passion for Vronsky is such that when she sees him after an absence, she must study his face, ‘comparing the image of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, and impossible in reality) with him as he was’.17 What the lover wants is to fantasize. Carson quotes the comparison made by Stendhal of such fantasizing to the crystallization that occurs in a salt mine: Leave a lover with his thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen: At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable.18 It is tempting to take this as a metaphor for the work Carson does in Eros the Bittersweet when she moves from Sappho’s use of the term glukupikron to the bittersweetness of Anna Karenina’s love for Vronsky, along with all the other examples she brings to the study of this word from so many centuries between then and now. There is a gleam to this accretion of ideas and imagery at least as scintillating as the purity Martindale’s imaginary philologist seeks to uncover. It could equally read as a metaphor for the way readers may be reading Eros the Bittersweet, layering their reading with their own associations, recalling other texts as well as their own experiences of desire. The paradox of bittersweet desire is not new. But perhaps it was once. It is to this moment of novelty that Carson keeps returning. Sappho’s coinage, glukupikron, bittersweet, is known to us because she used it in a fragment of lyric poetry: Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up.19 Her lyric poetry, like all the lyric poetry we have from this era, is preserved because it was written. Writing, in turn, was possible only because of a radically new technology, the alphabet. This is the era from which date the earliest written versions of poetry from an earlier oral culture. And this is the era from which date the first written versions of lyric poetry, the kind of poetry Sappho was writing when she coined the word glukupikron. Is it possible that the act of writing itself doesn’t simply allow the emotions of lyric poetry to be recorded, but allows lyric poetry to be composed at all? Is it possible that the act of writing doesn’t simply allow lyric poetry to be composed for the first time, but gives rise to the very emotions of lyric poetry themselves? In the literature of this era, we find evidence ‘of a sensibility acutely tuned to the vulnerability of the physical body and of the emotions or spirit within it’.20 Carson is less interested in establishing the truth of a causal 15

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relationship between the invention of the alphabet and this lyric sensibility than in exploring the implications of it, the ways it allows us to imagine a moment in time in which the limb-loosening desire that undoes us still might first have been felt the way we feel it now. Again and again, in these lyrics of limb-loosening desire she finds the word ‘deūte’, a word that, she explains, has a stereoscopic effect, bringing together two different vantage points on time: the particle dē signifying the immediate present – now! – and the adverb aute signifying repetition, ‘again, once again, over again’ as Carson puts it.21 Written literature itself, she points out, creates just such a paradoxical relationship between the present moment and the possibility of repetition, transience and permanence: When you read or write you seem to achieve that control which the lover craves: a vantage point from which the dilemmas of ‘now’ and ‘then’ may be viewed with detachment. When desire is the subject of a text you are reading, you can open it anywhere and end when you like. If Eros is something written on a page, you can close the book and be shut of him. Or go back and reread the words again and again. A piece of ice melts forever there.22 The piece of ice melting forever in this paragraph is one we have encountered already in the previous chapter, ‘Ice-pleasure’ – it appears again, here, as a repetition. Here we encounter it from the vantage point of detachment, the reader who is positioned outside of time. Our first encounter with the ice was more painful. The lover’s desire to ‘bring the absent into presence’ and to ‘foreclose then upon now’,23 unlike the reader’s desire, can never be realized. The chapter in which we first encounter the ice, ‘Ice-pleasure’ (though it could equally have been titled ‘Ice-pain’), begins with this problem of longing for a future ‘then’ when you have your desire. If this moment when ‘ “then” supervenes upon “now” ’ is the very moment of loss, when ‘the bittersweet moment, which is your desire, will be gone’, how can you want this? ‘And yet,’ as Carson writes, ‘you do.’ She finds an illustration of this yearning for what you cannot grasp in a fragment from a play by Sophocles: This disease is an evil bound upon the day. Here’s a comparison – not bad, think: when ice gleams in the open air, children grab. Ice-crystal in the hands is at first a pleasure quite novel. But there comes a point – you can’t put the melting mass down, you can’t keep holding it. Desire is like that. Pulling the lover to act and not to act, again and again, pulling.24 16

The Beginning of Now

The poem begins with the problem of transience – ‘an evil bound upon the day’ – but at the heart of the poem is the pleasure taken in ice, and the pleasure comes from ice as a novelty. In this poem, novelty and transience are in opposition, the pleasure of novelty a pleasure that by its nature cannot last. It is novelty that makes a pleasure out of what, Carson points out, would be the ‘acutely painful’ experience of holding on to ice, able neither to keep holding it nor to put it down. Just as the pain of holding the ice isn’t directly mentioned, neither is the desirability of desire, presented from the first line as ‘evil’ and a ‘disease’. ‘The absence of these predictable attributes of ice and of desire surprises you, like a missing step,’ Carson comments, ‘but you climb on through the poem anyway. And suddenly you find yourself on a staircase rendered by Escher or Piranesi. It goes in two places at once and you seem to be standing in both of them.’25 This circular staircase she conjures up here reflects the ring composition of the poem, in which the desire which is the subject of the comparison encloses the image of the ice it is compared to, the last two lines of the poem returning to the subject of desire. Desire, Carson elaborates, ‘forms a ring around the small universe of its victims: the poet who strives to represent it, the children fascinated by its analogue, the lover pinned in its compulsion’.26 But the staircase continues to spiral, and Carson continues to find further movement in the poem, as the desire as transience which begins the poem gives way to desire as repetition by the poem’s close – ‘So time forms a ring around desire.’ The ice at the heart of the poem is seen ‘as you peer down through concentric circles of time’.27 If this is something of an optical illusion Carson is presenting here, it is one she has set up through writing criticism like a poet, the ‘missing step’ of the attributes she expected the poem to supply suggesting the ‘staircase’ she continues to climb and then to peer down from, into the staircase’s own abyss. Melting itself was not a new image for desire, as Carson explains. But the lover would ordinarily melt like wax, or like honey – it was ordinarily an image of heat, not of ice. The image itself in this poem is a novelty, and the reader’s association of Eros with heat as they take in, simultaneously, this novel ice image ‘pulls your mind into vertigo’.28 It is a vertigo that brings you ‘back to the problem of time’. If time ‘encircles desire in this poem’, the melting ice becomes ‘an image of the way desire rotates within time’. There is movement within movement within movement in Carson’s reading of this poem. The question asked halfway through the chapter, can you freeze desire, has become, by the end of the chapter, can you want to freeze desire? ‘You cannot want that,’ Carson states, ‘and yet you do.’29 This is what leads on to the discussion of the alphabet as the technology that allows the lyric poem to step outside time, for the reader to step into that vantage point ‘from which the dilemmas of “now” and “then” can be viewed with detachment’.30 To read like a poet, as well as to write like a poet, gives Carson this vantage point even when reading what she initially presents as a fragment from a drama. From the moment she has finished quoting the ice-pleasure fragment, she never again refers to the context of the satyr play from which it came, but calls it ‘the poem’. A drama is a series of actions, leading to a resolution; a lyric poem presents a moment that is always both now and outside of time. To see how this removal from time allows the movement of time within the poem itself to be seen, we can turn now to the second book of classical scholarship Carson wrote, Economy of the Unlost. 17

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The stereoscopic moment Simonides was writing in the fifth century bce, about a hundred years after Sappho. In Economy of the Unlost, Simonides is introduced after the poet Paul Celan, whose poem ‘Matiere de Bretagne’ tells the story of ‘the bloodsail’ from the story of Tristan and Isolt. Tristan had arranged a signal to tell him before the ship reached shore whether or not Isolt would be brought back to him, alive, on board: a white sail to signal success, a black sail to signal catastrophe. When Carson turns to writing of Simonides, it is to answer the question raised by the Celan poem: why does Celan describe as a ‘bloodsail’ a sail that should be black? Simonides is introduced as the author of ‘our oldest literary example of the trope of the false sail’.31 To be the oldest literary example is to be the first, even though to frame a beginning in terms of oldness presents it very differently. But the oldest literary example already looks back to earlier origins: ‘the false sail was already an old story by Simonides’ time, part of the myth of Theseus, of which other versions existed’.32 When Simonides calls a sail ‘not white but a red sail’, he is already writing in defiance of tradition. In Carson’s reading of the two poems side by side, it is easy to miss that it is the true sail, not the false sail, Simonides is calling red, ‘dyed with the wet blower of the blooming holm-oak’. What matters is the ‘rich proposition’ the false sail represents: ‘white, black, red, lying, lied about, forgotten, fatal’,33 all of these narrative elements will be kept in motion throughout the book. Simonides was not the first to write of the false sail. But Carson does place him at the intersection of four essential moments of beginning. The ‘stinginess’ he was famous for she reads in terms of his early professionalization of poetry, at a time when one economic system, the archaic gift economy, was giving way to the newer economy based on the circulation of coins. Simonides is equally famous for his invention (still cited today in recent books on memory) of the ‘memory palace’, the method of attaching memories to locations in a room, after his ability to reconstruct the sitting arrangements of the feast of Skopas when the house collapsed, burying all the guests within its ruins. Only Simonides, who had left the house minutes earlier, survived. This power of memory, which ‘brings the absent into the present, connects what is lost to what is here’, was important to Simonides in his role as a (paid) composer of epitaphs. Monuments to the dead were, of course, not new, but the written inscription of epitaphs dates back only to the seventh century bce, and, Carson writes, ‘not until the lifetime of Simonides of Keos did the inscription fall into the hands of a master poet and become a major art form’.34 He was writing, too, at a time when ‘no thinking man could ignore what was going on in painting’.35 As Carson summarizes these new developments, ‘the invention of techniques like foreshortening, linear perspective, mixing and gradation of colors, superposition of paints and patching of surfaces, as well as all various kinds of proportional adjustments for optical illusion, transformed flat surface into an illusory world of objects moving in space’.36 What are the connections between these apparently unrelated things? Carson finds them by turning away from Simonides to look at what Paul Celan was writing two and a half thousand years later. A Romanian Jew, living in France, writing in German – the 18

The Beginning of Now

language, Carson observes, both of Celan’s mother and of the Nazis who murdered his mother – Celan writes of what he calls the ‘unlost’, pulling words together in new coinages in order to hold together contradictions, to ‘split the No not from Yes’,37 as he writes in one poem. Celan’s elliptical, complex, riddling poetry offers new ways of approaching the relation between absence and presence, the dead and the alive, time’s progress and time’s disjunctions, loss and gratuity, thinking and thanking – all essential to the understanding of the work of Simonides. Whereas Eros the Bittersweet was structured as a progression of swiftly developed ideas, kept constantly spinning, Simonides the Unlost is structured according to a principle even more central to Carson’s understanding of desire, the stereoscopic vision. This stereoscopic vision is introduced early in Eros the Bittersweet and returned to often. The first illustration Carson gives to demonstrate how the splitting of the self that desire brings about can bring about, too, the triangulation that allows desire to act as a verb, that figures desire as movement, is Sappho’s fragment 31. ‘The man sits like a god, the poet almost dies: two poles of response within the same desiring mind,’ as Carson summarizes the poem, and it is this stereoscopy that brings about movement: For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components – lover, beloved and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros.38 A more succinct exposition of the relationship between the doubling of self and the triangulation of desire can be found in the version of Sappho 31 by New Zealand poet Janet Charman, a version in which all the expression of physical sensation is removed to leave the geometry of desire in stark relief: After Sappho love him if you will he looks like me.39 The doubled doubling of self and other – does he resemble me, or does he look at you like I do? – allows the movement of your love to be both willed and conditional, the place of both agency and contingency we might expect to be taken by the lyric speaker. Ending with the word ‘me’, the poem enacts the disappearance of self that in Sappho’s poem takes place on stage (like Hamlet’s long dying). From tercet to couplet to the disappearing subject, the poem enacts the blind spot of stereoscopy that radiates throughout Carson’s analysis of desire in Eros the Bittersweet. 19

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The reader, of course, is the ultimate blind spot, ‘typically and repeatedly drawn into a conflicted emotional response which approximates that of the lover’s soul divided by desire’.40 If the lyric is constructed around this moment of stereoscopy, the novel’s structure allows it to sustain the lyric stereoscopy, permitting the reader ‘to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire’.41 This reach is also the reach of scholarship, which calls on stereoscopy to cross the ‘space between known and unknown’. This stereoscopic space, Carson observes, ‘is an erotic space’.42 Two pages before the end of the book, we can see Carson has reached an understanding of the question she posed to herself one hundred pages earlier: ‘I would like to grasp why it is,’ she wrote then, ‘that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is an electrification in them.’43 It is an electrification shared by the reader of Carson’s works of scholarship, which allow the reader to share Carson’s position in relation to antiquity. Antiquity, then, becomes the third term in the triangle, holding reader and writer electrifyingly together and apart. *

*

*

The many ways that writing holds reader and writer together and apart are explored throughout Eros the Bittersweet, and are explored from a new set of angles in Simonides the Unlost. We can see this reorientation in the way the word ‘then’ turns 180 degrees in relation to the word ‘now’. In Eros the Bittersweet, the lover looks ahead, always waiting, to reach a then always in the future – ‘a desire to foreclose then upon now’, in Carson’s words. The concern of Simonides, in contrast, is to restore a then now lost in the past – the epitaph, for instance, making an inscribed event out of the role of the monument ‘to insert a dead and vanished past into the living present’.44 Simonides has been described as a particularly painterly poet, and Carson calls attention to the high proportion of words for colour in his poetry as one piece of evidence.45 He himself described paintings as silent poems, poems as paintings that talk.46 The new advances in painterly realism were met with some suspicion, as the absent was rendered present, the two-dimensional transformed into an illusionary representation of the real world. Simonides drew on the art of painting in more than its visual aspects. As Carson writes of his artistry composing epitaphs, in a section of the book titled ‘Motion’, he was a poet who gave ‘considerable thought to the space of memory and to how words furnish it’, understanding ‘that to make a mental space memorable, you put into it movement, light and unexpectedness’.47 All of these qualities can be found in the example Carson gives us of a poem in which, she writes, ‘Simonides shows us memory as an event pulled out of darkness by language’: Asbestos glory these men set around their dear fatherland and in a dark blue death cloud they wrapped themselves. Not dead having died. Because virtue down from above keeps pulling them up glorying out of Hades’ house.48 Carson glosses the poem with questions: ‘What is burning? Apparently not that which has been set on fire. Who is dead? Apparently not those who have died.’49 The poet places 20

The Beginning of Now

the reader in a position of disorientation, ‘spatial, aural and temporal as well as cognitive’, giving the reader, Carson suggests, ‘the sense that he is staring down into a tomb’.50 The position she sees the reader taking up is not unlike the position that, in Eros the Bittersweet, she described the reader taking in relation to the ice-pleasure fragment: As he looks down from above at the doorway of death, he is expecting to see darkness. Instead there is a passageway out of which very bright living beings are rising and keep rising up into the moment of his own reading.51 It is a spiralling motion represented as Carson observes by the changes in verb tenses, from the past to the present tense of ‘keeps pulling’, like, Carson writes, ‘a slow leak of immortality’.52 When Plato objected to paintings on the grounds that ‘[t]hey create phantasms not reality’,53 his objection was to the apparent realism painters were achieving. The problem with realist representation was its ‘investment in the visible surface of the world as reality and a tendency to disavow the reality of anything not visible’.54 Simonides in contrast again and again writes of the unknown, the immortal, the invisible, the past and the future. His relatively high use of colour words is matched only by the number of negations in his writing. ‘Nothing is not painful among men,’ he writes. To describe a weeping woman, he observes ‘her cheeks not unwet by tears’. To describe a sound that spreads far and wide, ‘No leaf-shaking blast of wind arose that would have prevented the sound from spreading far and wide.’55 The effect is, as Carson observes, to fill his writing with counterfactuals, winds that didn’t arise, tears that weren’t wept, imagined alternatives that ‘come to rival the reality that is present and actual’.56 As Carson points out, negation offers good value for money if you are paying by the word, bringing into the poem the disavowed as well as its opposite, the No split not from the Yes, in Celan’s terms. Whereas Simonides expresses his negative orientation towards reality through circumlocution, Celan expresses the same orientation through coinages. The word ‘unlost’ of the book’s title might look like a translation from the Greek aiming to reconstruct the strangeness of what was once a new concept, like Sappho’s glukupikron, usually translated as bittersweet, taken back to its original form as sweetbitter in Carson’s translation. But ‘unlost’ is just one of many such coinages of Celan’s, coinages which, as Carson writes, ‘[evoke] something that now suddenly seems real, although it didn’t exist before and is attainable through this word alone. It comes to us free, like a piece of new air.’57 Of Carson’s two early books of classical scholarship, it is Economy of the Unlost which looks to economic concepts to explain the workings of literature. But it is Eros the Bittersweet that best accounts for the cost of what in Economy of the Unlost is counted as free air. Money and romance are generally regarded as opposites, but the alienation that a money-based economic system produced reads, in Carson’s account of Marxist theory, not unlike the alienation she has shown in Eros the Bittersweet to make desire possible. The invention of coinage was not only a radically new invention in itself. It was an invention that disrupted the conservative equilibrium of the gift economy, replacing a system of exchange with a system of circulation. Most of Eros the Bittersweet is taken up 21

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with the analysis of the costs of the disruption and disequilibrium introduced with desire. To put it most bluntly, ‘As soon as eros enters his life, the lover is lost, for he goes mad.’58 You cannot want this, and yet you do. Socrates counts the resisting of love a ‘deadly stinginess’. As Carson puts it: There is no risk involved in his transaction with eros because he does not invest in the single moment that is open to risk, the moment when desire begins, ‘now.’ ‘Now’ is the moment when change erupts.59 This change is a cost, but a cost that is worth everything. To point to its value, Carson once again gives us an image of a mine. Once again, she places the reader in a position of vertigo, looking into a shaft: Beginnings are crucial [. . .] The ‘now’ of desire is a shaft sunk into time and emerging onto timelessness, where the gods float, rejoicing in reality [. . .] Sokrates looks at the paradoxical moment called ‘now’ and notices a curious movement taking place there.60 We might picture this movement, perhaps, as a sailing ship. It sails between now and now. Carson takes us back to the beginnings of ideas that have become so familiar, so institutionalized, they no longer act on us as ideas at all. Yet the radical changes set in motion by the invention of coinage, the professionalization of poetry, the coinage of a word bittersweet, or sweetbitter, new developments in the art of painting, the ideas of Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Montaigne, are all a part of what makes the ‘now’ we are living in the now that it is. The work of the classicist, and of the scholar of classical reception, is not to set in motion a ship that is already sailing. Our attention must be on the sail we are flying, to make sure we are correctly signalling the life on board, as it is carried towards a shore that is always on the move. This essay itself might be seen as one such moving shore. For instance, Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer (2011).

Notes 1. Carson (1986: ix). 2. Carson (1999: viii). 3. Carson (1999: viii). 4. Martindale (1993: 4). 5. Carson (1986: 16). 6. Carson (1986: 17). 7. Carson (1986: 44). 8. Carson (1981: 3). 9. Carson (1986: 9).

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The Beginning of Now 10. Carson (1986: 82). 11. Carson (1986: 61). 12. Carson (1986: 137). 13. Carson (1986: 138). 14. Carson (1986: 25). 15. Carson (1986: 26). 16. Carson (1986: 4). 17. Carson (1986: 65). 18. Carson (1986: 64). 19. Carson (1986: 3) 20. Carson (1986: 41). 21. Carson (1986: 118). 22. Carson (1986: 121). 23. Carson (1986: 111). 24. Carson (1986: 112). 25. Carson (1986: 113). 26. Carson (1986: 113). 27. Carson (1986: 113). 28. Carson (1986: 116). 29. Carson (1986: 116). 30. Carson (1986: 121). 31. Carson (1999: 7). 32. Carson (1999: 7). 33. Carson (1999: 8). 34. Carson (1999: 73). 35. Carson (1999: 47). 36. Carson (1999: 47). 37. Carson (1999: 109). 38. Carson (1986: 16). 39. Charman (1999: 62). 40. Carson (1986: 85). 41. Carson (1986: 85). 42. Carson (1986: 171). 43. Carson (1986: 70). 44. Carson (1999: 73). 45. Carson (1999: 46). 46. Carson (1999: 46). 47. Carson (1999: 83). 48. Carson (1999: 85).

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Anne Carson/ Antiquity 49. Carson (1999: 85). 50. Carson (1999: 86). 51. Carson (1999: 86). 52. Carson (1999: 86). 53. Carson (1999: 48). 54. Carson (1999: 50). 55. Carson (1999: 101). 56. Carson (1999: 101). 57. Carson (1999: 134). 58. Carson (1986: 149). 59. Carson (1986: 150). 60. Carson (1986: 157–8).

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CHAPTER 2 CHIMERAS: EMPTY SPACE AND MELTING BORDERS Phoebe Giannisi

a dizzying spectrum of forms – prose poem, mock interview, travel journal, academic essay. Anne Carson, 1995 Chimera; a tripartite animal, with the face of a lion, the torso of a chimera and the back of a dragon. Hesychius, Lexicon (Π—Ω) Microchimerism is the presence of a small number of cells that originate from another individual and are therefore genetically distinct from the cells of the host individual. Wikipedia [W]e are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation [. . .] This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. Donna Haraway, 1991: 149–81, 150

Preamble Can poetic writing be combined with essay form? What is the significance of genre, what does it consist of, and can it be replaced by other forms or be open to mixture? Finally, should one intentionally signal for the reader the thing one loves, or allow it to disappear in the work? While Anne Carson starts from the point of keeping her two main identities, a classic scholar and a poet, in different realms (Eros Bittersweet is clearly a scholarly essay), she proceeds in quick strides to mix philology and poetry and goes on implacably to do the same with other genres and media as well. Admixture operates nowadays in her work as a liberating example of poetics and, as such, it merits discussion: a discussion that will open questions about identity, genre and genus, creative processes and power strategies, freedom, feminism, memory and symbiosis. 25

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Chimera I: definition chimera (also chimaera) noun 1 (Chimera) (in Greek mythology) a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. ● any mythical animal with parts taken from various animals. 2 a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve: the economic sovereignty you claim to defend is a chimera. 3 Biology an organism containing a mixture of genetically different tissues, formed by processes such as fusion of early embryos, grafting, or mutation: the sheeplike goat chimera. ● a DNA molecule with sequences derived from two or more different organisms, formed by laboratory manipulation. 4 (usually chimaera) a cartilaginous marine fish with a long tail, an erect spine before the first dorsal fin, and typically a forward projection from the snout. lexical entry, Oxford English Dictionary

Chimera II: self Call me Chimera. Female goat. A being composed of other beings. A being with different genetic codes incorporated. Various genes connected in one body. Multiple body. Members differing in genus. Members added on. Members growing inside the same member – can one discern their beginning or end? – splinter members like offshoots. I, standing on four legs horizontal not upright a multitude of beings melting into one another the joints invisible. Giannisi, unpublished poem 26

Chimeras: Empty Space and Melting Borders

Chimera III: books Making a poem is making an object. I always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language. It was another way to think of a book, an object that is as visually real as it is textually real. Wachtel, 2016 In this short quote, Carson explicitly enlarges her view of the poem as a visual object throughout the whole object of the book. She asserts that she composes her books as textual objects. Co(m)-poses, in the sense that she constructs by placing together: though what is included in a book is an important matter to do with its architecture, the more usual practice is for poetic books to be no more than a mere accumulation of poems that have been placed in a particular order. By contrast, in Carson, the book’s architecture can be viewed through the point of view of choice, co-presence, inclusion, the symbiosis of different genres. How are the included texts arrayed as the reader flicks through the book from beginning to end? I begin with a descriptive exposition, a list of contents of four of Carson’s representative books. In the Autobiography of Red (1998) prose coexists with poetry and the literary essay with narrative in verse (epic as she designates it). Taking the book from the beginning, we come across an introductory essay on the work of Stesichorus, followed by the extant fragments of his Geryon epic in a free translation by Carson, three different Appendices again to do with Stesichorus, the first Appendix comprising testimonia about his palinode, the second the translation of the palinode itself (fragment 192 PMG); and the third, an articulated argument on the palinode in the form of a rational treatise in twenty-one points. The main part of the book follows with a whole narrative poem in sections, each one a page long. The book closes with a fictional interview with the ancient poet. The book is thus tripartite: its beginning is its origin, that is, an introduction to the work of Stesichorus, with two voices, Carson’s and that of Stesichorus in translation; the main part is the rendition of Stesichorus by Carson; and the ending is the interview with the poet, again in two voices and operating as ironic reference to the rest of the work. In Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2006), already in the title Carson mentions the genres contained in the book: Poetry, Essays, Opera. Running through its body, we have in succession thirteen works in prose and in verse: a series of poems (‘Stops’) referring to her mother’s passing; an essay on sleep in literature (primarily in Homer, Plato and Virginia Wolf) titled ‘Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)’, ending in a one-page-long poem, ‘Ode to Sleep’; an essay called ‘Foam (Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime and Longinus and Antonioni’; a series of poems, mostly essayistic with some lyrical ones, on the previous subject, called ‘Sublimes’ (about Longinus, Antonioni, Monica Vitti); a series of poems called ‘Gnosticisms’, with references to other poets; an essay in verse on a work by visual artist Betty Goodman, whose image precedes the essay; an oratorio for five voices which had been composed as a contribution to ‘A Tribute to Gertrud Stein’; a poetic essay (not in verse) on Becket’s work, Quad I and II; a screenplay on Abelard and Eloise; a 27

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short essay on the Eclipse (Antonioni’s and in general); and two large sections on ‘DE creation’, the first an essay on Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil, the second an opera, again with the same title, whose characters include, among others, Porete and Veil. In Nox (2010) the structure is different. The book is in the shape of a harmonica scroll inside a box. The casing bears inside one object rather than many. Its shape, texture and colour are reminiscent of stone, a burial stone in this case, as this is a funeral speech for her brother and the book self-designates as an epitaph. Inside the book, the scroll is made up of a left and a right page, running in parallel. The overall book’s composition consists of the reproduction of collages of images and text, clearly hand-made in their original form. On the left page, the flow begins with the entire ‘Poem 101’ by Catullus on the death of his brother and his visit to his grave. Next, on every left page, appear one by one, in the same order as in the poem, dictionary entries on the poem’s words, though modified by Carson. The lexical scraps of the dictionary are reformed, in order to be included in the book. In the book that unfurls on the right side, there are parts of text, often taken from the images, or word descriptions of aspects of the images. These are documents from the life of the lost brother, letters and old photographs, either in their entirety or torn up, transformed into fragments of poetry or poems of a few verses, poems often made of one single sentence. Sometimes these images of text fragments occupy the full double-page, interrupting the flow of the left page. Finally, Float (2016) is a collection of twenty-three chapbooks gathered in a transparent case. The chapbooks each separately range from essayistic poetry and meta-poetry to lists and plays, and ‘float’ in the space of the box, as readers choose their own order of reading.

Chimera IV: assemblage In these four examples, Carson engages in a series of actions that are radical for literary studies as well as poetry. The first action is that of connecting disciplinary areas but also media and genres. Enumerating the disciplinary areas, one will come up with classical philology, esthetics, comparative literature, critical studies, cinema theory, poetry, philosophy. Enumerating the media, there is poetry, opera, theatre, film scenario, essay (as they are listed in the title of Decreation). As for the poetic genres, how do we distinguish the lyrical genre from the philosophical, the reflective poem from the autobiographical or the meta-poetic and is it possible for a poetry to exist which is also philology? To return to the issue of the book, we may recognize in Carson’s books a process of construction in progress, a road which the poet paves as she travels through it. Throughout her career, Carson encompasses a poetic assemblage in the original sense of the French word agencement used by Deleuze and Guattari: ‘According to Le Robert Collins dictionary, the French word agencement comes from the verb agencer, “to arrange, to lay out, to piece together”.’ The noun agencement thus means ‘a construction, an arrangement, or a layout’.1 The use of the term agencement has, according to Nail, a basic philosophical implication. The general logic of assemblages, 28

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[. . .] provides an alternative logic to that of unities. [. . .] In contrast to organic unities, for Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages are more like machines, defined solely by their external relations of composition, mixture, and aggregation. In other words, an assemblage is a multiplicity, neither a part nor a whole. [. . .] This is what Deleuze and Guattari paradoxically call a ‘fragmentary whole’.2 Thus, as Deleuze says, ‘in a multiplicity, what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what is “between” them, the in-between, a set of relations that are inseparable from each other’. The assemblage constructs or lays out a set of relations between self-subsisting fragments – what Deleuze calls ‘singularities’. ‘An assemblage does not have an essence because it has no eternally necessary defining features, only contingent and singular features.’3 According to Deleuze and Guattari, agencement is a process that creates a series of relations between the ‘self-subsisting singularities’ which the fragments are. In the books of Carson that we have looked at so far, the relationships leading to symbiosis are varied, just as the singularities vary amongst themselves. I would designate the relationships in question as practices of composition or aggregation: in Carson’s work it is possible to identify practices such as collation (Decreation), admixture and unfolding (Nox), juxtaposition (Autobiography of Red) and disjunction (Float).

Chimera V: mechanisms in epic, formula and simile Meter, essentially, is an attempt to control words in time. Carson, 1986: 162 The device for connecting different sections or fragments through an external mechanistic logic may well be the logic of the ancient Greek metre and rhythm. Indeed, metre keeps the world of epic in place. According to Milmann’s and Parry’s theory of the oral origin of the epic, it is the metre, the dactylic hexameter, the repetition of the stable phenotype of a linguistic rhythm that creates and secures the words’ position in the flow of the poem. The improvising poet must adhere to the metre’s discipline which is, at the same time, a mnemonic device for locating speech. Watch someone singing hip-hop: the word material is determined by the rhythm of the utterance and is shaped by it, like a river defined by the shores of its banks. This mechanism, one could say, is not related to the content it carries, but operates no matter what one puts in it, provided this is done according to the rules, as was previously described with assemblage. Yet, what is the inside of speech? We might say it is the meaning of words, what goes beyond the physical characteristics of their sound. Incidentally this view is most certainly not that of Aristotle. In his discussion of metre in Poetics (1459b–1460a), Aristotle speaks of mimesis, asking about the different metres appropriate to different mimeses, to different speech contents. The metre is a form that somehow corresponds to content, not a mechanism exterior to meaning. 29

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In epic, according to the theory of an oral poetic tradition, stable word configurations which follow the dactylic hexameter are formed and pre-exist so that they can be used as needed. According to Parry, the formula is ‘a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’.4 The minimal unit is a noun and the adjective that permanently attaches to it. In the context of the Homeric formula, Carson in Autobiography of Red (but also in The Albertine Workout)5 has this to say about the adjective: What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epi-theton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning ‘placed on top’, ‘added’, ‘appended’, ‘imported’, ‘foreign.’ Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being. [. . .] Homer’s epithets are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumptions. [. . .] For no reason that anyone can name, Stesichorus began to undo the latches. Stesichorus released being. All the substances in the world went floating up.’6 One can take these ideas as the key to the mechanism Carson herself constructs in her books: what is an ad-jective? Something that is added on top, an afterthought, something non-essential. Yet, Carson adds, they are the latches of being; adjectives define the particular aspect of a noun in a unique way. In Homer, adjectives are always the same, because the mechanism of the metre and the obligation to improvise without deviating from the metre forces them to stay unchanged, to stay self-identical. However, Stesichorus, arriving in the wake of the Homeric rhapsody, creates in his epic new connections between the adjectives and the nouns. While metre continues to be in place, Stesichorus overturns the traditional formulaic connection between a specific adjective and a specific noun. That said, the very act of connecting two unrelated entities, which is the basis of the use of adjectives, is very much the essence of poetry, a kind of freedom inside language. There is nothing that necessitates making those two linguistic entities coexist, the adjective and the noun, nor any other established and necessary connection in between words. In epic, this random coexistence simply becomes an unaltered marriage. But there are passages where, even inside the necessity of metre, epic incorporates this freedom of language. The field in which it is actualized is the one of the Homeric similes. Carson comments on the Iliadic similes.7 Longinus, discussed by Carson in Decreation,8 also makes reference to the Homeric similes. Here we can read a short excerpt; this particular simile is triple and unfolds along the verses with the momentum of Homer which Longinus is commenting on: But fain was he to break the ranks of men, making trial of them wheresoever he saw the greatest throng and the goodliest arms. Yet not even so did he avail to 30

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break them, for all he was so eager; for they abode firm-fixed as it were a wall, like a crag, sheer and great, hard by the grey sea, that abides the swift paths of the shrill winds, and the swelling waves that belch forth against it; even so the Danaans withstood the Trojans steadfastly, and fled not. But Hector shining all about as with fire leapt among the throng, and fell upon them; even as when beneath the clouds a fierce-rushing wave, swollen by the winds, falls upon a swift ship, and she is all hidden by the foam thereof, and the dread blast of the wind roars against the sail, and the hearts of the sailors shudder in their fear, for that by little are they borne forth from death; even so were the hearts of the Achaeans rent within their breasts.9 Homer, Il. 15, 615–29 In this excerpt, one can trace the construction of a multiplicity. Through the coexistence of the different worlds anchored onto the scene of the narrative, a passionate linguistic construction is built step by step, with continuity and temporal consistency, guided by the metre: the sewing together into one body of multiple worldly scenes in succession. The excerpt’s multiplicity unfolds in meaning like the scene the text describes, like a moving wave with the successive cascading of the action, the constant changing of physical matter and of feelings. It starts on land, moves to the sky and the winds that beset the sea, toss it about, drive it to the shore and, finally, returns to the soldiers’ breasts, being torn asunder. The very language evinces the materiality of the flowing wave, alternating verb, subjects and adjectives that pound the ear with sequences of alliterations. The series of images that correspond to actions and the accompanying verbs are connected by the adverb ὣς, meaning ‘as’ (‘in the manner of ’), which is encountered three times, introducing, linking, returning. Each scene melts into the other. In this simile, the distinctive terms have been conjoined as members of one body which is the language and the narrative flow. Language connects the materiality of the world with the warriors’ bodies and feelings. In the Homeric simile it is not necessity but free choice that joins the different worlds. The affinity of the terms of the comparison is an invention of the poet. In a way, it is a substitution device for the epic adjective. The enormous stamina of the Achaeans and their staunch resistance against Hector’s attempts to break through their lines, the greatness of their defensive force, becomes a second and a third scene picked out from the natural world in a flow of freedom. Just as in Homer two different realms of being enter one another, actualizing an association more extensive and diverse than a metaphor – as each part concerns a scene from a world in motion, rather than static – similarly in Carson’s practice, her quote is introduced every time, not just in the composition of the books, but in each poem separately.

Chimera VI: empty space and contingency In a 2004 interview with the Paris Review, Carson points out the importance of free choice, which brings into synergy two or more different worlds: 31

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The things you think of to link are not in your control. It’s just who you are, bumping into the world. But how you link them is what shows the nature of your mind. [. . .] I put them together by accident. And that’s fine, I’m happy to do things by accident. But what’s interesting to me is once the accident has happened, once I happen to have Simonides and Paul Celan on my desk together, what do I do with the link? [. . .] It seems totally arbitrary on the one hand and on the other, totally particular about who I am as a thinker.10 The writer’s table, and the incidental coexistence on it of certain texts or authors, bring to mind the phrase by Lautréamont : ‘Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’un parapluie’ (‘Beautiful as the encounter on an anatomical bench of a sewing machine and an umbrella’), which the surrealists subsequently borrowed for their definition of art. In its original context, this phrase is a simile, the last one of a series,11 about the beauty of a seventeen-year-old youth. The simile speaks of a youth’s beauty as the randomness of the encounter of two things with a third, which provides the framework, the space in which that encounter has become possible. Jesper Svenbro, classical scholar and poet himself, uses that very reference to talk about contingency and the role it plays in modern, but also in ancient, poetry. For Svenbro the random encounter is born out of a free poetic meandering.12 By contrast, Carson’s excerpt, quoted above, appears at first to be static: it is about her table; which is to say, her archive. In this dissecting table, a Simonides has randomly encountered a Celan. The vivisection table, the table of thinking on which Carson will write about these two random objects, offers them first of all a viewing platform, a hosting space. But this is also a space where an act of violence is likely to take place on the objects, an act of dissection and disassembling. Though it might perhaps only be an act of theorizing – or thinking. This takes us to another Carsonian practice, that of truncation, or division and truncation, and that of reinsertion or else composition/ aggregation. For these acts to be able to take place, it is the space that will host them that must first be secured, the empty space of the dissecting table.13 That space defines the distance needed for the thinking to be committed, the emptiness, the in-between. Carson is familiar with and fond of that space from her practice as translator: Physical silence happens when you are looking at, say, a poem of Sappho’s inscribed on a papyrus from two thousand years ago that has been torn in half. Half the poem is empty space. A translator can signify or even rectify this lack of text in various ways – with blankness or brackets or textual conjecture – and she is justified in doing so because Sappho did not intend that part of the poem to fall silent.14 Basically, this is the same space that the papyrologist and the philologist reconstruct – the empty space in the found excerpts: an exhale of what is unspoken and/or spoken and erased by time, which the reader restores using the power of her knowledge or imagination. 32

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I would designate that empty space as one of freedom. That same space of Sapphic silence Carson preserves and shapes in terms of the structure of her books. The space between the sections operates as an intermediary void, as a white page in a particular series or else, in works such as Float, as a repeal of sequence and structure that allows the reader to improvise. The improvisation on the reader’s part bringing two texts together is performative, it is physical and it imparts form: when, given the empty spaces, all the sections are manually connected into a reading sequence, new connections create a new work based on the particular, and each time singular, reading.15 The empty space therefore exists to host the members of the work with the necessary distance between them. Yet it also exists to contain the body of the absent reader who will complete it. And the distance between the table’s surface and Carson, however small, is the necessary coordinate for theorizing. This space, necessary and sufficient for knowledge, Carson says, is opened by means of love: The same subterfuge which we have called ‘an erotic ruse’ in novels and poems now appears to constitute the very structure of human thinking. When the mind reaches out to know, the space of desire opens and a necessary fiction transpires. It is in this space, at the point where the two principles of reasoning intersect, that Socrates locates Eros. He describes ‘collection and division’ as the activity that empowers him to speak and to think (Phdr. 266b). And he alleges that he is in love with this activity: ‘The fact is, Phaedrus, I am myself a lover of these divisions and collections.’16 The Socratic divisions and collections which Carson commits are reminiscent of the body as a metaphor of poetic speech which exists in ancient Greek poetics and runs through the entire Phaedrus.17 This metaphor finds full expression in the lexicon of ancient Greek metrics.18 Moving from the world of Lautréamont and the machine to the world of the Poetics, we have moved from the world of assemblage as a device in the world to the world of the animal body as an assemblage. This step is intentional. It aims at differentiating between the kinds of connections and articulations so as to associate the living matter of thought with the living body of the writer and, hence, the reader. It is she, also, who is practising divisions and collection.

Chimera VII: wings, melting, the self XV Pair These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood – His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders like the little mindless red animals they were. With a piece of wooden plank he’d found in the basement Geryon made a back brace and lashed the wings tight. Carson, 1998: 53 33

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Erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul. [. . .] Socrates describes how the wings will grow, given the right conditions, powerful enough to carry the soul back to its beginnings. Carson, 1986: 155–7 Eros is a device for self-knowledge, as is writing. Carson writes about imagination in the final chapter of Eros the Bittersweet, titled ‘Mythoplokos’. ‘Mythoplokos’, ‘myth weaver’, refers to desire, which, by means of creating distance, arouses the operation of the imagination:19 the wings of the lover, airborne wings, wings of knowledge and of desire, wings of imagination, weaving myths. I will briefly return to Phaedrus as a way of exiting. At the outset of the book, Socrates answers Phaedrus’ question about his belief in local myths by speaking about the existence of such composite beings as the Chimera and the Centaur. He insists that a question of that sort seems to him ridiculous to the extent that it cannot answer the first question of what he himself is, simple or composite being (Phaedrus, 229e).20 A question of that sort, which is so explicitly stated at the beginning of the dialogue, forms the upper limit of philosophical inquiry. Because the dialogue would not offer an explicit answer to Phaedrus’ question, we can assume that this question may, in fact, be the central theme of the whole work. We can read the subject of Eros, and the process of the soul’s return to its original condition when it had wings, as an apparatus of self-knowledge and an implied answer to the question about ‘who one is’. The growing of wings, as it is described by Socrates, is a physical process of both pain and pleasure which restores to the soul a member that used to belong to it, when it was in its heavenly abode. Yet, this description already operates at the level of simile and analogy: the wings’ sprouting is presented in terms of a purely physical process, similar to that of teething, which causes itching and unrest. The idea of the soul’s corporeality, even as an analogy, comes to be added to the image of the immortal soul as a charioteer with two winged steeds. Both images speak of a composite self that emerges out of a collection or aggregation (Socrates’ term, synagoge, literally, a bringing together) of different body parts from different species. Various types of linkages occur, such as that of the rider merely borne on the chariot and drawn by horses and that of the wing that grows from within the body. We are faced with an assemblage of body parts in a process of melting and metamorphosis. Throughout this reading, a kind of answer to Socrates’ original question emerges: the self ’s origins are composite. But that’s not all. We have also here the presence of a composite body. The image clearly has its origin in the animal world; it probably comes from an animal that undergoes a bodily metamorphosis in order to be able to sing and mate, omnipresent in the dialogue, the cicada.21 Therefore, we may read Phaedrus as an extended simile, which develops through the greater part of the book. A simile concerning not only the study of the self possible only through eros, but, at a second level, the gradual unfolding of the Socratic self-knowledge together with the unfolding of the very written work of the dialogue.22 If in the classical era, this simile concerns beings such as the cicada, which transform and change, then the Chimeras of Socrates belong in the same category. A work can be chimerical and its construction can imbue its poet with a kinetic self-knowledge. 34

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To come back to Carson, the writing and composition of her works take place at a time of a chimerical self, in the sense of Donna Haraway,23 composed partly of an organism and partly of a machine. Each of its transformations, each aggregation and division, each metamorphosis, is a form of self-knowledge. As the writer opens herself to the empty space of freedom, she imbues it with a transformative potential. By virtue of this openness, she inscribes herself into a series of feminist writings in the sense of Trinh T. Minh-ha, where writing is a process of becoming, not becoming something but intransitively, and which corresponds to Haraway’s notion of the chimerical aspect: Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain, and mend, categories always leak. Of all the layers that form the open (never finite) totality of ‘I,’ which is to be filtered out as superfluous, fake, corrupt, and which is to be called pure, true, real, genuine, original, authentic? Which, indeed, since all interchange, revolving in an endless process?24 Through writing, through its divisions and collections, a revealing mechanism is constructed, a mechanism of knowledge which also implies the change of the maker. At the same time, the practices of co(m)-position allow a space of freedom among the singularities, which it is possible to revise every time. Through such practices, not even the singularities themselves remain unaffected: the fragments are transformed, at one time suffering elision, at another evolving, according to a logic of their own, at yet another becoming hybrid. Thus, for instance, the Autobiography of Red, the novelistic epic of Geryon which coexists with the transplanted Stesichorean fragments, is also an epic about coming of age, a children’s tale, a rite of passage as well as the transcription of an ancient poem onto a contemporary condition. And the translated Stesichorean fragments become free renditions, elements of which will be incorporated into the novelistic epic. The elements, too, of documentary in Carson, as she defines them in Decreation,25 once introduced into writing, change the parts with which they are in proximity. The practice of using and commenting on quotes, though a formal aspect of essay writing, may also be incorporated in the poem and become part of it. The different genres, just like the different mediums, are not pure, essentialist entities once they begin to coexist with one another. As we have been taught by biology,26 the environment and the adaptation to it shape in time species which do not remain stable. Symbiosis automatically implies fusion or admixture, tending to the dissolution of pure identity in favour of an identity which bears within it variegated multiplicity. Even when identity defensively fortifies itself in the face of a rival, it has already been affected by its presence.

Chimera VIII: epilogue We started out with mechanism, and followed with Carson’s practices of aggregation, both of which led us to reviewing the aggregate parts. In order to exist, they require always the empty space of freedom. At their two extremes, they either concern disjunction, 35

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which allows for free space where the connections take place purely on the reader’s side, or admixture, the melting of boundaries where, as the boundary between body parts becomes hard to delineate, the very identity of those parts is transformed, like that part of the body where the wings sprout. In Decreation,27 Carson refers to melting. And in Float, she uses the idea in a radical meta-fictive way. The poem ‘Wildly Constant’ follows at dawn the unfolding, along the daily walk, of a speaking voice, where signs and surprise meetings take place, whether that is the ice, another walker, the crows or texts by others which are quoted verbatim and commented on. The walking voice enumerates the encounters that pursue her footsteps through the freezing air, returns home, makes tea, reads Proust and quotes him, talks about the experience of monogamy, the crows on the rooftops, life inside a library of melting ice, and she writes: I should learn more about signs. I came to Stykkishólmur to live in a library. The library contains not books but glaciers. The glaciers are upright. Silent. As perfectly ordered as books would be. But they are melted. What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure. ‘Adventure is a kind of incompetence,’ and its opposite, says the voice further down the text, is an egg. ‘This perfect form. Perfect content. Perfect food.’ The enclosed egg stands in contrast to the melting glacier, and melting books, but ‘Each glacier is lit from underneath as memory is.’ Something is lost and something is found when the distinctive form and genre melt away. The thing found is the becoming of writing through memory. Intransitive.

Notes 1. According to Nail (2017: 21–37), this original sense of ‘agencement’ has been altered by the use of the word ‘assemblage’.

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Chimeras: Empty Space and Melting Borders 2. Nail (2017: 23). 3. Nail (2017). 4. Parry (1971: 272). 5. Carson (2014: 25). 6. Carson (1998: 4–5). 7. ‘In a passage where she considers “the similes of the Iliad”, [Carson] argued that poetry’s task is “to translate our mind” by drawing the lineaments of “a likeness” between incommensurate things. [. . .] Homer’s comparisons, she suggests, “build a parallel world, with eyeholes through the war to gaze at it” ’ (Fisher, 2015: 10–16, citing Carson, 2004). 8. Carson (2005: 45–50). 9. Homer (1924). 10. Aitken (2004). 11. Lautréamont (1868: Song VI, I, 290). 12. In his lectures on poetics at the College de France Svenbro (2013: 5, 12, 19). For the poetics of the itinerary in archaic Greek poetry, see Giannisi (2006). 13. Ora (1983: 15–27). 14. Carson (2008). Also, Wachtel (2016). 15. Under the same specific angle, Berta (2018: 377–9). 16. Carson (1986: 171–2). 17. See, for instance, Phaedrus, 264c. 18. Svenbro (1982: 953–64, 957–8). 19. ‘Both the philosopher and the poet find themselves describing Eros in images of wings and metaphors of flying, for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the mind on a story’ (Carson, 1986: 173). 20. Moore (2015: 136–84). 21. Weiss (1929: 101–9). See also Egan (1995: 21–6). 22. On this subject, see also Nichols (2008: 90–151). 23. Haraway (1985). For a general view of Haraway’s theory of knowledge, see Thompson (2001: 14129–33). 24. Minh-ha (1989). 25. Carson (2005: 45–7). At the beginning of the essay, Carson describes Longinus’ On the Sublime as ‘an aggregation of quotes’. The use of citations in Longinus’ text is used by Carson to define ‘documentary’ as an element common to Antonioni and Longinus. 26. Whether through competition and antagonism (according to Darwin), or symbiosis (according to Lyn Margoulis), species are differentiated through coexistence either by vanquishing the other through war, or by erotically fusing with the other who is in close proximity. 27. Where she refers to Sartre. On this same excerpt, about viscuosity, see Douglas (1966: 39–40).

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CHAPTER 3 CARSON FOR THE NONCLASSICIST Rebecca Kosick

I am not a classicist. If it were possible to really know what one doesn’t know, surely there’s more I could confess in this regard – an account of all the classical knowledge I lack, a map of gaps. I would rather like to begin this way, because it would allow to me say, ‘here are the holes’, to show them as problems and announce that in this chapter I will fill them in. Instead, I’m going to offer a speculation that jumps from my experience as a non-classicist reading antiquity (and more) via Carson, who is a classicist but also not, or at least not only. In reading Carson reading someone/thing else, this essay contributes to a growing list of others in the same bibliographic boat. For example, in the prior volume dedicated to Carson’s work, Ecstatic Lyre, Brian Teare reads Carson reading Brontë, and makes the compelling claim there that ‘Anne Carson’s body of work insists upon reading as formative of selfhood and thus fundamental to being human, integral to everything from erotic love to mourning.’1 Teare goes on to trace the way Carson’s ‘protagonists pursue reading’, how they ‘attempt to organize their overwhelming interior lives through reading, interpreting, or translating texts’.2 Similarly, Keegan Cook Finberg (2013) (also addressing Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay’/reading Brontë) writes that Carson’s works ‘stage conversations between a lyric I – a speaker who is not only the speaking subject in the poem but also a reader of other poems – and a body of past literature’.3 Although we are often scolded for unproblematically allying the poet with her speakers, the author with her characters, it’s probably not too far-fetched to say that these recurring readers in Carson’s oeuvre can suggest something about the role reading plays for the poet herself. They also invite comparisons to Carson’s readers, ourselves, who in reading Carson’s work must too, in Teare’s words, ‘pursue’ reading.4 To read Carson, we are tempted by the pursuit of other writers and other texts, among them, classical ones. This volume attends to Carson and antiquity, and this essay, too, sits with that relationship, although it can’t exactly account for it. Any reader of Carson recognizes that classical texts and artefacts comprise a major part of the poet’s wide-ranging work. And one way of reading Carson is to consider what Carson reads and to unpack how it gets rendered – translated, interpreted, re- or deformed – in her writing. Yet, most of her readers are, like me, non-classicists. For those of us in that position, and with varying degrees of lay knowledge, whether Carson gets ‘it’ right (where ‘it’ is one of her many classical touchstones) is either an open question, or maybe not a question at all. Carson is a rare example of an extremely popular contemporary writer whose work is inseparable from antiquity. But, as scholars have noted almost uniformly, Carson’s work is encyclopedic and often difficult, with references to classical works and workers (Sappho 39

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as a prominent example), but also Hegel, Susan Sontag, Monica Vitti and her own publicly-unavailable biography, to name a very small sample. Beyond her myriad and eclectic literary references, there is the issue of form, which I would argue is always poetry, but because poetry is large, is also criticism, collage, opera and tango (again, to name only a slivered sample). In light of this range of challenges to the reader, the pursuit of Carson’s classical re-elaborations is alluring. If we can trace her writing to other readings, maybe we can figure out what is going on. Maybe. However, I am going to sidestep this particular pursuit, in order to posit a theory of reading that attempts to characterize this kind of writing – the kind riddled with reading(s). Although I can’t know, really or completely, how or what Carson reads, I want to offer a speculation about her writing as a public mode of what I’d like to call poetic reading. This is not the declamative sort, nothing pronounced out loud (although Carson’s writing is in part composed of such prior dramatic utterances). Poetic reading here means the kind of reading that poets do in private, as poets, as classicists, as people. Poetic reading loosens modes of scholarly reading that are more tightly bound to periodization, influence, and reception. Jonathan Culler (2015) remarks that ‘a striking feature of the history of literary forms is that, unlike social and political history, it is reversible. We cannot return to earlier socio-political configurations, but poets can revive old forms, exploiting possibilities that have lain dormant for a while’.5 Culler’s point has to do with recent returns of fixed verse forms (such as the sestina) and the transhistorical endurance of the lyric, something Carson’s bibliography can also attest to. But, in the background of Culler’s observation is a broader acknowledgement of reading practices that enable such revivals to take place in the first place. If twentieth-century poets were writing poetry that shares a form with twelfth-century verse, then they were either reading twelfth-century verse, or reading other poets (who were reading other poets) who were. If Anne Carson is writing antiquity and more through poetry, essays and opera (as the subtitle to 2005’s Decreation self-describes), then we can make some guesses about what she is reading. Carson’s writing reflects her own eclectic bibliography and the chance events of her life in and outside of poetry: for example, the fact that she took Latin in high school because, according to the poet, she didn’t want to take typing.6 Poetic reading is interested in these elements of chance, and in thinking connections among (inter)texts more loosely than we are often asked to as scholars. Rather than a masterfully assembled dot matrix of causality, sometimes what a poem is made of is largely incidental. In making this assertion, I am returning a bit to my younger self. I came to poetry first as a poet, and for years, literary criticism grated on me. Because poets know the plainest truth – why is this there in the poem? Well, because the poet happened to be thinking about it as the poem was coming together. It follows that intertextuality can arise in a similar fashion. Poets read, so what they read winds up in poems. And poetry can be, for poets, a way of writing to read. Poetic reading invites us not just to focus on what Carson reads and how that gets rendered in her writing, but on how the practice of reading can render itself as writing. In this way, poetic reading is not about so much about readers but about writers. It doesn’t position itself against other kinds of reading – interpretive, surface, close, 40

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distant. But it acknowledges that writing is not always primarily about or for its readers. It can be about and for the writer, and her own reading practices. Carson is not the only example here,7 though she is a strong one. As another example, Sina Queyras writes about contemporary poet Lisa Robertson, arguing that Robertson’s 2012 book Nilling constitutes ‘an appreciation of reading. Not an appreciation of reception, but a reveling in process.’8 I would argue that something similar, if perhaps less of a revel, is at work in Carson, and that attending to Carson’s reading takes us somewhere our (my) own reading cannot go. Returning to my position for a moment as a non-classicist, it’s clear that Carson’s work is not for me, in that it does not meet me at my level of knowledge about antiquity. It is also not for me in the way that a textbook is for its novice readers – meeting them where they are and inviting them into a shared base of knowledge. Yet it is ‘for me’ in the sense that I am not particularly bothered by the fact that I often don’t know what she’s talking about. And I do learn things from reading Carson reading antiquity. For instance, in ‘Powerless Structures Fig. II’ from Float (2016), Carson describes getting a call from her brother’s widow, revisiting a topic addressed throughout Carson’s earlier book, the materially-experimental accordion-fold facsimile notebook, Nox (2010). The account in Float is familiar to me because I have written about Nox, have read Nox. Other familiarities are made possible here too. The final verses of ‘Powerless Structures Fig. II’ are: most people blush before death she just steps off9 These lines are familiar to me as a reader of Nox but they lead somewhere I can’t go alone as a non-classicist. In writing about Nox, I wrote about this ‘blush before death’, that it shows up several times in the book, including as red paint (2020). I learned from an interview with Carson that although this particular blush accounts for death in Carson’s lifetime, it is a reference to antiquity, to one of her frequent touchstones, the Roman poet Catullus. In the interview, Eleanor Wachtel says to Carson, ‘At one point you ask, “Why do we blush before death?” I found that a surprising word. Have you found an answer to that?’10 Carson replies: No. It surprised me too. I found that in another poem of Catullus. I don’t remember the exact passage, but he’s talking about death, it’s an elegy for a friend, and he uses the blush, it’s a puzzling passage.11 In my prior consideration of Carson’s blushes, I speculated that this poem that Carson doesn’t outright name might be Catullus 65, which deals in death and blush, though I may have got this wrong. But I arrived either way to read that poem because Carson gave 41

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an interview where she said, this is where the blush comes from, even if she didn’t say it all the way. I learned somethings about Catullus from Carson, but I don’t think her writing is a kind of pedagogy. I think it’s just what she’s thinking about, which in ‘Powerless Structures Fig. II’ as well as Nox is both her own life and what she reads. After the reflections in the quote above about the puzzling blush, Carson continues: It often happens to me trying to translate something in Latin or Greek that I come to a piece that doesn’t make sense, but it still seems true, it seems like a nub of something I should get to, so I just secrete it into writing and hope it’ll work its truth by itself without me knowing how to control it. I’m still thinking about the blush.12 I’m still thinking about the blush too. Here, Carson gives us a look into her reading practices, which include translation, a kind of reading. As she suggests, this ‘piece that doesn’t make sense’ doesn’t just show up in the translation of the relevant source text, but more widely ‘secrete[s] into writing’, making its way into Nox and later Float, perhaps elsewhere. Clive Scott argues in Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading that it is [. . .] desirable to envisage translation not just as an in-textual act, but also as a pretextual act (i.e. the [source text] is an inadequate transcription of an oral performance by the reader that has already taken place) and as a post-post-textual act (i.e. translation should not just be the translation of a reading of a text, but also, possibly, the translation of the memory of reading a text).13 Scott’s envisaging of translation as pre-textual is helpful for thinking about poetic reading, in part because it acknowledges that the reader herself impacts on the written text, even if that text was written by someone else. This is particularly evidenced in translation because the reader/translator re(ad)-writes a further text, a record of her reading. But this is part of poetry too, even poetry that is not consciously connected to acts of translation. The recurring ‘blushes’ in Carson’s poetry suggest an overlap between Carson’s practice as a reader and writer and the wideness of the translation gesture as Scott sees it. The blush in Carson’s poems is a residue of the ‘post-post-textual act’ which, for her, involves working from a memory that, like most memories of reading, remembers some things and forgets others. For this concept of poetic reading that I’m developing as I read Carson reading in writing, it’s not necessary to fill in the gaps left by memory’s partially-failed workings. And it’s not necessary to build a metaphor between the kinds of impartial texts a classicist or translator of the classics inherits and the gaps she leaves for us readers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As non-classicists, the memory of Catullus’s poem is not even impartial – maybe it’s just a trace that comes through in the background, or maybe it doesn’t come through at all. It’s enough that the connections Carson’s texts make are 42

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available to us to be thought, even if we don’t know the ancient motivations for their being here, now. For example, we can acknowledge that Carson the poet is a person with her own preoccupations – sometimes read ones, sometimes also, as in the blush-referring paint in Nox and her ‘Autobiography of . . .’ (1998), red ones. And it is evident that some of these preoccupations go together for this poet, as with the memory of the experience of a death and the memory of reading a surprising account of death’s colouring. There’s plenty there no matter what we share with the poet in terms of ancient bibliography or anything else. *

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Associations between lived experiences and things we read are more often privately held. In scholarly instances of reading, our personal experiences are expected to be cloaked in the serious work of objective inquiry. But Carson’s writing publicly entwines personal experiences of life with personal experiences of reading. Here again is Carson as a non-classicist. Her writing winds us through her readings, classical and not, and through lots more too. In Float’s ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’, Carson opens with a quote from John Cage, famous for lifting the silence from silence: ‘Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.’14 Carson then fills a further nineteen pages (not counting the bibliography that is explicitly included at the end of the chapbook) with prose and verse, including other people’s poems and a series of her own translations that are constrained Oulipo-style by the words made available in further source texts. Examples include ‘Ibykos fr. 286, translated using words from Bertolt Brecht’s FBI file #100-67077)’, ‘Ibykos fr. 286, translated using stops and signs from the London Underground’, and ‘Ibykos fr. 286, translated using words from the owner’s manual of my new Emerson 1000W microwave oven, pp. 17–18’.15 Though the words themselves are constrained by translation tactics Carson employs, these poems are ‘prismatic’ – ‘alert to translation’s proliferative energies’.16 They are also alert to silence, which Carson notes in the chapbook’s opening line ‘is as important as words in the practice and study of translation’.17 Like the blush before death, silence and nothingness (and their twin poles of noise and somethingness) are themes Carson returns to throughout her work, notably in Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) (1999). Karla Kelsey calls this work an ‘exploration of nothingness’ and writes that Carson approaches ‘the fragmentary nature of Simonides’s and Celan’s texts’ by ‘appl[ying] the tools of the scholar, working into the textual-material landscape in order to work outward toward absence’.18 As further proof of scholarship, Kelsey comments on the book’s ‘eight-and-a-half-page bibliography citing primary and secondary texts written by poets, philosophers, literary critics, art critics, historians, and economists in French, German, Italian, Spanish, ancient Greek, and English’ (plus its 265 footnotes).19 It wouldn’t be remarkable to apply the tools of scholarship unless the writer was perhaps also up to something beyond the usual activities of the same. The range of the bibliography described by Kelsey, as well as the juxtaposition of the twentieth-century 43

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German poet Paul Celan (whom Economy of the Unlost’s own subtitle explicitly tells us Carson is reading antiquity ‘with’), already hint at the degree to which Carson’s reading practices disfavour a strictly-defined ‘field.’ In this way, she is not just a classicist, but there are jarring juxtapositions in Carson’s writing that underscore that neither is she just a scholar, generally speaking. To be clear: this is not a deficit. As a reader who writes, Carson shows reading not to be motivated in the way scholarly reading is (or purports to be). And she makes manifest the random, the contingent, the happened-to-have-beenaround that I take to be characteristics of poetic reading. Of course, the combination of Celan and Simonides of Keos isn’t that random. To start with, they are both poets. That’s enough for Carson’s book to constitute a belonging to my scholarly interdiscipline, comparative literature. But, returning to ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’, those texts that Carson reads (and translates) ancient poetry with are not just work by other canonical poets. They are FBI texts about leftist poets – this is provocative – and they are texts that were obviously just . . . there. Part of the poet’s lived experience. Signs she saw while sitting on the London Underground. And even more mundane: a microwave manual. We can read in these texts something about the ways constraint productively impinges on translation. But I’m mostly interested in the way that Carson lays bare the wide-ranging, unconstrained private reading that a poet does, and in how this reading comes to surface in public as poetry. The final translation, the microwave one, makes a good show of this. Among its lines are: and beneath the magnetron tube soggy crackers, wrapped in bacon, toughen.20 Just as I was invited into Carson’s chain of read signifiers by finding out the blush was a reference to Catullus, the bacon here builds on frequent references within the eighteen prior pages of ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’ to the twentieth-century AngloIrish painter, Francis Bacon. Unlike Ibykos, whom I know very little about, I know a bit about Francis Bacon, and some of it I know because, like Carson, I have read Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. My ‘reading’ of Bacon is coloured by my reading of Deleuze, and my reading of ‘bacon’ in the final microwaved verses of Carson’s chapbook was conditioned by reading Carson reading Deleuze reading Bacon. Here, then, as with Scott’s understanding of translation as ‘pre-textual’, Bacon inscribes on the bacon that follows, even where this bit of language comes from way outside of the textual universe we might imagine connecting Anne Carson with the painter, the philosopher and the Greek lyric poet. *

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In ‘Mia Moglie (Longinus’ Red Desert)’, which appears in ‘Sublimes’, a section of Decreation (2006), Carson returns to a number of familiar preoccupations. Red Desert is 44

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the name of an Italian film from 1964 starring Monica Vitti, but as readers of Carson, red, like bacon, is pre-inscribed by now. There is also green. Between couplets that are sort of about the Monica Vitti movie and also addressing the sublime as a concept, Carson nestles bits of a translated quote from Sappho, one word at a time. The full quote (within this poem anyway) is ‘greener than grass and dead almost I seem to me’.21 Each of these words appears italicized alone in its line, and each subsequent word begins a bit further to the right than the last, visually cascading through the poem and its two pages, from top left to bottom right. If you read Decreation in order and you are a non-classicist, there are some, but not entirely clear, clues as to the origins of this partial quotation. The first couplet in ‘Mia Moglie’ reads: A caught woman is something the movies want to believe in. ‘For instance, Sappho,’ as Longinus says.22 Longinus, Red Desert and Monica Vitti have all appeared prior to these lines, so the reader comes to this anachronistic opening bearing a bibliographic support for what’s happening here, provided by Decreation itself. Sappho, though, doesn’t get an extended address until about ninety pages later, in the essay, ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God’.23 In Part One of that essay, Sappho’s Fragment 31 appears, and Carson notes there that Fragment 31 ‘has been preserved for us thanks to Longinus’.24 There it is delivered in fuller, if not full, context. The lines relevant for ‘Mia Moglie (Longinus’ Red Desert)’ are: and cold sweat grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead – or almost I seem to me25 Now, if you are a careful follower of Anne Carson’s publications, even as a non-classicist, you’ll have come across this information earlier. Three years prior to Decreation-thebook’s appearance in print, the Sappho, Porete and Weil essay was published on its own (Carson, 2002). That same year, these translated Sappho verses also appeared in Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Sappho and Carson, 2002). Such is the case for lots of what appears in Decreation, and that’s fairly standard practice for poets, whose individual poems or parts of poems are often published in a scattered array of places before coalescing with their future neighbours in/as a book. So as a non-classicist it is possible to track down the ancient sources, at least some of them, that incorporate themselves into Carson’s writing, even without looking outside of Carson’s writing itself. She returns again and again to the questions she has, the reading she’s doing, the things she’s thinking about, and across her catalogue are bits of parts that can assemble themselves toward something like wholeness, if you read enough. But here I’m giving the impression that Carson the poet is out marking the trails of an elaborate treasure map for us, and I don’t really think that’s the case. I don’t think she’s really writing 45

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for me, the non-classicist, or even for the yes-classicist. I think she’s writing as a way of reading, and that we benefit from having a public view into this private process. Culler writes that ‘the operations for the production of poetic effects’ wind up being primarily studied as ‘operations performed by readers’ rather than as something poets marshal in creating the poem.26 In some ways, what Culler suggests here contrasts with the claim I make above, that reading is often the private backroom behind the public office of writing. But there are three parts to this sequence as I envision it: 1) the reading the writer does, 2) the writing, and 3) the reading that readers do. Culler is describing the third portion of the process, which for scholar-readers can turn into a fourth – further public writing, whereby we recount our experiences of reading writers. Culler goes on: ‘The statements authors make about the process of composition are notoriously problematic, and there are few ways of determining what they are taking for granted. Whereas the meanings readers give to literary works and the effects they experience are much more open to observation.’27 This openness takes many forms beyond essays like this one. Anytime people talk about a literary text, they are offering an account of their experience reading. This frequently takes place in public – in the classroom, among friends, in the newspaper, and so on. I said before that poetic reading wasn’t about readers but writers. And this is where reading as a usually-private activity registers. Certainly, writers give windows into their influences by means of intertextual reference, the convention of indicating poems written after others, and further strategies – conscious and not. But most poets don’t reveal their reading to the degree that Carson does, and this gives us an interesting window not just into the process of reading as reception (although that is there), but also into the process of composition. As Culler suggests, this process is much more opaque, burdened with clichés, with self-mythologizing, even lies. But if poets offer unsatisfying accounts of how poetry came to be, what Carson offers is not a telling but a text. Her compositions comprise themselves from the effects, the memories, the experiences of reading. *

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Scholarly segmentations of literature break our unruly history of texts down by era and language, which prompts a theory of reading in which what’s already contextually adjacent predominates over chance resonance. This is an overstated account, I admit. But periodization, poetic ‘schooling’, geographic coincidence and the demands of disciplinary expertise nevertheless exert their pressure on how scholars read. Poets do not bear this burden – they are free to read whatever they come across, in the languages they happen to know or in translation, and all of this can make it into a poem without brackets. ‘Gnosticism III’ from Decreation provides a kind of reflection on this point: First line has to make your brain race that how Homer does it, that’s how Frank O’Hara does it, why at such a page Muses 46

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slam through the house—there goes on (fainting) up the rungs of your strange BULLFIGHT, buttered almost in a nearness to skyblue Thy pang – Pollock yourself! Just to hang onto life is why28 Because I am something of a twentieth-century Americanist, with apologies to myself for hemming me in, I can offer a key to a slightly clued reference in this poem. The last line is from the New York School poet Frank O’Hara’s casual jaunt of an ars poetica, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’. In it, he offers some words on both writing and what happens after: As for their reception, suppose you’re in love and somebody’s mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don’t say, ‘Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!’ you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do may after a few months. But that’s not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical.29 Carson refigures this ‘hang onto life’ line. In her poem, it’s more positively cast, but either way the most obvious take-away here is that she was reading this O’Hara essay, or remembering it, at some point in the process of writing ‘Gnostiscism III’. And Homer too. And Pollock, though reading him is a kind of looking. This poem is also full of seemingly out-of-nowhere interjections that press the contingent influences on the writing process – from readings far afield in time and space to muses that come in unfettered forms, here a bullfight, there a microwave manual. Carson encourages all of us – classicists and reluctant twentieth centuryists and ‘ists’ of all and no kinds – to tune into this process of poetic reading. Poetic reading doesn’t predetermine what kinds of texts/‘texts’ get a say in the writing that follows. And while Carson may not be doing this for us, even in a text like Decreation that is ‘for [her] students’, we can anyway take this lesson. We can loosen our own reading practices and also perhaps more readily admit the elements of chance that influence our formations, our studies and our writing. We have a model for this in Anne Carson. It’s evident in the ways she moves among centuries and languages in two lines of verse, or in the ways she links literary lines or motifs with her real lived experiences. Sometimes, even, she plainly lays out how reading influences the writing we are witness to now, as in Float’s ‘Merry Christmas from Hegel’: If I hadn’t been trying on the mood of Hegel’s particular grammatical indignation that Christmas Day, I would never have gone out to stand in the snow, or stayed to speculate with it, or had the patience to sit down and make a record of speculation for myself as if it were a worthy way to spend an afternoon.30 Here is a portrait of a chain of chance operations, rooted in reading, that resulted in a written text. 47

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On Float’s ‘cover’ page (there is no cover), Carson tells us ‘reading can be freefall’ (2016). This statement follows on from the information just above it, which indicates that the twenty-two chapbooks that comprise Float can be read in any order. But it also hints at the style of poetic reading I see Carson as making public in her writing, and it prods us to let our own reading fall as it may, which, in O’Hara’s words, it ‘always do may’. As a non-classicist, what I take from reading Carson is not an opaque puzzle to be solved by focused study of her ancient bibliography (though certainly there are discoveries to be made in that regard). In some ways Carson herself thwarts the suggestion that antiquity is a primary focus by way of so many references to other texts and times, which find themselves incongruously butting up against one another everywhere throughout her oeuvre. This can be read as asserting the enduring relevance of classical writing. But we can also read Carson’s myriad references as a view into the way reading texts of all kinds figures into the process of writing. I take from this a provocation to honour the freefall features of poetic reading and invite what chances float on.

Notes 1. Teare (2015: 30). 2. Teare (2015: 30). 3. Finberg (2013: 105). 4. Teare (2015: 30). 5. Culler (2015: 4). 6. D’Agata (1997: 3). 7. Carson may be part of a nascent trend in contemporary poetry in this regard. In addition to Lisa Roberston, Fred Moten is another example of a poet whose poetry registers a rich record of the poet’s reading. See, for example, Moten’s All That Beauty (2019). 8. Queyras (2012). 9. Carson (2016: n.p). 10. Wachtel (2014). 11. Wachtel (2014). 12. Wachtel (2014). 13. Scott (2012: 2). 14. Carson (2016: n.p.) 15. Carson (2016: n.p.) 16. Reynolds (2019: 9). 17. Carson (2016). 18. Kelsey (2015: 88). 19. Kelsey (2015: 88–9). 20. Carson (2016: n.p.) 21. Carson (2006: 67–8).

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Carson for the Non-Classicist 22. Carson (2006: 67). 23. Carson (2006: 155). 24. Carson (2006: 160). 25. Carson (2006: 159). 26. Culler (2002: 136). 27. Culler (2002: 136). 28. Carson (2006: 89). 29. O’Hara (1995: 498). 30. Carson (2016: n.p.).

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CHAPTER 4 É CRITURE AND THE BUDDING CLASSICIST Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi

Euphoric urge Alone in the Public Gardens of Palermo, Sicily, Goethe looks at the early-April lemon trees, the hedges of oleander filled with blossoms, the green borders surrounding exotic plants, the ponds with goldfish, and, above all, the haze that touches everything with a tint of light blue.1 He then walks to the top of the hill, contemplating the look that the blue haze gives to distant ships and promontories. He writes: The enchanted garden, the inky waves on the northern horizon, breaking on the curved beaches of the bays, and the peculiar tang of the sea air, all conjured up images of the island of the blessed Phaeacians. I hurried off to buy myself a Homer so that I could read the canto in which he speaks of them.2 I wish to address the creative implications of the sort of rapture that is manifest in Goethe’s impetus to rush and buy himself a Homer while enjoying Palermo’s garden and its surroundings. I would like to approach this type of resolute but usually silent desire, in this case recorded by Goethe in his Italian Journey, as an instance of how Homer, and indeed any other Greek or Roman poet or prose writer, may emerge as the object of one’s intellectual yearnings. How is such a euphoric urge recast in one’s way of thinking and writing about verbal artefacts of ancient Greece or Rome? Such questions will prove to be relevant to my exploration of Anne Carson’s writing about classical texts in her early to mid-thirties, at the beginning of her career as an academic classicist. As for Goethe’s own experience of total bliss in the gardens of Palermo, in his late thirties, his desire to reread Homer soon led him to an outburst of creativity. A month later, now in Taormina, he writes with nostalgia about this memory: As I wandered about in the beautiful Public Gardens of Palermo, between hedges and oleander, through orange trees and lemon trees heavy with fruit, and other trees and bushes unknown to me, I took this blessed strangeness to my heart. There could be no better commentary on the Odyssey, I felt, than just this setting. I bought a copy and read it with passionate interest. It fired me with the desire to produce a work of my own, and very soon I could think of nothing else: in other words I became obsessed with the idea of treating the story of Nausicaa as a tragedy.3 51

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Hence, a moment of exceptional physical and mental elation in a Mediterranean eutopia stirred Goethe’s craving to re-read the Odyssey, which it turn fuelled his strong impulse to rewrite it, to reimagine part of the epic narrative as tragedy. Though almost fully planned, this tragedy was never fully written.4 Nevertheless, what we are lucky to have, thanks to Goethe’s diary, is the full process from lived experience to intellectual engagement to the genesis of writing – a humanized but still splendid variation of Diotima’s doctrine in Plato’s Symposium. This more forgiving model begins with the adult Goethe gazing at the beauty of a blooming, maritime, landscape; proceeds with his longing for a beautiful logos, that of Homer; and rounds off with his strong desire to give birth to his own logos, a tragedy. Goethe’s funnelling of a moment of profound euphoria, where the real and Homeric worlds converged, into what we would classify today as creative writing is not surprising. Goethe was certainly not a classicist himself; though he did sporadically write short notes or essays about ancient visual and verbal art, he generally channelled his enchantment with antiquity into other genres of writing: diaries, letters, poems, drama, novelistic prose. But he was steeped in the atmosphere of a period that gave birth to the very idea of the professional classicist, and witnessed from close-by the nascence of ‘classical philology’, then a novel discipline.5 It emerged in the period that coincides with his midlife as an autonomous academic field, largely due to the figure of Friedrich August Wolf. There is good evidence pointing to the nascent classical scholarship as the very link that brought together the two men in an intellectual friendship, including the anecdote about Goethe’s eagerness to attend Wolf ’s lectures at any cost (even if this meant that he would have to remain hidden behind a curtain to avoid recognition) and Wolf ’s dedication of his Darstellung der Altertumswissenschaft, his manifesto on the aims and methods of classical scholarship, to Goethe.6 This seminal publication of Wolf was consequential in many ways, including the manner in which incipient classical scholarship would have to conduct itself thereafter. The study of antiquity would have to be a rigorous discipline comparable to the ‘scientific study of nature’, aiming at the ‘empirical knowledge of human nature’, with Greek and Roman antiquity considered to be key in the understanding of humanity.7 Given the fascination of the period’s intellectuals with current developments in the sciences, it is not hard to understand how Wolf ’s nascent Altertumswissenschaft, inspired by and rhetorically emulating such advances, would aspire to reach unquestionable truths about antiquity of the sort that ‘the exact sciences are justly proud of ’.8 I would like to take my point of departure from this formative, indeed determining, period in the broader field of Classics by viewing Goethe and Wolf as representatives of two divergent models of that era’s deep investment in antiquity. On the one hand, the commitment to a scientific or scientific-like purity by way of which the professional classicist would reach undeniable knowledge through methods of indisputable precision; on the other hand, an unconditional, but also methodologically uncommitted, fascination with all things Greek and Roman, finding ways to articulate itself, in part or whole, in alternative discourses. 52

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Though much has changed in classical scholarship since the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, these two poles represented by Wolf ’s and Goethe’s models are still active today. On the one hand, a discourse well equipped, at its best, with methodological rigour and the props of the academic métier. On the other hand, a medley of all sorts of genres conveniently amassed under the rubric ‘creative writing’, which is usually defined by opposition to other modes, academic writing being one of them. In academic writing, language is supposed to be a mere tool, a concatenation of transparent signifiers that should not complicate or delay the reader’s immediate access to the signified. Conversely, in so-called ‘creative writing’ language is given the right for adventure, allowing the signifier to display its labyrinths. Here method has no relevance and truth a limited one. As for imagination, it is here free and wanton, unlike academic writing where imagination may occasionally be celebrated, but with a caveat: that it be invariably controlled by the presumably unfailing workings of reasoning.

Essay: a tryout This taxonomy may sound tidy yet it tends to overlook facets of the discipline that resist its neatness. One of these facets is the interpretation of literary texts with which one develops liaisons of lived experience. Such a condition is not the result of individual caprice. A wide range of ancient poetry – including Homer, to whom Goethe recurs in his moment of bliss – was meant to operate precisely this way and can still do so, as literature in general does. Because the affective power of such texts is an integral part of their immense cognitive potency, the more attuned to these powers the more revealing and indeed effective an interpreter may be. Consequently, the epistemological entanglement of interpreting ancient literary texts can be quite complicated; acquiring any ‘belief ’ about them, let alone ‘an accurate’ one, is intertwined with demanding questions about one’s positionality in interpretive processes, questions that may be even more challenging in Classics than in anthropological studies, where similar issues have been endlessly debated.9 This is not the place to dwell on the perplexing crossroads where hermeneutics, epistemology and Classics meet, yet it is crucial to keep in mind that a classicist’s mode of writing is often an indicator of her coping with such issues. I believe that in her budding years as an accomplished classical scholar, that is, in the 1980s, Anne Carson must have been questioning traditional distinctions between academic and creative writing while at the same time embedding this questioning in her own work. This period coincides with the completion of her 1981 PhD at the University of Toronto with a dissertation titled Odi et Amo Ergo Sum.10 By then she already had shorter publications relevant to classical scholarship (and to her dissertation) and was teaching in the Department of Classics at Princeton University. It seems to me that between 1981 and 1986, when her first book, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, appeared, she had indeed made the decision to turn her dissertation into what it was really meant to be: not just an exploration into the topic of Eros in antiquity but, at the same time, an exploration of the 53

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ways one may think and write about such a topic in the last quarter of the twentieth century; or, to put it otherwise, an inquiry into how one’s lived experience and intellectual formation in the last quarter of the twentieth century can become an active, vital, part of the way one thinks and writes about Eros in antiquity. Likewise, I take the subtitle of her book in the first edition, An Essay (unfortunately removed in some later editions), to point not just towards the wide range of the prose genre we tend to call ‘essay’ but mainly towards the primary meaning of the word as used by Montaigne in his Essais: namely as a trial of the very act of writing; as an inquiry into the potentials of the articulation of thought; as an attempt at communicating both one’s ideas and oneself through writing.11 Not surprisingly, perhaps, a quotation from an essay by Montaigne appears around the middle of Carson’s book, in one of the several moments where she discusses the erotics inherent in writing itself: ‘My page makes love and understands it feelingly.’12 Above all, however, Carson’s mode of writing in this book exudes the intellectual atmosphere of its own times. Though Montaigne’s explorations into writing may indeed be in its background, it is the broader period of the composition of her book that electrifies its mode of writing. This is a book written by a budding classicist, with antiquity at its thematic core, but creatively aligned with contemporary debates in Europe, and especially in France, regarding the very nature and function of writing. I use écriture here to evoke precisely that period in recent history rather than a specific definition of the term. I am referring to the tumultuous period that extends over the second half of the twentieth century, with France as its epicentre and Roland Barthes as a particularly influential intellectual figure continuously problematizing the very idea of textual production and especially the relationship between writing and the self. This was far from a debate merely about style; it was a fundamental questioning of the act of writing in its totality, exceeding genre classifications and including, in fact often originating from, the issues attached to one’s writing about others’ writings. Barthes himself seems to have undergone a constant series of trials, reconsiderations and shifts on the questions he repeatedly raised, which are often apparent in his own diverse enactments of writing until the abrupt end of his life. Rather than pinpointing any particular stage of this journey, I am here referring to Barthes’ overall role in turning écriture from a form of communication to a topic of intense deliberation, including the manner in which somebody like him, a stellar academic, was supposed to employ it.13 I single out Roland Barthes, who surfaces in a long epigraph from A Lover’s Discourse to one of her chapters, as a refreshing presence one can sense in the undercurrents of Carson’s book, the man who epitomizes a pervasive and vibrant interest in the issues of écriture.14 Although in effect Carson’s mode of writing may be considered (and may well be) an outstanding instantiation of écriture feminine as professed by Hélène Cixous both in those times and later, my impression is that, as far as her own mode of writing is concerned, Carson’s engagement with ideas about écriture feminine was quite diffused in that period, or perhaps less easy for a reader to pinpoint.15 Notwithstanding, Cixous’ views on female écriture as an activity tied to the female body and sexuality seem broadly 54

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compatible with Carson’s forward-looking inquiries into Greek perceptions of the female body elsewhere in her early work.16 Écriture thus understood – the function of writing inextricably connected to questions regarding one’s stance in the world of language and of language in cognition – leads me to Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay as a strong statement about one’s positionality in both writing and thinking as a classicist. Curious about the way Carson shaped her écriture as she was preparing her book, I obtained her typewritten dissertation from the University of Toronto, to get a sense of what was salvaged and what was altered as it became this unusual ‘essay’. Despite the many and consequential transpositions, reductions and shifts in emphasis, the broader thematic overlapping between dissertation and book is unquestionable. As she herself says in the beginning of her dissertation abstract: Our thesis undertakes to explore the bittersweetness of love in three spheres: erotic justice, erotic physiology and the relation of eros to women. In each of these spheres, eros is construed by ancient thought as absent presence. Eros entails endeia; to feel desire is to register that a part of me is missing: Plato and Virginia Wolf concur.17 It is not my goal to discuss here the wealth of this dissertation, its mode of argumentation, the interest in the senses (including the so-called lower ones, taste and smell) well before this became fashionable, the breadth of its textual references both within and outside the classical world. My goal is much more specific: to shed light on what I think changed in terms of Carson’s conceptualization and practice of écriture as she was embarking upon the transformation of her dissertation into a book. Among many such differences, there are two interrelated ones that are decisive. The first one is a different conception of structure. Unlike conventional academic writing (including her dissertation), the book is crafted as a sequence of short, distinct textual units, ranging between one and six pages, each one with its own title. At first sight, the reader is prompted to wonder about whether this marked brevity is meant to evoke lyric poetry, prose poems, short stories, the fragmentation of écriture as practised by Roland Barthes, or even another budding classicist’s, Nietzsche’s, irregular but generally short (yet untitled) units in his Birth of Tragedy. While all of these, and many more, possibilities may arise in her reader’s mind, Carson’s mode of crafting these units is singular. The second difference is the centrality in her book, as opposed to the dissertation, of a practice that was on the verge of becoming outmoded in the academy, if not banned, at that time: close reading. Though one may object that practising close reading is not an issue of écriture, I would suggest that it is precisely the decisions Carson seems to have made about the shaping of thinking by way of writing that turned her atypical close readings into emblems of the deep erotic function she attributes to the acts of reading and writing in general, an issue she brings up repeatedly in the book. Carving out a new writing mode for exploring specific poems turned the surprisingly limited presence in 55

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her dissertation of poems such as Sappho’s fragments 105a LP and 31 LP into key acts of reading in her book.18

Amalgams It is to her distinct close readings of Sappho’s poetry as instances of Carson’s écriture that I will now turn. I consider them examples of a self-aware, adept impurity and refer to them this way to mark their resistance to puristic approaches to writing, such as the ones I mentioned earlier, that is, a ‘pure’ academic writing, on the one hand; a ‘pure’ creative writing, on the other. While incorporating both of them, Carson’s close readings are at the same time neither: her peculiar textual entities are, above all, curious discursive amalgams of classical scholarship with modern thought conceived and performed as vivid enactments of one’s cognition when encountering verbal art. The Reach, which comes early in her book, is a (just about) three-page-long close reading of Sappho’s three-line fragment 105a LP, the beginning of a simile of which the focal point is an apple turning red on the highest branch of a tree, an apple that has escaped, we learn, the attention of the apple pickers, or, rather, the apple pickers were unable to pick it. The fragment stops here and we never hear about how the simile was rounded off. Carson’s way of writing about this fragment is representative of her discursive amalgamation. Perhaps more prominently than other chapters in the book, this one rejoices in exhibiting the methods of the classical philologist. It tells us about the ancient source that provided us with the three-line Sapphic excerpt; it mentions the possible ritual context of which this short quotation may have been part in Sappho’s times; more notably, by not only employing but also explaining at some length the rhetorical figure of anaphora and the phonetic phenomena of correption and elision, it indulges in displaying the rhetorical and metrical equipment of a classicist.19 Regardless, the reader feels she is introduced to a dictional and interpretive environment that is not exactly the classicist’s workshop, for familiar methods and tools sound utterly strange once interspersed with formulations such as ‘one might think of correption as a sort of metrical décolletage’.20 This thought would have otherwise perished in silence had it not landed in a parenthesis, a parenthesis, however, that stirs up its textual surroundings by its otherness. The classicist’s vernacular turns into a peculiar idiolect. Such thoughts are sometimes placed as strong signposts. The second paragraph of The Reach starts with a judgement formulated as a succinct juxtaposition of opposites, quite Sapphic in style: ‘The poem is incomplete, perfectly.’21 One wonders if a tiny but attention-drawing token like this, claiming perfection and wholeness for a three-line excerpt, the fractional state of which is spelled out from the beginning, reflects Carson’s conversation with the young Ezra Pound who experimented with Sapphoesque fragments, the mutilated condition of which he reproduced while at the same time treating them as if they carried full poetic potency.22 Carson’s discourse is constantly rejuvenated by all sorts of cool underflows, quite often originating from a modernist sensibility that is not explicitly addressed. 56

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One realizes that not all of the nourishing sources are displayed, for many of them have been naturally absorbed, over time, in the fleshing-out of Carson’s own écriture. For instance, her persistent and detailed engagement with sound is strongly reminiscent of the discourses of ancient criticism, with Dionysius of Halicarnassus an unquoted yet organically integrated and beneficial source. In his treatise On the arrangement of words, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the first century bce critic, examines the effects of poetry or prose on listeners or readers depending on the various sound patterns created by different collocations of words. Such sonic patterning is generated not only by different metrical schemes but also by different modes of assembling ingrained qualities of vowels, semivowels and consonants. Different phonetic sequences, which derive from different sequences in the arrangement of words, lead to a different vocal processing that, in turn, induces different affective states in the listener.23 Dionysius’ approach to the sonic impact of word arrangement has ramifications that are particularly relevant to Carson’s close reading: when one vocalizes a verbal artefact, its sonic textures generate a sense of movement. As different sonic assemblages accelerate or slow down, facilitate or impede the movement of voice, Dionysius refers time and again to the varying modes, paces, and forces of movement that verbal artefacts instil, depending on the way a poet or prose writer weaves their fabric of sound. Carson’s focus on the movement elicited by the phonetic texture of fragment 105a LP places her in the broader discursive environment of ancient literary criticism. In the congruence of the poem’s repetitions of words along with its two distinct ways of either reducing the length of vowels or of completely cutting them off, she senses a ‘gradually imposed constraint’.24 The third and last line, with its multiplied elisions, ‘crops the apple-pickers’ hands in midair’.25 A kinetic drama is made manifest. This kinetic drama is never described as such in the fragment. As the poetic eye keeps peering at the solitary, untouched apple on top of Sappho’s apple tree, one could reasonably argue that it is stillness, not movement, that pervades the imagery. Absent from the fragment’s imagery, the movements Carson summons up are sensed in the sonic arrangement of its words and only – yet effectively – there. Thus, in her reading words are much more than just verbal matter being moved along by way of phonetic texture; nor are sonic motions enhancing a movement that is made explicit in the words, as in Dionysius’ most captivating readings.26 Carson calls forth an otherwise invisible choreography where words are imagined as fully-fledged corporeal agents engaged in active motion. To put it otherwise, in this strange, unseeable yet perceptible ballet d’ action, words are not mere vehicles but complete embodiments of sound. Shortening the length of their vowels or cutting their vowels off is understood by Carson as a breakage of a body’s moving force; chopping the sound is like curbing the body’s extension precisely at the moment it was ready to be fully deployed.27 This is how repeated elision can indeed be sensed as ‘cropping the apple-pickers’ hands in mid-air’. Although Carson’s mode of reading here (and elsewhere) strikes one as rooted in ancient criticism, its outcome branches into modern thought.28 I am thinking especially of influential intellectual figures such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry in the second half of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century, whose 57

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explorations into the relationship between poetry and dance were formative for modernist approaches.29 Carson’s approach to the sonic arrangements of the Sapphic fragment as summoning up a kinetic drama brings to mind Valéry’s thoughts in his essay on the Philosophy of Dance: that a poem is action – it exists at the moment of being spoken; that this act, like the dance, creates a state of mind; that, like dance, the poem creates a time and a measurement of time that are essential to it; that we cannot distinguish the poem from its form of temporality; and, as a result of all these, that ‘to begin to vocalize a poem is to enter a verbal dance’.30 It is a verbal dance, that of the apple pickers’ hands stretching out, reaching out and cropped in mid-air, that Carson conjured up in The Reach.

Poems lived-in So, what is The Reach? One would tend to call it a close reading and I have myself called it so, for it is indeed a minute reading of the fragment’s verbal organization. Yet unlike typical attempts at close readings in the twentieth century, which tend to be classed (sometimes too hastily) under the rubric of New Criticism, Carson’s short chapters don’t fully fit this description. Proceeding from chapter to chapter, one is increasingly made aware that individual readings of poetry or prose are not meant as self-serving, inwardlooking, closed off, textual analyses. Rather, they are outwardly looking, open to a conceptual environment outside themselves, pixels of a bigger picture made throughout the book. The book puts forward a larger thesis, of which individual readings are constituent parts: it explores desire as a mental structure that both depends upon and reimagines a variety of spatial patterning, largely relevant to the experience of boundary and absence. Language, and according to Carson language specifically practised as written language, conveys and intensifies the sense of boundary or edge of one’s self, thus becoming instrumental in the way desire is both formed and communicated. At times, Carson’s distinct close readings strike one as interpretive vignettes akin to ekphrasis. I am thinking here of ekphrasis as self-standing short pieces of prose, in the manner of Philostratus the Elder, the author of Imagines, a collection of descriptions of paintings. Of course, Carson describes verbal, not visual, art. Yet her overall approach to literature as a medium is profoundly visual, with repeated emphasis, throughout the book, on what she claims to be the broader psychological consequences of the graphic depiction of language. More importantly, it is the constant osmotic action between description and interpretation that strikes one as ekphrastic in nature, as well as the sense that these descriptive-plus-interpretive vignettes achieve a certain level of autonomy, thus becoming pleasurable in themselves, despite their mediatory role as hermeneutic conduits.31 Above all, perhaps, like ekphrasis, her vignettes come across as real-time enactments of one’s mind during the very process of its engagement with an artefact. This brings me back to Carson’s particular interest in verbal art as a material, graphic depiction of language. Perhaps due to this approach, her close readings exude an actual, 58

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physical intimacy with the poems she describes and interprets, as if poems are cherished objects one is surrounded by and cohabits with. Or, sometimes, it is as if poems are turned into three-dimensional spaces, their spatiality allowing her to experience and explore them from within. This impression is more prominent in her Ruse, a reading of Sappho 31, the poem much celebrated in both antiquity and modern times that is organized around three persons: a man and a woman engaged in intimate conversation, and a first-person female speaker who, while looking at and addressing the woman, details a concurrence of affective bodily symptoms that accumulate into a near death experience.32 This is certainly not the place to discuss in detail the poem, the voluminous scholarship on it, and Carson’s succinct and bold reading of it in the 1980s. Yet, in accordance with the point I have been making, it is startling how the budding classicist turned a poem of which the staging is purposefully anchored in literal, physical stillness (with the man and the woman explicitly said, in its first stanza, to be sitting opposite and close to one another) into a celebration of movement. Rejecting, earlier in her reading, the idea that this is a poem about jealousy, she brings up bassa danza, the Renaissance dance that enacted the psychological state of jealousy through transpositions and successive seclusions of dancers, in order to point out that, by contrast, in Sappho’s poem the persons involved are not meant to change or exchange their positions.33 In the closure of the chapter, however, she returns to the poem’s triangular structure only to see its three points as an electromotive force that, despite the utter fixity of its three agents, generates a dense circuit of volts dancing in space: ‘For in this dance the people do not move. Desire moves.’34 Unlike the bassa danza that Carson brought up earlier in her reading, only to reject it as an unfitting analogue to interpret Sappho fr.31, here, at the end, we are not given any extant model for this invisible yet vital choreography of volts that fill the empty spaces between the three points of the erotic triangle. A few decades after the publication of Carson’s book, William Forsythe’s experimentations with new ways of depicting choreography would introduce computerized visualizations of the pathways created by the movement of the body, alluring pathways that are shown like luminous colourful streams filling the empty spaces from which dancing bodies have just passed in their vigorous locomotion.35 It is, I think, a similar fascination with movement’s invisible traces in a space devoid of matter that Carson was thinking about when envisioning ‘the three-point circuit’, as she calls it, ‘in Sappho’s mind’.36 It is only by living with and within a poem that one can begin to catch sight of such vistas where others see a bare void. Perhaps, then, close readings in Carson’s écriture are the narratives of her sojourns in the spaces she calls poems, peculiar memoirs of sounds and sights she invites you to share. The full ending of her vignette on Sappho 31 goes this way: ‘For in this dance the people do not move. Desire moves. Eros is a verb.’37 The very last statement, ‘Eros is a verb’, is not just a token of the self-aware impurity of her writing; or the classicist’s vernacular turned into idiolect; or poetic license subverting perfect grammar. More than these, ‘Eros is a verb’ is a token of the intense euphoria that living in and with a poem can give, a mental state that has surprising affinities with Goethe’s euphoric urge in the Public Gardens of Palermo. 59

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Notes 1. I would like to thank Laura Jansen for being a model editor, both in the conception of the volume and in all its intellectual, artistic and technical aspects. 2. Goethe (1962: 236). 3. Goethe (1962: 288). 4. Goethe (1962: 288–90) and Trevelyan (1941: 164). 5. Trevelyan (1941); Grumach (1949). 6. Grafton (1985: 3); Wolf (1869: 808–10). 7. Bolter (1980: 85–7) cf. Wolf (1869: 816). 8. Bolter (1980: 86); Wolf (1869: 832): ‘[. . .] die nicht minder überzeugend ist als deren die exacten Wissenschaften sich mit Recht rühmen’. 9. See for instance Marcus and Fischer (1999:17–76); regarding the field of Classics, see recently The Postclassicisms Collective (2020:144–60). 10. Carson-Giacomelli (1981). 11. Montaigne (1993), 1, address ‘To the Reader’. The subtitle An Essay is removed from Carson (1998). 12. Carson (1986: 87). 13. On Barthes and écriture, see for instance Kennedy (1981); Wiseman (2017: 86–107). 14. Carson (1986: 117). Barthes’ A Lovers Discourse appears in Carson’s dissertation as well. In these early writings by Carson, I do not see specific references to Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (first published in France in 1973), a work that strikes me as quite relevant to her way of thinking about textual production. 15. See for instance Cixous’ influential The Laugh of the Medusa (1976, first published in France in 1975). 16. Carson (1981:178–292); Carson (1990: 135–70). 17. Carson (1981). 18. There are only scattered references to these two poems in Carson’s dissertation: for Sappho 31 LP, see Carson (1981: 106, 138–9, 156–8, 305); for Sappho 105a LP, see Carson (1981: 119). Unlike these scattered references in her dissertation, in her book the two poems are central and her close reading of them reverberates throughout her pages, much beyond the respective chapters dedicated to them. 19. Carson (1986: 28). 20. Carson (1986: 28). 21. Carson (1986: 27). 22. See for instance Ezra Pound’s poems entitled Papyrus and Ιμέρρω in his Lustra of 1913–15 (Pound, 1990: 115–16). 23. D.H. Comp. esp. 11–16. For a detailed and insightful discussion of the sensory, and more broadly, somatic terminology and imagery in ancient criticism, see recently Melzer (2020). 24. Carson (1986: 28). 25. Carson (1986: 28). 26. See esp. D.H. Comp. 20. 27. Outside Sappho’s poetry, see Carson (1986: 58) for her reference to alphabetic letters as dancers. 60

Écriture and the Budding Classicist 28. Dionysius’ presence in Carson’s close readings is also felt in her reading of Archilochus, esp. Carson (1986: 47–8). 29. See for instance Mester (1997: 1–25). 30. Valéry (1957: 1400): ‘Commencer de dire des vers, c’est entrer dans une danse verbale.’ 31. On the explicit understanding of ekphrasis as hermêneia, see Philostratus, Prologue to the Imagines, esp. 3.13, 4.35. 32. Carson (1986: 12–17). 33. Carson (1986: 14). 34. Carson (1986: 17). 35. See Zuniga-Shaw (2017); see also https://accad.osu.edu/research-gallery/synchronous-objects. 36. Carson (1986: 16). 37. Carson (1986: 17).

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CHAPTER 5 ERRING AND WHATEVER Gillian Sze

Consider incompleteness as a verb. Anne Carson, 1995: 16 Poetry is the scholar’s art. Wallace Stevens, 1951: 61 One of my favourite descriptions of Anne Carson is by Mary Gannon: When I saw her in person she looked every bit the classics scholar that she is. With crossed arms, glasses, and a cardigan sweater draped over her shoulders, she watched me from the landing of her second-story apartment while I fumbled to pay the cabbie in Canadian dollars. She looked serious, stately, and, I feared, humourless. Once we were inside she led me to one of her desks (she has three, each with a different purpose), where we sat by an open window. It was then that I noticed the vibrant pink of her lipstick, her unmatched earrings, and, pinned on the wall, her rendering in acrylic of a llama on wheels, details about her that conveyed an unexpected playfulness. Gannon’s account highlights what we already know of Carson – that she occupies both academic and creative author positions, while bringing together their seemingly contradictory postures. Here Carson is at once serious and stately while a closer look reveals that she is also eccentric and playful. She is both the austere scholar and the spirited artist. Carson herself does not pay much heed to these titles, calling herself a ‘visiting [whatever]’ (Anderson) when she appears at a university. So why should this matter? *

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We should consider how Carson’s work as a poet and her position as a scholar is significant to many critics, who can struggle to reconcile these two dimensions. David Ward writes, ‘Classicists work from texts, post-modern poets from within their heads, and Carson’s unstable attempt at marrying the two disciplines continually jars.’1 Robert Stanton asks, ‘Can Carson bring the two sides of her own work – her scholarly accuracy, her poetic ‘mistakes’ – into a similar congruence?’2

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And David Solway, who criticizes Carson’s ‘celebrity status’, bluntly states, ‘Carson may be our newest pedestalized inamorata but the fact is, and I say this unabashedly, she is a phony, all sleight-of-hand, both as a scholar and a poet.’3 *

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Is Carson too scholarly for poetry? Is she too poetic for scholarship? Is it necessary to uphold one writerly and readerly function over the other? ‘Carson is a classicist with avant-garde longings,’ William Logan writes, emphasizing again the shortcoming of multitasking. Mention of her day job keeps appearing in readings of her poetry, often generating an exclusive disjunction. The attendant qualities of each moniker – ‘poet’ and ‘classicist’ – are, as others quickly point out, incongruous. But it seems that by pitting the scholar against the poet, these criticisms drive a wedge between the two crafts. What critics have highlighted is not just Carson’s ‘unstable attempt at marrying the two disciplines’4 but her participation in this age-old struggle between the two disciplines, one which is implicitly inscribed in readings of her work. Indeed, setting the classicist against the poet is strangely evocative of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, which harkens as far back as Plato’s Republic. Poets, the harmful imitators of truth, are considered dangerous. We are warned in Book X that ‘poetry is not something to be taken seriously, as something important, with some bearing on the truth’ (Plato 329–30). On the other hand, philosophers, like scholars, are not ‘makers’ but discoverers of truth on account of their ability to recognize the eternal forms in which particular things participate. Plato insists on the significance of this distinction: a philosopher is worthy to rule. A poet, however, threatens the republic of truth. The platonic division implicitly structures Carson’s own reception. Is she a scholar in dogged pursuit of a univocal truth or is she engaged in the equivocal play of poetry? No wonder there are readers who don’t know what to do with her. *

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So let us then, as Carson suggests, ‘find the line and go someplace else’.5 Let us discover an alternative route. How does Carson herself grapple this dichotomy between truth and poetry – an ancient opposition with which, as a Classics scholar, she is well-acquainted? Subtending the opposition of poet and scholar is Carson’s orientation toward language. Carson’s poetry and scholarship are intertwined and driven by a sheer fascination with words. Working among multiple languages, she dips into etymology, philology, translation and grammar. Carson is interested in how language works, how it connects, whether poetically or academically. And language is, as she makes clear in Plainwater, a route to the strange: Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again. I have heard that anthropologists prize those moments when a word or a bit of language opens like a keyhole into another 64

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person, a whole alien world roars past in some unarranged phrase [. . .] The research comes alive in unexpected ways.6 More importantly, the work of language – ‘work’ as in the art object as well as the act of labour – is inexhaustible. Carson’s primary concern, which she highlights in her first collection, has always been the torsion, the eccentric trajectory, of words: I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.7 *

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‘Words bounce,’8 Carson states. This strikes me as contrary to what Virginia Woolf writes in her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, which simmers with the anxiety of the unknown and distant history, and the errors that arise from misreading and mistranslating Greek. When it comes to the ancient language, meaning for both Carson and Woolf is described in spatial (and figurative) terms. For Woolf, meaning is located at a distance, ‘just on the far side of language’.9 For Carson, Greek is ‘at the roots of meaning’. The ‘compacting’ effect of a Greek metaphor, as she describes it, is ‘just on the edge of sense and on the edge of the way language should operate’.10 When encountering Greek, both Woolf and Carson experience a stretching of the mind and imagination across some void, a reach that crosses vast time and linguistic difference. What is the Greek language like for Woolf? While words seem to bounce along this expanse for Carson, Woolf is concerned about the loss of meaning: ‘We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English.’11 Woolf ’s use of the word ‘fling’ should be unpacked. Many would agree that our minds certainly cannot catapult across history and haul in the full meaning of a Greek sentence. The force with which one ‘flings’ is not entirely recoverable. As a result, Greek comes out distorted, ‘a vague equivalent’, and Woolf poses an important question: ‘[A]re we not reading wrongly?’12 *

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While Woolf ’s verb ‘fling’ is a one-directional movement, Carson’s ‘bounce’ suggests that what moves up will inevitably come down. Language offers, in Carson’s metaphor, a reciprocity. ‘Bounce’ has the feel of schoolyard play. In another analogy, Carson describes the Greek language as ‘the best experience in the world, there’s no reason to ever stop. It’s just some amazing combination of the kind of puzzle-solving that goes into crosswords and amazing literature.’13 Greek is an endless game which, in its fragmented state, produces an infinite number of readings, as evidenced in Carson’s translations and retellings of Stesichoros, Catullus, Sappho and Mimnermos. Carson, herself, describes her scholarly 65

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activity as ‘translat[ing] badly’ and deems non-pejoratively the space between languages as a ‘place of error or mistakenness, of saying things less well than you like, or not being able to say them at all’.14 According to Carson, the purpose of dwelling in this linguistic and temporal space is to open oneself to possibilities and play, or to ‘put [one]self off balance, to be dislodged from [. . .] complacency’.15 For Carson, Greek and its translation ‘continually does that dislodging’.16 When Woolf questions if we are reading ‘wrongly’, we can safely imagine that Carson’s response would be, ‘Yes. And I prefer it that way.’ *

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The risk of reading wrongly correlates, unsurprisingly, to the fact that the ancient past comes to us in a state of wreckage through the long processes of loss, deterioration, reassemblage, mediation and archivization. All of this, Carson asserts, ‘add[s] up to more life’.17 There are those, like Woolf, who find this condition nerve-wracking. How to deal with all this passed time and loss and roundabout readings? Then there are those who accept that ‘the different readings of a classical text over time become not misreadings, but the only readings we have’.18 Perhaps we can view Carson’s ease with translating ‘badly’ as dovetailing with the inherent ‘wrongness’ or error in the classical archive, as every point of engagement with a given ancient text invariably tampers with the full recovery of the ‘original’, historically circumscribed meaning (if such a thing can even be posited). Carson is thrilled not only by what is missing, but the sheer potential for mistake. Her poem ‘Essay on what I Think About Most’ opens: Error. And its emotions. On the brink of error is a condition of fear. In the midst of error is a state of folly and defeat. Realizing you’ve made an error brings shame and remorse. Or does it?19 She goes on to answer this query later in the poem when considering an error found in a fragment from Alkman’s Greek lyric. Of course, being just a broken part of a whole, the error remains uncorrected. Truth is shrouded by the accidents of transmission and loss. But, counter to the work of the philologist who seeks restorative wholeness, Carson dwells on this error. But as you know the chief aim of philology is to reduce all textual delight to an accident of history. And I am uneasy with any claim to know exactly what a poet means to say. So let’s leave the question mark there 66

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at the beginning of the poem and admire Alkman’s courage in confronting what it brackets.20 What we have here is not only a pointed commentary on the work of those philologists who minimize ‘all textual delight’, but praise for error. Carson’s engagement with Alkman is a unique point of contact in the long chain of reception, and rather than considering the fragment’s form as a deficient or accidental product of its transmission (the original longer text being better or more ‘complete’), Carson praises the courage of the poet in committing an error. *

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‘We can’t think of fragment without thinking of whole,’ Lydia Davis writes. ‘The word fragment implies the word whole. A fragment would seem to be part of a whole, a brokenoff part of a whole. Does it also imply, as with other broken-off pieces, that enough of them would make a whole, or remake some original whole, some ideal whole?’21 Page duBois says something similar about the fragments of ancient texts: Classical scholarship and biblical scholarship have always been in part efforts of restoration. Philologists have tried to make whole what was broken – to imagine and guess at the missing parts, to repair what was transmitted inaccurately, to change, excise, add, to return to the original and perfect text that we can never know. (my emphasis)22 While poetry is imagined to be unstable and even frivolous, the scholarly imperative involves restorative and reparative processes. But Carson doesn’t seem to care too much for wholeness as she does for hole-ness, resisting even the surface of prose where, as she puts it, ‘meaning is all padded, costumed in normalcy’.23 Rather, she prefers ‘dealing with classical texts which are, like Sappho, in bits of papyrus with that enchanting white space around them, in which we can imagine all of the experience of antiquity floating but which we can’t quite reach’.24 It seems appropriate that Carson’s first collection, Short Talks, begins, ‘Early one morning words were missing.’25 And from there she continues to invite us into those holes, or places of absence in her work: stolen or missing fascicles and notebooks, an estranged faithless husband, her late mother and late brother. Absence is something tangible, visible and marked. ‘[B]y a simple stroke – all is lost, yet still there.’26 *

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Carson complicates and disrupts the philological approach to the past as she provides an alternative way of engaging with history. Who can blame Carson for not concerning herself with restorative processes? As she sees it, ‘In surfaces, perfection is less interesting.’27 For Carson, the past comes to us in shards or fragments and catches 67

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our curiosity: ‘[T]he space of not knowing has always been seductive to humans,’28 she tells us. And of course this curiosity does not totalize – rather, the shards and fragments become a point of departure for speculation, meditation and resonance. Carson’s sense of the classical archive begins with philology, but invents, in both the obsolete and current senses of this word: ‘to discover’ and ‘to create something new’. Scholars, we have seen, tend to be associated with discovery while poets tend to be associated with creation. As Carson makes clear about the tension between her poetic and academic work, ‘I was taught that objective reportage of academic questions is the ideal form for scholarship to take, but in pursuing scholarship myself I never found that possible.’29 *

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What sort of scholarship is possible for Carson? It seems to have something to do with loss and heaven, pears and winter, and the tripping spaces between words. In the introduction to ‘Life of Towns’, Carson turns the figure of the academic on her head and reveals an alternative position: A scholar is someone who takes a position. From which position, certain lines become visible. You will at first think I am painting the lines myself; it’s not so. I merely know where to stand to see the lines that are there. And the mysterious thing, it is a very mysterious thing, is how these lines do paint themselves. Before there were any edges or angles or virtue – who was there to ask the questions? Well, let’s not get carried away with exegesis. A scholar is someone who knows how to limit himself to the matter at hand.30 Indeed, this description ties in closely with the scholar who works within the limits and boundaries of reconstruction. However, Carson speaks about the critical task of the scholar in creative terms. The speaker here is ‘a scholar of towns’ – a curious vocation – but what is that exactly? Carson defines a town as ‘matter which has painted itself within lines’.31 To take up a position (perhaps in a given discourse) is to situate oneself within a ‘town’. A town is a small pit stop of thought. It seems fitting that someone who describes Greek as a ‘home in [her] mind’ (Aitken) would also present academia in terms of space and locality. A scholar is one who, by advancing an argument about the past, chooses and resides in a town. However, Carson makes clear that the painted lines of a ‘town’, or a given position, are not fixed. ‘But what about variant readings?’32 the speaker wonders. Multiplicity, or the divergent readings and interpretations of a text, suggests instability. Thus, ‘Towns are the illusion that things hang together’ (my emphasis).33 To illustrate the variety of ‘towns’, Carson quotes a passage from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, and draws our attention to an error. A scholar by the name of Kao contests the translation of a single word found in the quoted passage: ‘The word translated “loss” throughout this section does not make much sense [. . .] It is possible that it is a graphic error for “heaven”.’34 68

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Of course, replacing the word ‘loss’ with ‘heaven’ alters the whole meaning of the passage entirely. By taking a different position to Lao Tzu, Kao makes up his own ‘town’, which Carson calls the ‘Town of Kao’. Resulting from this mistake are two distinct ‘towns’, an analogy for two distinct interpretations. As Carson’s speaker states, ‘The position you take on this may pull you separate from me. Hence, towns. And then, scholars.’35 What Carson is most interested in is the distance and ‘between-ness’ that separates towns, or the space that exists and disunites Lao Tzu’s ‘loss’ and Kao’s ‘heaven’. But this error also unites ‘loss’ and ‘heaven’ – while they are separate ‘towns’ they participate within the same discourse, or, to continue with this metaphor of place, the same ‘district’. By considering this example, we can begin to understand what is meant by ‘my pear, your winter’ in the first line of the introduction: ‘Towns are the illusion that things hang together somehow, my pear, your winter.’36 A question I ask is, ‘Why these two particular nouns?’ While it is difficult to say for certain, some insight into this association can be found in a later section of Plainwater where Carson also discusses language in reference to ‘towns’ and ‘districts’: I have heard that anthropologists prize those moments when a word or bit of language opens up like a keyhole into another person, a whole alien world roars past in some unarranged phrase [. . .] you hear a Berliner say ‘squat town’ – and suddenly, see sunset, winter, lovers coking eggs in a grimy kitchen with the windows steaming up, river runs coldly by, little cats go clicking over the snow. You can fill your district notebook with these jottings, exciting as the unwary use of a kinship term [. . .] The research comes alive in unexpected ways.37 What is the kinship between ‘loss’ and ‘heaven’? In the example of Lao Tzu and Kao, ‘loss’ and ‘heaven’ are separate towns, but as a result of error, each is also a replacement of – and for – the other, creating a harmonic resonance. At the end of her introduction, Carson inquires into this ‘in-between’ space between ‘loss’ and ‘heaven’ and ‘my pear’ and ‘your winter’: What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by silence. Can you punctuate yourself as silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world of another kind – back into real emptiness, some would say.38 What is that place between words and semantics? ‘My pear’ and ‘your winter’? If a town is ‘matter which has painted itself between lines’ then Carson stands at a point where the view is indistinct, illusory, a point where ‘pear’ and ‘winter’ are interchangeable. This ‘illusion’, as she calls it, reminds me of St Peter’s Square where Bernini marked two spots, halfway between the fountains and the obelisk, so that if someone were to stand on one of these spots and view the four-column-deep colonnade, the columns would precisely 69

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line up and create the illusion of a single column. The ‘place’ the speaker occupies can be considered ‘poetic’, where, via metaphor, we can meditate upon language’s possibilities and limits, and slip from the literal to the hypothetical. Carson’s speaker seeks this place where ‘winter’ and ‘pear’ overlay and become ‘variants for one another’. One can indeed ‘eat winter’ and ‘live six months inside a frozen pear’. *

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What I continue to encounter when examining the bafflement of those who struggle to place Carson as a classicist or a poet is their frustration with her lack of biography. Solway, who accuses her of being phony, goes on to remark snidely, ‘we learn that “Anne Carson lives in Canada.” That’s it! No more information is needed for so illustrious a personage. The implication is that Canada is fortunate for being put on the map by virtue of its association with Anne Carson.’39 *

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In Closer to Home, a book of author portraits photographed by Terence Byrnes, Carson ‘placed a surprising restriction on [their] shoot’ and told Byrnes, ‘You can only take one picture of my face.’40 *

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Carson’s avoidance of personal attention has given her the reputation of being somewhat of an enigma, and a 2013 interview in the New York Times, titled ‘The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson’, encourages this impression. The interviewer, Sam Anderson, attempts to answer the question, ‘Where does Anne Carson come from?’ and supplies three possible answers: Canada (where she was born), Michigan (where she lives), or ancient Greece (which she has inhabited for ‘a large percentage of her mental life’). The final possibility is striking in that it situates Carson in antiquity, alongside other poets who have also been studied in the hope of reconstructing a biography. As Holt Parker writes of Sappho, for instance, ‘We have always approached Sappho looking for traces of her private life.’41 Over the years, the ancient poet has occupied a number of roles such as schoolmistress, lesbian, musician and lover, among others. Persona and biography also creep into how readers approach Carson’s work. A number of critics have drawn attention to Carson’s biography – or the lack of available personal information. Carson has been known to withhold details in her author biographies. An inspection of the jacket flaps or back covers of her works shows a single biographical sentence. This seems intentional. Carson herself has revealed, ‘I want to have a blank book. This is my aim. Nothing. No biography, no author’s photos, no quotes from whoever, just the book.’42 It comes as no surprise that Sappho, who was an important starting point for Carson’s study of Eros in classical literature (Eros the Bittersweet), continues to feature regularly in her work. Both poets are met with an equal sense of fascination and bewilderment. What sort of space do these two women take up? Sappho, with her work arriving to us in fragments, and the ‘inscrutable’ Carson who delights in the imperfect? 70

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No doubt also at play in their reception is gender: Sappho, the foremother of Western poetry, and Carson, a female classicist, disrupt the implicit masculinity of their respective categories. But before I go any further, and, like others, snatch at fragments to glean details of a personal life, let me heed the advice of Carson whose own remarks on Sappho may be applied to herself: Controversies about her personal ethics and way of life have taken up a lot of people’s time throughout the history of Sapphic scholarship. It seems that she knew and loved women as deeply as she did music. Can we leave the matter there?43 *

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I will then re-direct myself towards the beginning. There is a poem by Carson that appears in the Spring 1990 issue of Grand Street Journal. The poem, entitled ‘Now What?’ was published before her first collection, Short Talks. I would not necessarily claim that this poem serves as an early model for her later work – Carson can’t be pinned down. (She would probably oppose the linearity of this line of thought anyway.) But what I will say is that the poem demonstrates the mutual and necessary coexistence of the poet and scholar in her work in general. Scholarship is part of her poetic play and creation. I would like to share with you the shape of the poem, rather than a close analysis of the words and meanings themselves. ‘Now What?’ is divided into three parts. The first part, titled ‘Sappho’, is the ancient poet’s fragment 55, which Carson labels and provides in its entirety in the original Aeolic Greek. The second part, ‘Translation’, is Carson’s translation of this fragment. Up until now, everything is fairly straightforward. Most readers, likely unable to read Greek, will skip over and move on to part II of the poem. The translation in part II of the poem, however, is anything but fluid. Carson alters the line breaks presented in part I (moving away from the four-line construction of the Greek fragment) and includes full stops at the end of her lines. Dead and you will lie dead. And there will be no memory of you none. No desire none. Not ever. For you. Have no share in the roses.44 It should be noted that the poems in ‘Life of Towns’ – a meditation on the role of the scholar – also misuses the full stop in the same way. The punctuation appears before the break and marks the interruption of a complete thought. The reading of the poem is clumsy, as we have been conditioned to pause at the full stops, to take a breath at the line breaks. The full stop, or ‘telia’ from the Greek, marks the end of a complete thought. As we can see here, as well as in ‘Life of Towns’, Carson quite literally puts language in 71

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‘disequilibrium’ by placing the full stop in the middle of thought. She stutters our reading. Perhaps this effect is meant to reproduce the difficult experience of reading ancient Greek (which she tells us in If Not, Winter is devoid of word division, punctuation or lineation). Perhaps this mistaken use of the full stop is to combat the scholar’s desires for completion and wholeness. Nevertheless, our reading becomes strained and the end of each line forces us to confront a definitive pause. The limit of language, or the limit reached at the end of each line, is silence. As Carson’s speaker in ‘Life of Towns’ asks, ‘Can you punctuate yourself as silence?’45 The final section of the poem is what I find the most exciting and peculiar about this text. Entitled ‘Scholia’, the poet appears to step out of her role and signal to the reader that she will adopt the role of the scholiast and philologist. Indeed, Carson’s speaker provides her own notes on the Sapphic fragment in this section. That is to say, a close reading is supplied as part of the poem. In a gesture that is self-aware and generically playful, ‘Scholia’ makes up the bulk of the entire poem and is a thorough and careful examination of the original Greek. The focus on scholia in this poem can of course be considered a feminist play with textual inversion – the marginalized scholia suggestive of the marginalized position of the female poet – but, more precisely, the use of scholia here demonstrates the convergence of Carson’s scholarly and poetic practices. The scholium (which, like the poetic fragment, is itself vulnerable to loss) is no longer a marginal note situated on the side of academia; rather, it becomes the central vehicle for the poet to accommodate the reader’s movement through the Greek fragment. The division between scholia (which happens to be written in the same faltering style as part II) and poetry becomes blurred. The scholarly task of commenting upon the Greek is simultaneously a poetic task. *

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Finally, I want to return to the desks that Mary Gannon noticed when she was invited into Carson’s home. Each desk is assigned a different purpose. In an earlier interview, these desks are also mentioned: ‘Carson often acknowledges using two different desks in two separate rooms of her house for her two kinds of writing – “scholarship” and “poetry”.’46 Though Carson has two separate desks for these endeavours, I wouldn’t consider them so neatly distinct. Just as Carson’s translation and exegesis of Sappho’s fragment 55 finds and plays within the liminal space between scholarship and poetry, the critical and the creative, she too bounces between these two desks and finds herself in the complex intersections between academic connoisseurship and creative flights of meditative writing. Or, as she puts it in ‘Notes on Method’ in Economy of the Unlost: I have struggled since the beginning to drive my thought out into the landscape of science and fact where other people converse logically and exchange judgments – but I go blind out there. So writing involves some dashing back and forth between that darkening landscape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of everything I do not know. It is the clearing that takes time. It is the clearing that is a mystery.47 72

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Carson’s use of the archive, in both her capacity as scholar and poet, participates in what I could only call an ‘inventive’ poetics of error. The past and its errors, misreadings, translations and transmissions are all sources of creativity and irreverent play. She composes from within ‘that darkening landscape’48 that exists between the work of a poet and the work of a classicist. As for the questions of her inscrutability, or where she comes from (present day Canada or ancient Greece), she perhaps answered that a while ago. So intent are we on borders and linearity, the lines that we paint around language, time and place, of Carson we wonder who she is, when and where she comes from. In ‘The Glass Essay’, Carson’s speaker visualizes time as an old videotape that runs beneath the present, mindful of ‘the transparent loops’49 that pass beneath her. Once when asked to share more about herself, Carson responded, ‘I am tallish with brown hair. I am not very interested in biographical data. “Today is most of the time,” as Gertrude Stein said.’50

Notes 1. Ward (2001: 14). 2. Stanton (2003: 28). 3. Solway (2001: 24). 4. Ward (2001: 14). 5. D’Agata (1997: 15). 6. Carson (1995: 232). 7. Carson (1992: 9). 8. Carson (1998: 3). 9. Woolf (1925: 14). 10. Brockes (2006). 11. Woolf (1925: 16). 12. Woolf (1925: 16). 13. Brockes (2006). 14. McNeilly (2003: 12). 15. McNeilly (2003: 12). 16. McNeilly (2003: 12). 17. Aitken (2004). 18. Kallendorf (2007: 2). 19. Carson (2000: 30). 20. Carson (2000: 34). 21. Davis (2004: 36). 22. DuBois (1995: 37–8). 23. D’Agata (1997: 14).

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Anne Carson/ Antiquity 24. D’Agata (1997: 14). 25. Carson (1992: 9). 26. Carson (2000: 166). 27. Aitken (2004). 28. McNeilly (2003: 12). 29. Aitken (2004). 30. Carson (1995: 93). 31. Carson (1995: 93). 32. Carson (1995: 93). 33. Carson (1995: 93). 34. Carson (1995: 94). 35. Carson (1995: 94). 36. Carson (1995: 93). 37. Carson (1995: 232). 38. Carson (1995: 94). 39. Solway (2001: 26). 40. Byrnes (2008: 28). 41. Parker (2005: 5). 42. Burt (2000: 56). 43. Carson (2002: x). 44. Carson (1990: 43). 45. Carson (1995: 94). 46. D’Agata (1997: 9). 47. Carson (1999: vii). 48. Carson (1999: vii). 49. Carson (1992: 8). 50. Di Michele (2001: 7).

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CHAPTER 6 THE GIFT OF RESIDUE Laura Jansen

‘residue’: 1. The remainder, the rest; that which is left. a. Of things [. . .] 4. That which remains after a process of combustion, evaporation, digestion, etc.; a deposit or sediment; a waste or residual product. ‘residue n. 1 and 4’, OED Third Edition Online, March 2010 As a classicist I was trained to strive for exactness and to believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible for us. This residue, which does not exist – just to think of it refreshes me. To think of its position . . . its motion . . . how it can never stop moving because I am in motion with it . . . to think of it as a shadow . . . to think of these things gives me a sensation of getting free. Anne Carson, ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’, Float, 2016: n.p. ‘This residue, which does not exist – just to think of it refreshes me’: I want to explore this idea of residue as a gift value informing Anne Carson’s classical praxis and thought.1 By ‘residue’, I mean something close to the remains of a trace, for instance, a mutilated word inscribed on a piece of papyrus, a word whose sound cannot be easily rendered, or a conceptual phenomenon that occurs and can only be grasped through movement, like the passing of time, or the picture motions that make up a film. By ‘gift’, I mean a kind of bonus whose value becomes apparent through reading and interpretative strategies and processes. For Carson, residue of this type exists, however impalpably, in spaces where her academic training gives way to her creative thought. This vision becomes central to her translation activities, which are often inseparable from her task as a writer and creator. In her classically oriented oeuvre, one can find residue of this kind at various points. My focus will be on her engagement with gaps, lacunae and silences. Carson regards these as no-space locations where classical matter appears as a ‘residual product’ that moves intangibly yet powerfully like a ‘shadow’, as she puts it in the citation above, as well as sites ripe for creative potential and freedom. Here, residue emerges as an artistic gift which, I argue, substantiates key facets of Carson’s classicism, especially her take on classical fragmentation and voice and, pointedly, her regard for the part these play in her modernity. *

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Blank spaces, fragmentary expression and the rendering of words and sounds lost in or escaping translation populate Carson’s page. One such example of this feature can be found in her upper-case transliterations of cry-sounds from Greek tragedy, like OIMOI or O TALAINA or PHEU PHEU, with which she stresses the intractability of emotion in the case of onomatopoeic sounds lacking a concrete word.2 Likewise, her deliberately disorienting translations of Mimnermus fragments in Plainwater (1995), which blend reality with fantasy and translator’s notes with modern colloquialism, can be taken as a commentary on our near impossibility of grasping full meaning in this archaic Greek poet’s corpus.3 These features dominate the visual aspect of Carson’s translation-page and could be taken together as a characteristic of her distinct translation style. But they also offer a key to a less explored inflection of her classical translation praxis: her strategy of plotting residual meaning from antiquity, as she traces its fickle movement through lexica between gaps, lacunae surrounding mutilated lettering, and the deeper silences hidden beneath certain words. While this side of Carson’s oeuvre is propelled by her knowledge of ancient Greek literature in particular, one usually finds her reaching out to continental thought and the visual arts to advance her readings of the fragmentary and/or hard-to-translate classical past in her modernity. Here, she makes fluid, unexpected alignments between archaic Greek poets and modern practitioners of continental philosophy and the visual arts. Below, I trace three dimensions of this approach, as they emerge in her engagement with Friedrich Hölderlin (Germany, 1770–1843), Walter Benjamin (Germany, 1892–1940) and painter Francis Bacon (Ireland, 1909–92). Each of these dimensions point to the aleatory nature of her encounters with Greek antiquity, as Carson finds fortuitous connections with different avenues of modern Western thought. My introduction to this volume describes in detail Carson’s aleatory classicism, and I hope that my reader takes that early discussion (pp. 6–8) on board when reading this chapter. The three dimensions explored here also crucially uncover moments in which Carson deliberately confounds academic and artistic spheres, and where one can detect, phenomenologically speaking, the tenor of her poetics taking specific turns. How this occurs and with what possible effects on Carson’s regard for antiquity are two overarching questions guiding me below.

Hölderlin’s gymnastics and ‘the third place to be’ In discussions of her translation process, Carson often focuses on a conceptual space which operates somewhere between the edges of words in the original and the target language. She has identified this space as a ‘third place to be’, an area in between, if you will, where certain hidden meanings can be located and disclosed. A key point of influence on this site of semantic formation is German Romantic poet-philosopher and translator Friedrich Hölderlin, whom Carson discusses in some extensive detail in ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’ (2016). In this chapbook, Carson explores the phenomenon of the ‘untranslatable’, which in her study takes the form of silent words, 76

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words without a linguistic equivalent, or words that exist only in motion between tangible and intangible spheres.4 Towards the end of this piece, she declares: Most of us, given a choice between chaos and naming, between catastrophe and cliché, would choose naming. Most of us see this as a zero-sum game – as if there were no third place to be: something without a name is commonly thought not to exist. And here is where we may be able to discern [. . .] the untranslatable. Translation is a practice, a strategy, or what Hölderlin calls ‘salutary gymnastics of the mind’ that does seem to give us a third place to be.5 While this passage concerns questions of untranslatability, it is also about how we read and trace meaning ‘in between’. Between chaos and order and catastrophe and cliché, there exists a space which can be easily ignored by the casual reader, not only because it is barely palpable, but also because, often, the transaction of meaning is more naturally regarded as a move from the unknowable to the concretely knowable. Getting to the knowable stage of meaning, that is giving a word a recognizable name, seems to give us a sense of cognitive control over a lexical world marked by transience and uncertainty. This may be so. But the A-to-B translation process also robs us of an alternative landscape of intellectual operation and potential, where the search for meaning – for ideas – can be more than a set of transactions moving toward a linguistic resolution; it can also become a site of intellectual and subject formation. For Carson, the third place to be is a space in which translators, as actors, can keep redefining, reforming their method and skill and, potentially even more productively, their understanding of who and what they are in the world as a result of their practice. For this is a space where the mind, as it grapples with translatable and untranslatable phenomena, can perform a ‘gymnastics of the mind’, exciting and strategic intellectual workouts in the manner proposed by Hölderlin.6 In a conversation with American playwright and poet Brighde Mullins, televised in 2003, Carson already describes the phenomenon of translation in terms similar to Hölderlin’s metaphor.7 Her reflections in this matter are some of the most revealing for anyone exploring her strategy of rendering meaning existing in between words, as well as the sense of self-knowledge which she believes can be obtained through this process: B.M. Can you speak a little about the phenomenon of translating? A.C. [Translation] gives one to think, in a way that no other practical exercise does, because you come to a place where you are standing at the edge of a word and you can see across the gap to other word, the word you are trying to translate and you can’t get there, and that space, between the word you are at and the word you can’t get to is unlike any other space in language – and something there is learnt about human possibilities, in that space, I am not sure what, but I like to test it. It’s humbling. Here is that third place to be in translation once more, which Carson would recall over a decade later in ‘Variations’ in specific connection with Hölderlin. Crucially, this time we 77

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are invited to envisage this space of praxis in terms of a ‘gap’, which we may notice but don’t quite know how to cross, as well as a training ground on which the translator – as practitioner – can attain levels of self-knowledge. For Carson, translation is an activity that involves a unique intellectual ability (‘[it] gives one to think’), as we attempt to move toward a purpose or intent in a place which often is ‘without a name’ and ‘thought not to exist’. Like gymnasts holding fast by the edge of a swing bar, translators stand ‘at the end of a word’ in a given language, as they envisage the gap to ‘the other word’ in another language and question their ability to cross that gap successfully (or not). This is a conceptual realm of activity, which points to the kind of ‘human possibilities’ which Carson ‘like[s] to test’, not just because it poses a welcome intellectual challenge, but because it is a ‘humbling’ experience that keeps her constantly working at and evolving her intellect and craft. The more one reads Carson, the clearer it becomes that, for her, the optimal state to act and be is in motion. The preface of Economy of the Unlost, which deals with the poetics of economy that Carson finds in her alignment of Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–468 bce) and Romanian-born German poet Paul Celan (1920–70), closes with a perfect illustration of this idea. Towards the end of the preface, Carson invites her reader to engage in a translation workout. Her example is the Greek preposition pros, whose semantically wide field of operation (to, toward, against; in the name of, by; close by, near, in addition to) shifts according to the case it governs (accusative, genitive or dative, respectively). But even within the single case of the accusative, motion remains at the core of its manifestation of meaning: Think of the Greek preposition πρός. When used with the accusative, [it] means ‘toward, upon, against, with, ready for, face to face, engaging, concerning, touching, in reply to, in respect of, compared with, according to, as accompaniment for.’ . . . πρὸς θεόν ‘And the Word was with God’ is how the translation usually goes. What kind of withness is it? Between logos and theos, the Word and God, there exists a word whose most historically appealing meaning has been ‘with’. Yet, if one considers its broad accusative character, this is a piece of language whose prepositional character is open to semantic motion, a motion that impels us to question, even challenge, the kind of ‘withness’ implied in the translation of pros in the first line of the Gospel of John. Here, naming, describing, pinning down meaning can become both a capricious activity and a mode of cementing ideas. Following this translation workout for the reader, Carson concludes the preface with some thoughts arising from the visual experience out of a train window, as she explores a sense of a temporal now that thrives in movement: I am writing this on the train to Milan. We flash past towers and factories, stations, yards, then a field where a herd of black horses is just turning to race uphill. 78

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‘Attempts at description are stupid,’ George Eliot says, yet one may encounter a fragment of unexhausted time. Who can name its transactions, the sense that fell through us of untouchable wind, unknown effort – one black mane?8 How do we make transactions of meaning in a state of constant motion? And what does this process tell us about how we attempt to make sense of the world around us, when all we seem to have is fragments moving through gaps in between? We find a tentative response in the preface to Eros the Bittersweet. Here, Carson recalls Kafka’s story ‘The Top’, about a philosopher trying to catch a top while still spinning. Here, meaning spins like a metaphor: remaining upright on an axis of normalcy aligned with the conventions of connotation and denotation, and yet: to spin is not normal, and to dissemble normal uprightness by means of this fantastic motion is impertinent. What is the relation of impertinence to the hope of understanding? [. . .] Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. [. . .] To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.9 All of this reminds me of the sculptural oeuvre of Costas Varotsos (Greece, 1955–), especially O Δρομέας, The Runner (1988), a 12-metre-high sculpture made of green shards of glass, originally erected in Omonoia Square in the centre of Athens in 1988 (see Figure 1), and now situated opposite the city’s Hilton Hotel.10 This is a piece whose

Figure 1 Costas Varotsos, The Runner (1988). 79

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very identity, like that of Kafka’s spinning top, the preposition pros, or the moving mane of a horse across the Italian landscape, attracts the viewer in puzzling ways, as they walk or drive pass it. Each time one sees this monumental sculpture made up of shards of glass, it seems to exert the mind in ‘impertinent’ ways, as one tries to grasp its colossal shifting form. But it would be a mistake to regard this sense of impertinence as a rude imposition. Rather, each shard, each fragment emulating constant motion, demands, daringly, that we ‘keep attention strong’ so as to ‘keep it from settling’.11 As we observe the image of the silhouette running, what we make of its meanings and effects will entirely be our semantic prerogative, as is the case with the preposition pros. It is the impertinence of its shifting form and the gaps that this form seemingly fills and leaves free through its representation of movement that aims to provoke us. For me, it amounts to an artistic space intended to make us rethink the stability of our daily world and the fixed meanings – the theories – that organize that world. Yet, it is not just that this image works against stability; it also evokes that in-between point between chaos and definite form/meaning which Carson highlights in her appeal to Hölderlin’s gymnasticsof-the-mind metaphor. We know that we are seeing a runner but cannot make out the determinate features, only residues of it. It is neither fully chaotic nor fully formed, neither utterly unidentifiable nor encased in a fixed shape and identity. Anne Carson’s practice of rendering meaning in archaic Greek authors suggests similar forms of provocation and indiscipline.12

Sappho’s lacunae and Benjamin’s intention In her preface to If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), Carson offers further reflections on the theme of translation as a residual space of semantic transaction. In this instance, however, this space becomes a stage on which she performs acts of creative restoration of missing words in Sappho’s poetry intended as songs, and which have come down to us mostly in fragmentary form. In a brief section entitled ‘On Marks and Lacks’, Carson tells her reader that, for each of her translations into English, she has marked partial lexica and/or lacunae by using a single bracket in the forms of ‘]’ or ‘[’ . The marks are meant to give ‘an impression of missing matter’ where Sappho meant to say something, either in sections of the destroyed papyrus or where letters are illegible (xi). Crucially, Carson stresses that this facet of the transmission of Sappho should not discourage the non-expert reader. In fact, brackets can bring us closer to the excitement of reading the fragmentary phenomenon we nowadays identify as Sappho’s poetry: Brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event [. . . They] are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp – brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.13 80

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This is the kind of translator’s prefatory note which blends erudition and creativity most successfully, in my opinion. For it seduces readers into wanting to get to know more intimately the world of the otherwise notoriously difficult and heavily mutilated text about to unfold. Furthermore, Carson’s invitation includes the possibility of being more than a reader – one can also become an active spectator of the complex practice ahead of her. Not knowing Sappho’s Greek, as is the case with many of Carson’s readers, or lacking the expertise to grasp the intricacies in Sappho’s critical apparatus, need not deprive anyone from tracing Sappho’s voice, even if this singer’s words have been corrupted and destroyed by time. The invitation also includes the possibility to immerse in dramatic acts, that is ‘the drama’, as Carson puts it, in which material actors such as brackets recreate the ‘papyrological event’, opening our reading of Sappho to ‘a free space of imaginal adventure’. What we make of this space is, for Carson, entirely up to how we choose to hear Sappho’s absent voices in a variety of contexts and scenarios. An example can help visualise this process. Take Carson’s translation of Sappho fr. 8 on Atthis, believed to be one of Sappho’s three companions,14 in the table below. Here, if we take Carson’s translation activities as a dramatic performance, as Carson prompts us, this begins in column i. with a tiny scrap of papyrus inscribed with Greek in ca. 2 ACE (P. Oxy.2289, fr. 3). The second act follows in column ii, which shows Carson’s transcription of two letters (l.1, .ν. o ̣ .) and four (partial) words (l.2 α ̣μφ, l.3 Ἄ]τθι and σο, l.4 νέφ), based on Eva-Maria Voigt’s 1971 edition of Sappho.15 The third act then gives us Carson’s own strategic translation, which includes single brackets ‘to give the impression of the missing [and fragmentary] matter’ we see in column ii.16 Columns ii and iii are the only ones actually visualized by readers in If Not, Winter. Yet, Carson’s use of brackets to point to the ‘papyrological event’ precisely work to imply column i, as does, one may add, the paratextual element offered by the stock image of an illustrated papyrus on the cover photo of If Not, Winter.

i. P. Oxy.2289 fr. 3 (Figure 2)

ii. C.’s transcription on left-side page

iii. C’s translation on right-side page17

].ν. ο ̣ .[ ] α μ̣ φ.[ Ἄ]τθι σο.[ ]. νέφ[ ] [

] ] ] Atthis for you ] ]

As opposed to other Anglophone translations, which either give the line ‘Atthis for you’ on a page also occupied by other translated fragments, or do not translate the piece at all,18 Carson translates Ἄ]τθι σο (l.3), while being faithful to her promise to readers to signal the ‘papyrological event’ from which the fragment derives, placing her brackets where words can barely be made out or suggest various morphological possibilities. Carson’s brackets are designed to give a degree of presence to the gaps, lacunae and partial lexica scattered on a piece of papyrus, or formally discussed in a critical edition like Voigt’s, which is written in German, with citations in other European languages, and 81

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with entries in Greek and Latin. In Carson’s translation, brackets are intended to ‘dramatize’ but also democratize the complexity behind this whole process of translating Sappho in fragmentary form. Her translation practice also affords us an opportunity to exercise the mind in imaginative ways, and to become something close to co-creators of spaces which traditional translations of Sappho usually occlude in an effort to remove difficulties typically considered to be the exclusive sphere of the trained specialist. Carson instead shows us those residual moments in which gaps and holes can reopen the mystery of a lost Sappho to a ‘free space of imaginal adventure’. One can trace aspects of Carson’s idiosyncratic practice of encountering antiquity in this intention to restore and re-energize the space of Sappho’s partial voice. I want to explore next this sense of restoration of Sappho’s voice in Carson’s dialogue with ancient commentators on Sappho’s fragments. *

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The modern translator is by no means the only practitioner who can potentially silence parts of Sappho. ‘A duller load of silence’ and ‘still more haunting [. . .] instances’19 of that silence can also be found in the practice of ancient commentators, who cite Sappho without context or give context without citing her words.20 Carson not only identifies this type of practice as ‘acts of deterrence’, occurring at the centre of Sappho’s text,21 but also as exercises which contrast sharply with her own aims of translating the poet: In translating such a stranded verse, I have sometimes manipulated its spacing on the page, to restore a hint of musicality or suggest syntactic motion.22 Many of Carson’s translations of Sappho perform such an ambitious programme of restoration. I offer as an example her rendition of Sappho fr. 56, included in Carson’s preface. Here, the strategic distribution of words spaced across Carson’s page (column ii) gesture toward her intention to restore the tempos and rhythms of Sappho’s poetry, originally in song form, as well as the motions produced by her characteristic syntactic economy: i. Sappho, f. 56 Voigt

ii. Carson’s translation

οὐδ᾿ ἴαν δοκίμωμι προσίδοισαν φάος ἀλίω ἔσσεσθαι σοφίαν πάρθενον εἰς οὐδένα πω χρόνον τεαύταν

not one girl I think who looks on the light of sun will ever have wisdom like this

With this example, Carson aligns her overall strategy with that of Walter Benjamin’s own translation principle of ‘intention’ in ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1955).23 As she puts it towards the end of her preface, ‘[t]his is a licence undertaken in deference to the 82

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principle that Walter Benjamin calls “the intention toward language” of the original’.24 It is worth citing a more substantial passage from Benjamin’s own text than Carson does in her preface to do fuller justice to the significance that his sense of intention has for her thinking about the translation process: The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original [. . .] Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside; it calls without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one. Not only does the aim of translation differ from that of a literary work – it intends language as a whole, taking an individual work in an alien language as a point of departure [. . .] The intention of [. . .] the translator [is . . .] ideational.25 (my emphasis) As she does in her reading of Hölderlin, Carson finds in Benjamin a key guide for her own thinking about the praxis of translation. This is ‘the intention toward the language of the original’, as she puts it in her preface.26 But this intention aims not at linguistic exactitude or neat correspondence – it points to the heart of Benjamin’s presentation of translation as a process in which a word in the original is ultimately mediated as a harmonious idea in the target language: In the realm of translation, too, the words εν αρχη ην ο λογος [in the beginning was the word] apply. [. . .] as regards the meaning, the language of translation can – in fact, must – let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony.27 Indeed, what attracts Carson is the intended effect of this notion of translation as an intentio to restore some of the ‘echoes’ and ‘reverberations of the original’ by positioning oneself, as Benjamin proposes, ‘on the outside [of . . .] language’. It is in this sense that the task of the translator is not to reproduce the original text but to recover its ‘ideational’ quality and tenor. We may have already noticed some of Benjamin in Carson’s own intention towards the silent language existing in lacunae and other gaps illustrated above. Carson herself openly declares this intention at the beginning of her preface: ‘I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through.’28 *

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We can pause momentarily at this stage to reflect on two emerging praxes (in the sense of ‘performances of an action’) of recovering the motions of Sappho’s silent voice, as proposed by Carson, in the graph below. Naturally, the course of action that we ourselves choose to adopt, if any, will be entirely dependent on our reading practices, and whether these practices have an academic and/or creative aim in mind. What guides and shapes these particular processes seems to amount to the kind of intentions and curiosities the practitioners uphold, as they accommodate ways of encountering the legacy of 83

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fragmentary or lost voices from the past. Who we are and what we think as practitioners here seems to be fundamentally shaped by how we intend towards our praxis.

Homer’s silences and Francis Bacon’s screams Silence is as important as words in the practice and study of translation.29 My last focus is on a very different yet equally telling form of residue in Carson’s ‘transcreation’ thought, to adopt Susan Bassnett’s term in this volume (Chapter 17): her fascination with a phenomenon she calls ‘escapades of translation’.30 A fragmentary poem of Sappho inscribed on a piece of papyrus features a form of physical silence, that is a lexical silence produced by the wearing out of materials and/or the passing of time. In ‘Variations’, Carson discusses another type of lexical silence, which she identifies as metaphysical. We recall that in her preface to Economy of the Unlost she draws our attention to the meanings hidden in the accusative case governed by the Greek preposition pros, a word which, depending on our rendition, will give a voice to one meaning over the silencing of another. In ‘Variations’, Carson looks even deeper into the metaphysical silence embedded in some words: But now what if, within this silence, you discover a deeper one – a word that does not intend to be translatable. A word that stops itself.31 In Odyssey 10.305, Homer gives us one such word – moly – a plant with pharmaceutical properties which Hermes gives Odysseus to use against Circe’s magical power to turn men into pigs. What interests Carson about moly is that Homer presents it as belonging to ‘the language of the gods’ (μῶλυ δέ μιν καλέουσι θεοί, ‘Moly is what the gods call it’, l. 305). For humans, then, moly becomes untranslatable, a word whose silence contains deeper silences only translatable by immortal beings. It is a word whose semantic motion moves not only beyond cases and syntax in a sentence – it also operates quasi-fantastically between human and divine spheres. We may try to decipher what moly means, as linguists do, tracing the presence of ‘some older layer of Indo-European preserved in Homer’s 84

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Greek’.32 Yet again, for Carson, this kind of disciplinary endeavour, while highly respectable, would involve an act of deterrence. For Homer ‘wants this word to fall silent’. At this juncture, Carson’s begins to focus metaphorically on the idea of ‘white paint’. Thrown onto the surface of a page, as if it were a canvas for painting, white paint figuratively represents the concealment of meanings we cannot read or see but that we know exist on a deeper level. Like moly, these meanings are untranslatable, splashed with white paint moving across human and divine spheres: Homer has splashed white paint not on the faces of the gods but on their word. What does this word hide? We will never know. But the smudge on the canvas [. . .] remind[s] us [of] something important about these puzzling beings, the gods of epic [. . .] know not how to die. And who can say but the four unstranslatable letters of moly might be the place where that knowledge is hidden. There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.33 It is at this point that Carson aligns Homer’s silent words in transit with the motions and variations found in the paintings of Francis Bacon.34 For those unfamiliar with this painter, Bacon is renowned for his portrayals in sequence of partially disfigured faces and bodies, such as those of popes and crucifixions, as well as for his depictions of raw emotion, such as screams.35 Carson, herself also a visual artist, as Yopie Prins shows in Chapter 10, is here particularly interested in how Bacon’s paint strokes transmit hidden sensation in his medium, and how this practice involves the avoidance of clichés and/or the stabilization of meaning. One of Bacon’s most well-known pieces, Study after Velásquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), illustrates these ideas well. For the viewer, Bacon’s portrait unlocks the visceral, loud emotion hidden deeply in the silence and psychological control that Velásquez secures in his 1650 version of the Pope. When put together, the two paintings become intermedial, depicting a single emotion in its full movement and spectrum, from restrained composure and repression of sound in Velásquez to the full release of a scream in Bacon. Here, the translation of this emotion cannot be solely found in each painter’s intention, but instead in the process by which deep silence and loud sound interact between the two masterpieces. Yet, if we get to know both works well, we could anachronistically say that Velásquez has thrown white paint on Bacon’s Pope, while Bacon’s Pope emerges as an intention to translate something ideational, as Benjamin contends, in Velásquez’ original (see Figure 3 and Figure 4). Whether we are after the silence or the scream, both sensations are silently at play in residual form in both paintings. ‘Francis Bacon does not invoke the metaphor of translation when he describes what he wants to do to your nerves by means of paint, but he does at times literally arrive at silence, as when he says to his interviewer [David Sylvester], “You see this is the point at which one absolutely cannot talk about painting. It’s in the process.” ’36 Like Homer’s moly, certain ideas escape translation, and their meanings can only be located in the motion of silent processes, or behind the white paint that covers their semantic completeness. It is through this sense of untranslatability, 85

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Figure 3 Diego Velázquez, Pope Innocent X, Figure 4 Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s 1650.

Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953.

when a ‘word [. . .] stops itself, in that silence’ that ‘one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free’.37 *

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Epilogue: the gift of residue and the stains of antiquity In surfaces perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s a historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greek come to us in wreckage, and I admire that – the layers of time [. . .] All those layers add up more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing.38 I have attempted to show how Anne Carson explores various types of residue in her engagement with classical and modern written and visual texts, and how her interest in the residual sheds light on her intellectual and creative vision. In tracing this aspect of Carson’s oeuvre, one evident effect is her indiscipline towards the more conservative elements of her classical training, but also the autonomous ‘third-way’ character of her classical poetics. This aspect of her classical engagements evolves from her activities as a translator, activities which reveal an artist constantly stretching her skills and abilities in the form of a gymnastics of the mind which never settles and never compromises. It is in this continuous workout and training field that one can locate, as long as we keep moving, 86

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the swerving formation of her artistic self. Yet, one can also locate residual tensions at the heart of her classical profile: ‘As a classicist I was trained to strive for exactness and to believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible for us. This residue, which does not exist – just to think of it refreshes me,’ as Carson puts it in the epigraph that opens this chapter. If one follows Carson’s own philosophy of reading, residual traces in between language, images and silences, this tension between the academic and artist in her classical profile, points profitably to her sense of the classical tradition. Like Bacon’s white paint, ‘the stain on a page’ featuring an ancient Greek poem directs our attention to a space that conceals her connections between, for instance, the past of a Sappho and the present moment of her reading Sappho. Here, the tea stain becomes a third point of reference disclosing the pull she – we – may experience between the desire for retrieving Sappho in perfect exactitude and the near impossibility of that desire, as the world keeps moving and staining the past. For Carson, this kind of stain impertinently presents antiquity as an imperfect notion, an incomplete cultural phenomenon which moves along with history and its temporal layers, covered in silences, acts of deterrence, or white paint. Yet the stain also operates metaphorically as a gift, if we take its residual substances, not as obstacles of the classical past, but instead as welcome marks of its classical presence.

Notes 1. My warm thanks to James Porter and Luke Roman for their incisive comments on drafts of this essay, and to Lottie Brown for her proofreading, enthusiasm, and support. 2. Carson (1996: 5). 3. Eccleston (2017: 272–92). 4. As far as I am aware, Carson does not make any explicit connections with Barbara Cassin’s philosophical study of the untranslatable, for which see Cassin (2014) and an interview with Cassin (2004). There are several points of contact between the two thinkers’ approach to the untranslatable which I am currently exploring for a future study. 5. Carson (2016: 11). The chapbooks in Float are not paginated, thus the page numbers given here are my own. Carson cites D. Constantine (2001: 7) with Hölderlin’s line translated ‘a salutary gymnastics of the mind’. I have adapted the citation removing the article for the correct use of the plural ‘gymnastics’. 6. Elsewhere, in a letter to a friend written in 1794, Hölderlin expands on this idea: ‘Translation does our language good, like gymnastics. It gets beautifully supple when forced to accommodate itself to foreign beauty and greatness and also often to foreign whims’ (VI, 109–10, 125). See Constantine (2011: 81). 7. Readings & Conversations (March 2001) 8. Carson (1999: viii). 9. Carson (1986: xi). 10. https://www.greeknewsagenda.gr/index.php/topics/culture-society/6847-costas-varotsos-thepoet-sculptor. 11. Carson (1999: viii).

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Anne Carson/ Antiquity 12. For an understanding of Carson’s ‘indiscipline’, see my Introduction p. 12. 13. Carson (2002: xi). 14. Atthis is also found in Sappho fr. 49, 90, 96 and 131, who, according to the Suda Suda, Sappho (Σ 107) (Campbell, Testimony #2). 15. Preface, x. 16. Preface, xi. 17. It is worth noticing that other Anglophone translations either do not translate this fragment (Powell) or offer only the line ‘Atthis, for you’ (Lombardo). 18. Lombardo (2002) and Powell (2007). 19. Carson (2002: xi; xii). 20. Examples of this abound. For the former category, Carson cites Apollonios Dyskolos, On Conjunctions 490 = Sappho fr. 107 Voigt; Pollux 7.49 = Sappho fr. 177 Voigt; and Chrysippos On Negatives 13 = Sappho fr. 56 Voigt, and for the latter Libanius, Orations 12.99; Stobaios Florilegium 3.29.58; and Aristotle, Rhetoric b. See her preface, xi–xiii. 21. Carson (2002: xiii). 22. Carson (2002: x). 23. Now included in Illuminations, with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt (1999: 70–82). Carson’s specific translation is on page 77 of this edition. ‘The Task of the Translator’ was originally published as a preface to Bejamin’s translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, a text added to the second edition of his Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). 24. Carson (2002: xii). 25. Benjamin (1999: 77). 26. Carson (2002: xii). 27. Benjamin (1999: 78). 28. Carson (2002: x). 29. Carson (2016: 1). 30. Carson (2016: 4). 31. Carson (2016: 1). 32. Carson (2016: 2). 33. Carson (2016: 2). 34. Following her outstanding analysis of parallel silences in the transcription and translation of Joanne d’Arc’s trial from Middle French to legal Latin (2–4). 35. See Sylvester (2016) which includes 141 images of Bacon’s artwork. For a televised version of Sylvester’s interview, ‘The Brutality of Fact’, see https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hThzlTF7uVA. 36. Carson (2016: 5). For the full script, see Silvester (2016), Interviews 1–3. 37. Carson (2016: 11). 38. Aitken (2004: 202).

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CHAPTER 7 CARSON FRAGMENT Sean Gurd

Ancient Greek has a class of small words called ‘particles’. The name makes them seem unimportant, as though they were as insignificant as little bits of matter. But material particles are also fundamental: they’re the basic building blocks which create whatever we sense and love. Mostly single-syllable words, Greek particles come close to the beginning of phrases and they usually link the phrase they’re in with the one that came before. It’s a bad idea to translate them literally: you end up saying things like ‘but’, ‘and’, ‘indeed’, ‘and so’ in every sentence (and sometimes even more frequently than that). Worse, you end up misrepresenting the work that particles actually do. Greek particles aren’t logical operators. Rather, they articulate the mental phrasing of a series of ideas. They join notions the way a touch of blue in the pigment can give a painted sunflower to the sky that surrounds it. Take, for example, the particle men. A men tells you that the idea it is attached to is part of a complex problem: when you read a men you know there will be more to the story, and this ‘more’ is signalled by another particle, de, which will be attached to some subsequent idea or ideas. If someone is outwardly joyful but secretly sad, Greek might say ‘he is happy in public [men], but at home [de] he weeps’. There is a fragment of the archaic Greek elegiac poet Mimnermus that contains a men, but the context in which it is cited leaves out the de that probably followed; this is a poetic utterance that cries out for a response but is surrounded by silence. Carson translated this fragment in The Brainsex Paintings: They (on the one hand) made his chilly tears immortal neglecting to tell him his eyes were not1 This is about Tithonus, who received eternal life but not eternal youth. Carson comments: In this case, it is syntax, not metrics, that shapes the human predicament. The poem begins by setting out the first half of an unusually common Greek construction: the particle men (‘on the one hand’) is generally coordinated with the particle de (‘on the other hand’) to create a balanced sentence or two-part remark. It is as if some other side of Tithonos’ story were about to be set in motion and carry him on past petrification. Sadly this does not happen. Of course the fragment may be incomplete. But then so is Tithonos.2

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The fragmentariness of this bit of Mimnermus is, for Carson, constitutive of its meaning. Something has interrupted the poem, taken particles of its being away, and because of this the poem says what it says. The same is true of human life, which is defined by its own inevitable state of brokenness. Something similar happens in Carson’s translation of another fragment of Mimnermus, which contains caesurae at positions she considers unusual. A caesura is a moment in a run of metrical verse when a strong word division allows the singer to pause and take a breath without destroying the identity of the rhythmic form. Caesurae let the singer escape the shackles of metronomic time. But such pauses can also come across as syncopations or hitches. Carson reads them as the sound of death slipping into the steady rhythm of youth and pleasure. She translates them as little sighs of negation, as though in the midst of a blissful moment there arose a subtle chorus of whispered denial: Up to your honeybasket hilts in your ore – or else Death? For yes how gentle it is to go swimming inside her the secret swimming of men and women but (no) then the night hide toughens over it (no) then bandages Crusted with old man smell (no) then bowl gone black nor bud nor boys nor women nor sun no spores (no) at (no) all when God nor hardstrut nothingness close its fist on you3 Her commentary: Exactly at the middle of the poem, which consists of ten verses organized in five elegiac couplets, time cuts through the narrative of flesh: ‘but (no) then’. It is a very unusual caesura, a notably nonlinear psychology. We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken.4 Here Carson has in effect invented a particle. (No) is English for the rhythmic hiccup in Greek elegiac metre. And like Greek particles, (no) has a meaning that can only be articulated through expansion, interpretation, paraphrase, with the nuance of your own way of being and speaking. Indeed, The Brainsex Paintings might itself be an extended gloss on (no), on the interruptions that define things. Don’t think, though, that interruption or fragmentation is merely the symbol of death. Nor is it half of a process that might move us forward into some brighter life. This (no) is neither Hegelian nor Adornian: it sets nothing in motion, nor does it stop anything from transforming itself. Carson’s (no) creates fragments that are buoyed by nothingness. Consider incompleteness as a verb. Every verb has a tense, it must take place in time. Yet there are ways to elude these laws. The Greek verb system includes a tense 90

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called aorist (which means ‘unbounded’ or ‘timeless’) to capture that aspect of action in which, for example, a man at noon runs directly on top of his own shadow. So in fr. 13(a) Mimnermos uses an aorist participle to describe how men move in water. Like acrobats of the psychic misdemeanor we call history, warriors qua warriors live hovering above the moment when action will stop. They are the receptacle of a charge that shoots itself toward the night side, spoor of its own explanation. Mimnermos is a poet intrigued by beginnings and endings, but not in the usual way – who reveres noon as a study in true black: ‘socketed.’5 The darkness at the centre of the sun holds us in place even as it breaks our connection with everyone and everything. We move as isolated particles, not even connected to light via our shadows, surrounded by void. But the void, in Carson, is anything but empty. Or, rather, the emptiness of the void proves a rich plenitude, for we can never stop imagining what’s not there. There is no wine in Mimnermus’ verse, no warm bath, no running animal, no cherries or silk or pale blue bones, no dice, no slapstick nights of song. This list of what’s not in Mimnermus could go on forever – and so this adumbration of the void is itself a fragment, inevitably broken off. Fragmentation as logic ramifies itself through the Brainsex Paintings at nearly every level: it becomes a fractal process in which nothing envelops everything, including itself. *

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There was a trick with film Lev Kuleshov learned to do. Take some footage of the Eiffel Tower and splice it to some footage of the Brandenburg Gate; when you show the resulting film, audiences will see a new, entirely fictive space which includes both Paris and Berlin. Cut footage of a man looking down with footage of a bowl of soup, and the man looks hungry. Replace the soup with a girl in a coffin, and the man seems to grieve; replace her with a living woman on a couch, and his grief turns to desire. Nowadays people call this the ‘Kuleshov effect’. It discloses the power of juxtaposition and the fungibility of appearance. Film peels layers off the visible world, makes it available to the work of scissors and tape; you can resequence appearances to provoke new thoughts in people. Film is quite different from language in this regard. You can’t take words and cut and paste them with the same freedom as you can with film, for the simple reason that a word is never quite your own. Modernists looking for the equivalent of the Kuleshov effect in language needed much more radical means of separating words from the apparent continuities that contained them. In Zürich, Tristan Tzara cut words out of newspapers and rearranged them to create new and unforeseen combinations (the ‘cut up’ became a central part of twentieth-century art and popular culture). In Paris, André Breton and his friends started co-writing texts, with each writer adding a word; a text seemed to evolve autonomously this way, heading out in strange new directions. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot dissolved the glue linking images and ideas, producing massive 91

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juxtapositions that Pound called ideograms and Eliot, more simply, fragments. Walter Benjamin collected passages from sources describing the nineteenth century, intending to juxtapose them in an art of ‘citation without quotation marks’ in an attempt to shock readers out of their habits of understanding. These techniques were anything but new, at least to Carson. Way out west, in the south Italian Greek town of Himera, the seventh-century bce poet Stesichorus lived in a frontier world where the carefully mapped and traditionally guarded world had started to fall apart. Back east, where the musical expression that mattered was the epic tradition we call Homeric, the centre still held: [B]eing is stable and particularity is set fast in tradition. When Homer mentions blood, blood is black. When women appear, women are neat-ankled or glancing. Poseidon always has the blue eyebrows of Poseidon. Gods’ laughter is unquenchable. Human knees are quick. The sea is unwearying. Death is bad. Cowards’ livers are white. Homer’s epithets are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption.6 Things were a little less buttoned down in Himera, ‘among refugees who spoke a mixed dialect of Chalcidian and Doric. A refugee population,’ claims Carson, ‘is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen. Words bounce.’7 This was a context in which the explosive rhetorics of high modernism were not required. History and geography had dynamited Stesichorus and his fellow Himerians out of the carefully plotted continuity of the metropolitan east. Thus Stesichorus found himself able to disconnect nouns from their typical adjectives, to find new qualities in things and create new meanings out of juxtapositions. The words out there had become like strips of film just waiting to be spliced together in new ways. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless. Or hell as deep as the sun is high. Or Herakles ordeal strong. Or a planet middle night stuck. Or an insomniac outside the joy. Or killings cream black. Some substances proved more complex. To Helen of Troy, for example, was attached an adjectival tradition of whoredom already old by the time Homer used it. When Stesichoros unlatched her epithet from Helen there flowed out such a light as may have blinded him for a moment.8 Stesichorus was working in a language of fragmented particles, his world full of aleatory energy. And time has done the favour of returning his poems to a fragmentary state: the connecting tissue has melted away, and fragments skid over the page in jubilant freedom. There’s a moment in the Iliad where the Greeks have to pick a hero by lot: they place their names on ostraca, put the ostraca into a helmet, and shake the helmet until a name bounces out. That’s what Stesichorus’ work is like. It’s as though 92

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Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat. The fragment numbers tell you roughly how the pieces fell out of the box. You can of course keep shaking the box. ‘Believe me for meat and for myself,’ as Gertrude Stein says. Here. Shake.9 *

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In the late 1950s Lukas Foss founded the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble, a quartet dedicated to producing music spontaneously. Foss thought improvised music needed to incorporate what he called ‘the chance element’: if some accidental sound or unexpected phrase appeared, he wanted musicians who could answer back.10 Foss emphasized the importance of presence and attention on the part of performers. He wanted a musical coordination obtained via ‘reaction, in other words, via musical points of reference, via listening and playing accordingly’.11 He was by no means abandoning the function of the composer; rather, he was searching for a way to use composition to create living, responsive, open performances in which chance elements were given the opportunity to be heard and metabolized. In his 1964 setting of The Fragments of Archilochus, Foss built Guy Davenport’s translations into a complex construction which tasked the conductor with selecting and arranging musical elements. The piece’s design makes the execution of Foss’s score different in every performance, depending on the conductor’s choices. These choices are, from the point of view of the composer, chance elements: he cannot predict what choices will be made. The score amounts to a set of fragments to be endlessly shuffled and redistributed, reproducing at the musical level what has happened to Archilochus’ text. Foss scored The Fragments of Archilochus for eight sub-ensembles or forces, and divided these into two sets. Each of these sets was assigned a group and, within each group, a part. This is done ad libitum by the conductor. The score is broken into twelve phrases (A-M; there is no J), each a single page of music. The conductor chooses which phrase he wants to begin with and may then cycle through in order; for example, G-H-IK-L-M-A-B-C-D-E-F. Or they may choose the order of phrases according to their own taste or desire. The ensemble plays the score three times, but everyone does not always play or sing their part: a ‘performance scheme’ specifies which parts are sung and which are silent for each phrase on each run through the complete score. The distribution of silent parts means that none of the twelve pages or ‘phrases’ are ever played in their entirety; there is always somebody ‘sitting out’ and listening to the rest of the ensemble. This seems to have two consequences. First, it effectively guarantees that there is always an audience to every note sung or played – even when the seats of the concert hall are empty. This may have been quite important to Foss, for whom listening was a crucial part of musical improvisation. Second, in a piece setting the fragments of Archilochus by creating and then directing the disposition of musical fragments, it also projects fragmentation horizontally down the score, in that the full score is never expressed all at once. 93

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Could we read those silences as little caught breaths, syncopations that punctuate the otherwise continuous run of notated music? Foss’s little (no)? *

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An athlete who wins at an event like the Olympian Games momentarily stands out among his peers and poses a problem to his group: on the one hand, the victory tempts the victor towards arrogance and overweening self-praise, while on the other hand it provokes the community towards envy, resentment and disproportionate blame. How can the collective recognize and overcome such momentary hyper-visibility and competitive excellence? One solution, which Carson says was proposed by Simonides in the very early fifth century bce, was the musical genre known as epinician song. This style of music celebrated an individual who had momentarily outshone his community through victory, but also articulated a set of partial analogies with myth, religion and morality that were meant to reintegrate him into his community.12 At the core of this delicate operation is the poet’s ability to balance precisely at the midpoint between praise and blame, operating as a technician of the distribution of public recognition. ‘The poet is one who knows how to draw a clear boundary between praiseworthy and blameworthy actions,’ Carson writes, ‘and who is obligated to announce the difference in public poetry. The justice and health of his community depend on it.’13 Without epinician song, the moral landscape risks becoming a messy combination of ill-measured and badly distributed praise and blame, a paint can full of random pigments. The praise poet pays to the victor a ‘wage of song’ that will unmix praiseworthy action from unjust blame and clear away the shadow and smoke of hatred. As such the poem is a process of spatial definition. It marks out the area within which a man may prove himself good. Its language is that of boundaries and space and the purification of bounded spaces.14 The singer’s methodology is to administer and distribute awards based on some common sense of right and wrong, an aspiration that was a frequent theme in Greek wisdom writing.15 Doing so might imply dropping a grid over the moral landscape so that when things happen they are already sized up and ready for judgement. But that, it turns out, is not the direction Carson’s Simonides pursues. Rather, the poet is like a finely-tuned and highly sensitive instrument that responds sympathetically to different actions. This almost automatic voicing in response to action articulates the action as good or bad,16 and ties the victor, the singer and the community together in a single moral and aesthetic continuum, a unified medium in which excellence moves from action to song to community and back. Thus the praise poet does not so much reintegrate the victor into his community as assert what was always already there: a continuous process of belonging that underpins everything all at once. Carson suggests – playfully, maybe – that we have the first praise poem by Simonides, an ode to Scopus preserved in fragmentary form in Plato’s dialogue Protagoras. It is preserved there because Socrates attempts an extended commentary on it. But the 94

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preservation is fragmentary: Plato only cites parts of the poem and Socrates is unclear about when he’s paraphrasing, so that to this day no one can agree on the most basic questions of its boundaries or restoration. We do not know where the poem begins, where it ends, how many verses are missing, or what should be the order of the verses that are here. We cannot tell whether Socrates and Protagoras are quoting, paraphrasing, misremembering, or deliberately falsifying the original text.17 Carson places the blame for this awkward textual situation firmly on Socrates and his hermeneutic method. His close reading of Simonides’ poem relies heavily on violent transgressions of Greek syntax and idiom; he favors a technique of creative hyperbaton whereby words are trajected out of the boundaries of their natural phrasing into new and strange mixtures of sense.18 But Simonides’ poem isn’t really mixed into Plato’s text. Rather, it is fragmented and distributed like so many shards through the Platonic matrix. Socrates’ readings do not create new blends; rather, they break the poem up more, ignoring syntax and tesserating the words, generating meaning by creating juxtapositions. Most notoriously, Socrates proposes a hyperbaton in the text and understands Simonides as saying that he ‘willingly praises whoever does nothing bad’, while the natural way to read the Greek is that he ‘praises whoever willingly does nothing bad’. This brings Simonides’ moral vision in line with Socrates’ own: Socrates proposes that one never chooses to be vicious: vice, he thinks, is always caused by theoretical error or lazy thinking. But this reading also requires that Simonides approach Greek in a very idiosyncratic way: he can put words in weird places, and Socrates can relocate them in others, because the continuities of syntax have been replaced by the juxtapositions of semantics. This is perfectly in line with Socratic ethics, according to Carson, who sees Socrates’ innovation as an inward-turning self-interrogation with violent social consequences. ‘The moral health he prescribes’ she writes, is one that each man achieves individually by searching through his beliefs in a process of dialectic. Its objective is to learn, to practice, the art that will unmix evil from good in all the choices of human life.19 This ‘unmixing’ is permanent. It leaves everything it touches in a state of isolation. If Simonides was trying to mix the victor back into his community, then Socrates was trying to keep him in a state of unmixed suspension. His turn to inward self-interrogation inaugurates a world of atomic subjects, a society of fragments. *

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Such a longing for love, rolling up under my heart, poured down much mist over my eyes, filching out of my chest the soft lungs – 20 Carson remarks that ‘with line 3 Eros completes his violation. One quick theft whistles the lungs straight out of the lover’s chest. Naturally, this ends the poem: with the organ of breath gone, speech is impossible.’21 This makes it seem as though Carson thinks Archilochus lifted his pen right here, that the dramatic loss of voice is meant to enact the erotic breathlessness the poem described. But that’s not quite right, for – as Carson immediately points out – this is an accidental fragment.22 And yet it isn’t accidental at all. Somehow, this is an essential fragment without anyone intending it to be: somehow, it breaks off right when the breath fails and perfectly enacts its own theme. Carson reads phrenes, ‘lungs’, as referring to the breath and, more crucially, to perception and cognition – it being the view of Onians that the lungs were the seat of cognition for most, if not all, archaic Greek thought.23 But Carson also connects this – in a manner that is not Onians’ – to ‘oral culture’. Carson finds in oral society a worldview in which everything ‘breathes together’, in which ‘breath is everywhere. There are no edges.’24 This emphasis on a holistic conspiracy is also, says Carson, central to the experience of love or Eros; ‘inescapable as the environment itself, with his wings he moves love in and out of all creatures at will’.25 But Archilochus does not belong to this archaic, oral, holistic universe; he is ‘at the edge’, and for him the all-penetrating erotic field is a ‘violation’. At what edge, exactly? The edge represented by alphabetic writing. A written text separates words from one another, separates words from the environment, separates words from the reader (or writer) and separates the reader (or writer) from his environment. Separation is painful.26 Archilochus lives in this painful world. There’s a coalescence of factors at work here: alphabetization, which lets Archilochus ‘break pieces of passing sound off from time and hold them as his own’,27 integrates with a second historical development, which Carson characterizes as equally important: the emergence of subjectivity, the ‘birth of the self ’. Archilochus, for Carson, was among the first to record the experience of ‘individual consciousness’, that sense of selfhood as enveloped and contained, as something with edges. Love plays a central role in this process, though Carson’s account is less clear than one might like. Invoking Freud, she speaks of a decision to demarcate an edge between self and world, to love self and hate non-self.28 This certainly is an important part of psychogenesis in the psychoanalytic scheme. But there is a second, equally important part of psychoanalysis’ view of the subject, which Carson acknowledges in an oddly disavowed form, attributing it to Bruno Snell and via a reading of the compound adjective glukupikron, which stands for ‘a moment of ambivalence that splits the soul’.29 Blocked Eros causes the self to spark into existence, brings personal feelings to the level of consciousness.30 This is close, though not identical, to Freud’s diagnosis of ‘Oedipal 96

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subjectivity’. One difference is that for Carson, erotic blockage comes when the loved object is not available to desire, while for Freud the erotic blockage that produces the self is self-administered: the male child ends his maternal attraction as unacceptable and through this self-censorship initiates his own process of individuation and begins to create a sphere of unconscious thought. Although this theory of primal disavowal seems disavowed in Carson’s invocation of Snell, it emerges much more fully elsewhere. For Eros, which seems to evoke the self when it is blocked, is also blocked by the self as inimical to its sense of autonomy. Love threatens the self by blurring its edges, and the pathos of early love poetry is, for Carson, a register of this curiously contradictory process of self-emergence and self-defence. Frustrated desire produces selfhood: but at the same time selfhood produces itself by treating desire as self-destructive (and therefore, presumably, working to frustrate it). This paradoxical psycho-generative process has a counterpart in the contrast between writing and orality. Carson asserts that ‘self-control is minimally stressed in an oral milieu;’31 in contrast, literacy produces closure, turning the subject away from the world and the senses. Readers learn to focus on the text at the exclusion of all else, turning away from the world and creating a still inwardness that comes to be cherished and defended as a self.32 The genesis of subjectivity in authors like Archilochus and Sappho is thus, for Carson, no accident. The presence of their poems, the fact that they were transmitted as alphabetic texts, is a constitutive part of the experience they record and enact; for it is only after reading and writing has made it possible for you to experience yourself as selfcontained that love will come to seem a corrosive force that melts away at your edges. This is a book about love and writing. Asked if she enjoyed the process of writing in an interview in 2016, Carson replied, Just making the letters. I never really got over the fun of making letters. Do you remember when they taught cursive in schools? I think they don’t anymore. But I still enjoy it – just the physical act and all the – the whole business of making a thing out of language.33 In the late 1990s, shortly after I had finished studying with Carson, I told her how hard I found it to write, how exhausting and humiliating the process was. I asked her if she found writing difficult. She said it was effortless. I think we may have been talking about different things. When the lungs are stolen from Archilochus’ speaker’s chest, several things happen all at once. The breath of the spoken word is removed in the production of a written text, and the inner border of the self is violated and erased. These two processes are not the same: they are even contradictory, in as much as lungless writing stands for a selfcontained subject and the lungless lover stands for the subject losing its edge. But the contradiction is essential: it could be described as a form of the pressure that the Oedipal subject experiences, predicated as he is on the endless fluctuation between repression and return. *

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Carson defended the first version of Eros the Bittersweet as her dissertation in 1981 (its original title was Odi et Amo ergo sum), then published the book in 1986. I met her sixteen years later, on the first day of Introductory Ancient Greek in my first year at McGill. Until then, I had been completely committed to a career as a musician; but that summer a last-minute change of heart led me to enrol in a BA programme instead. I thought I had acquired a strong sense of self and a deep internal drive. Encountering Carson’s writing completely exploded that belief. She distributed her just-published Mimnermus translations to our class. Though I had just enough Greek to know there was no (no) in that Mimnermus fragment, I had no idea what a caesura was. I was chipping away at the edifice of Greek philology and Carson seemed to be kicking it over with the tools of a literary avant-garde I had learned from Toronto’s second-hand bookstores. The result of my crashing into Carson like this was a sustained struggle to regain something I could recognize as my own voice. Eventually and out of desperation I stopped reading her work altogether. Instead, I read Robert Duncan and Steve McCaffery and BP Nichol, Charles Olson and George Bowering and Dionne Brand. I apprenticed with other teachers: from Brian Stock I learned to see selfhood as the product of daily, continual and effortful work, cognitive labour not unlike physical exercise, in which reading could play a part but didn’t need to, and which could be referred to by various names: ‘spiritual exercises’ (Hadot), ‘care of the self ’ (Foucault), ‘care of the soul’ (Patochka), ‘contemplative exercises’ (Stock). Like many others, I came to distrust the McLuhan–Havelock–Ong line of media determinism. I learned to want a more fluid, more historical understanding of the interactions between complex social and technological phenomena. I began to worry that Snell’s ‘birth of the self ’ privileged Western consciousness in particular ways, as Freud’s clearly did. I took a class with Ted Chamberlin – like Brian Stock, a Toronto-based reader and critic of the Ong–Havelock line – and I learned to worry about the work ‘oral–literate’ divisions did. Chamberlin liked to tell a story about Antquililibix (Mary Johnson), a Gitksa elder who tried to convince the Canadian Judge Alan McEachern that the Gitksa had a claim to their ancestral lands because they had stories about it. McEachern denied the claim, in part because ‘he believed Antquililibix but not her song’.34 The Gitksa oral tradition, it seemed, had no standing in a Canadian court of law because its orality made it, for McEachern, unreliable. Literate societies, Chamberlin taught me, asserted cultural and legal privilege over ones they designated as ‘oral’. He led me to suspect that the Havelock–Ong ideas were not just wrong but harmful: they helped colonizing powers engage in the dispossession that had destroyed so many over the last several centuries.35 In short, I moved on, forged a way of working that I trust to be my own. But it is fragile. Although I tell everyone within earshot that I learned Greek from Carson, I continue to be afraid that if I get too close to that voice my own will suddenly wash away. So I was – I admit it is perverse – relieved to discover in Eros the Bittersweet a connection between writing and self-consciousness. That’s a link I now deeply mistrust. The discovery gives me a little extra space, a little more freedom from Carson’s overwhelming voice. 98

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On the other hand – and I realize this only now, late in the process of putting this essay down – maybe the voice I heard and resisted was never Carson’s at all. Perhaps it was someone else’s altogether. ‘Respectable gentlemen like you and I’, she writes in her essay on Simonides.36 Carson’s early work with classical texts, it now seems to me, is deeply ironized and carefully separated from any putatively ‘personal’ voice. These early texts have a fictive and slightly warped scholarly tone, as though they were parodic representations of the men that, at the time, largely occupied positions of influence and authority in classics. Maybe these men are the ones speaking in Eros the Bittersweet’s sections on writing. Maybe, too, it was the unlikely opacity of the critical voice in The Brainsex Paintings that I found so overwhelming, to which I could barely restrain myself from answering back. *

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Everybody knows about John Cage’s 4′33″. It’s a silly joke, until you actually get it, at which point it becomes almost unbearably profound. Cage scored four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence for solo piano. The point was to clear a space for all the other sounds that were going on during the performance. As the tuxedoed pianist sits there at his instrument carefully keeping time, an unexpected symphony arises: shuffling feet, breathing, sniffling, the sound of the HVAC, the street traffic outside, shifting in seats, coughing, tittering, footsteps . . . Cage called this ‘letting the sounds be themselves’; it demanded a heightened form of listening, a greater attentiveness to what was there to be heard. He gave the experiment two kinds of justification. The first was musical: he placed himself in a line of composers who took noise to be as musically useful as musical tone.37 The second was Buddhist: Cage’s persistent interest in letting sounds be themselves meant relinquishing his intentionality as a composer, creating a context in which the mind, as he put it, has nothing to do – so that the mind could experience itself just being itself. ‘Silence’, in other words, was a technique by which Cage sought to get out of the way – out of his own way, and everybody else’s. I find a lot of similarity between this and Carson’s professed method in If Not, Winter, her translation of Sappho’s fragments. She calls this method ‘standing out of the way’,38 using it, she says, to let Sappho show through. Carson doesn’t seem to me to pretend that her English is a purely transparent rendering of Sappho’s Greek. Rather, I think ‘standing out of the way’ is about refusing to insert her own voice when the Greek falls silent. Thus ] ] ]nor ]desire ]but all at once ]blown desire ]took delight39 99

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pretends to carefully transcribe the lacunae in its original. In fact, it doesn’t: this particular fragment has at most one complete word in the Greek, and the lacunae in the translation do not appear where they are in the printed original (though her translation does render likely supplements in most of these lines). But what Carson aims to do here – and this is the effect that puts her beside Cage – is present her sense of the original in a context of disciplined silence. Even as the words seem to want to be read as a sentence or a sequence (‘nor desire; but all at once, blown desire took delight’), the ‘]’ prevents this. My mind has nothing to do when it reads these fragmented words; there is no sense to make. But it can watch itself straining to make sense anyway. Carson’s fragments loosen their grasp on syntax. They are tesserated, atoms, the narrative and inflectional ties to other fragments eliminated by time and history. This, too, is something they have in common with Cage, whose techniques for letting sounds be themselves was described by Henry Cowell as ‘getting rid of glue’. Cage commented that ‘when people had felt the necessity to stick sounds together to make a continuity, we [Cage, Feldman, Brown, Christian Wolff ] felt the opposite necessity to get rid of the glue so that sounds would be themselves’.40 Cage was critical of development in composition: development imposed a syntax on sounds, sought to make them cohere and become something other than what they were. Cage’s sounds are atoms, not monads. Leibnizian monads are distinct and singular and self-enclosed, but each contains a reflection of the whole, the world cohering through a dispersion of resonant images. Atoms are wholly and only themselves; they have no inner link with anything else. 4′33″ is, among other things, the culmination of Cage’s involvement with chance operations: by opening the performance to ambient sound, Cage required attention to auditory events that, seen through the tiny window of the performance, had no internal sense of syntax. The world became the world when it was freed from the imperative to cohere. *

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In ‘Cassandra Float Can’, Carson articulates a translation methodology centred on what it would take to summon the power necessary to take the world and turn it into ‘cracks, cuts, breaks, gashes, splittings, slicings, rips, tears, canonical intersects, disruptions, etymologies’.41 For Carson, Cassandra is one source of such disconnecting energy: things come away from their usual places when she is nearby. Her Greek embodies the result, a fact every reader of the Agamemnon knows but few have articulated as clearly as Carson does. Even when Cassandra announces her intention to be clear, what comes out is a little bit of Gertude Stein: Behold no longer by oracle out from veils shall be glancing like a newly married bride but as brightness blows the rising sun open it will rush my oceans forward onto light – a grief more deep than me.42

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This translation is even truer to Carson’s vision of Cassandra than Aeschylus’ Greek, which for all its opacity still relies on the syntactical glue provided by the Greek inflectional system. Here, on the other hand, you will never be able to tell if it’s you or Carson making sense with Cassandra’s words. And, of course, she isn’t trying to tell you about yourself. She’s talking about the experience of someone for whom things grow increasingly unmoored. Aeschylus would like us to see the veils flying up in Cassandra’s mind, would like us to be wondering at what level of herself she is translating some pure gash of Trojan emotion into a metrically perfect line of Greek tragic verse and what that translation has to do with the arts of prophecy. Because in both cases there is some action of cutting through surfaces to a site that has no business being underneath.43 Cassandra, it turns out, is like George Matta-Clark, who in the 1970s cut massive holes in condemned buildings, using precisely delineated empty space to transform ruins into cathedrals, further fragmenting already fragmented constructions and finding something else in the resultant hyper-ruin. Cassandra, too, ‘removes the walls and floorboards and suddenly we are in a site selected for demolition’.44 Carson does this as well: ‘Cassandra’, it turns out, is Carson’s name for a sensation she has when translating; ‘whenever I am engaged in a translation I experience continually, offside my vision, a sensation of veils flying up’.45 The feeling that something will turn up under the floorboards when you start jimmying up nails (or erasing the inflectional endings, arguably the defining operation for anyone who translates from Greek into English) is the constitutive unit of translation, and it’s why Carson describes trying to write an essay about translation as a process in which ‘syntax decays. Perforations appear. By the end there is not much left but a few flakes of language roaming near the margins, looking as if they want to become an art of pure shape.’ Which is perhaps just to say that the words are falling through nothingness along with everything else. Perhaps you will recall the basic atomist mise-en-scène. There are atoms. They are separated from each other by void. Occasionally they collide, and these collisions produce agglomerations of atoms, sensible to us as things. In the Epicurean version of the model, these collisions were seeded by an essentially random event, a chance operation that leads to the birth of the world: every once and a while, for no particular reason, an atom swerves. This clinamen, as it has come to be known, establishes chance as a constitutive element of the cosmos. It also, not coincidentally, establishes the cosmos. Here. Shake.

Notes 1. Carson (1995: 5). 2. Carson (1995: 16).

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CHAPTER 8 SHADES Elizabeth D. Harvey

In her lyric essay in praise of sleep, ‘Every Exit is an Entrance’, Anne Carson recalls her earliest memory, a dream she had when she was three years old.1 She dreamt that she awoke and went downstairs to the living room of her childhood house, where everything appeared just as it always had, except that ‘it is was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad.’2 In her account, the dream living room was folded inside the daytime version of itself like a lining, a spectral double. As I will be suggesting in greater detail, the double living rooms nested within Carson’s memory exemplify her pervasive fascination with duplicates or twins. These conjoinings are strewn throughout her writing in forms as diverse and intricately multiplied as double-entry bookkeeping, duplicate poetic structures and diptychs, twins, puns, mirror images, rhymes, doubled characters, and objects with two sides. I claim that these doubled figures condense opposing energies of desire and lack, of having and losing, of life and death. Each aspect inevitably summons its counterpart. Carson’s figuration of doubling leads us deep into the nature of consciousness, of what we know and what we can never know, of what can be expressed and what can only be implied by the shadow of its twin. Carson frequently uses twins to represent melancholy or loss; for her, twinship always has a double face, like the Janus-faced herms of antiquity. The figure of the twin signals both a gravitational pull toward undivided unity and, at the same time, a recognition that this longing is inevitably precarious, divided and out of reach. To put it in other words, twins are the human figuration of what Carson, following Sappho, designates as eros the bittersweet, or ‘sweetbitter’, desire and loss rolled into a simultaneous unity of experience, a double ‘living’ room of mortal existence.3 As an embodied form of doubleness, twins represent in their compressed intensity all human or familial connection. Yet Carson’s representations are never simple. To return to the example with which I began: she pairs the recollection of her childhood dream living room with a face-to-face encounter many years later with her father, who was by then afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. Carson recalls the dream only because her father is losing his memory, as if her mnemonic recovery could substitute for his forgetting. The juxtaposition of doublings – the dream and her father’s face – extends her sense of their uncanniness. Her father’s memory loss and the eventual disarticulation of his mind made the world alien to him. Gazing at him, she saw his face as simultaneously familiar in its lineaments and completely transformed by the alterations of a progressively damaged brain, a kind of premature epitaph. His face was, Carson says, ‘well-known’ and at the same time (like the dream living room) ‘deeply and glowingly, strange’.4 Father and daughter shared the profoundly disorienting and tragic experience of his disease, he 105

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from the inside, she from the outside. Carson describes the progressive depredation of her father’s mind as producing an uncanny copy that revealed his hidden inside: ‘he became an X-ray of himself ’.5 Like the X that designates the unknown in science, dementia revealed a hidden interior, exposing through its inexorable erasures the secret operations of the brain and psyche with the linear clarity and glowing strangeness of radiographic imaging.6 Carson couples her childhood dream and her father’s face as twinned confrontations with the defamiliarized ordinary, a mnemonic retrieval that stitched them together along the seam of their strangeness. The analogical link Carson forges between her childhood dream and her father’s face captures essential features of her thought. Why was it, she wonders, that she found the ‘entrance into strangeness so supremely consoling’? One answer may lie in her awareness of the alienated quality of the dream living room, ‘sunk in its greenness, breathing its own order, answerable to no one, apparently penetrable everywhere and yet so perfectly disguised in all the propaganda of its waking life as to become in a true sense something incognito at the heart of our sleeping house’.7 The incognito, as I will suggest, also shapes the heart of Carson’s poetics. Its strangeness in her usage is signalled by the italicized Latin, the word resisting through typography and tongue its assimilation to the English around it. It enacts its own foreignness. It refuses translation, like words that go ‘silent in transit’.8 That Carson glosses the incognito by way of a double negative performs this refusal: the definition promptly dissolves into itself, offering enigma in the place of explanation: ‘something [that] is not nothing’. Like the Freudian unconscious, Carson’s incognito resolutely opposes translation into rational, waking thought. The living room’s glowing alterity projects the unbinding of sanity into the surround: the room itself had gone mad. It is both hidden and unknown, a realm that is disguised, underneath, notable for an existence that precedes and postdates the uses we might make of it. The topography of the incognito is shifting and variable in Carson’s writing: sometimes it is beneath, behind, before, inside or outside. It encompasses many states, which may include but are not limited to madness, death, silence, dementia, mourning, prophecy, frenzy, anachronism and sleep.9 Carson’s unforgettable term for approaching this unknown is through the ‘sleep side’, an oblique entrance into the familiar home (Freud’s etymology of the unheimlich hovers here) through the unexpected.10 I want here to probe the nature of that incognito. The challenge of my inquiry lies in the paradoxical effort of examining a kind of experience that defies explanation or efficacy, but which is nevertheless fundamental to Carson’s poetic project and thought. Why analyze useless experience or uncanny states? A provisional answer might be that the realm of the unknown or madness is what consciousness discards, disowns and disregards. But like sleep, as Lacan argued and which is high on Carson’s list of apparently useless activities, it looks back at us. In its disguised, elusive, nonsensical way, the incognito is the other side of knowing, what faces away from language and meaning and what paradoxically sustains it. I claim in this essay that the known and the incognito are repetitively depicted in Carson’s writing as uncanny twins. Twins form the skin between literal and figurative. Carson’s work is crowded with examples that interlace literary features and human aspects: the facing pages of a bilingual edition, actual twins (Gordon 106

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Matta-Clark and his twin brother), the anachronistic conjoining of Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe in Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, the unlikely coupling of Simonides with Paul Celan, mirrored characters (the Annas of Canicula di Anna)11 and linguistic elements or poetic figures (caesura, puns, crossouts). My chapter will explore the pervasive psychic reverberations of these linguistic, poetic and philosophical doublings. They reveal Carson’s art as deeply preoccupied with grief and death. Yet her soundings of the unknown and the darkly unexpected are paired with a wildly generative, even erotic, assertion that language and poetry can survive loss and time’s erosions. Carson plumbs ancient and recent literature and art for affinities or twins that cleave to her purpose. Paired through their mutual loss, she chooses Catullus’s elegy for his dead brother as her companion as she creates an epitaph for her own brother in Nox. She enters the sensibility of Emily Brontë in The Glass Essay through their shared landscape of moor and sorrow. Sappho instructs her understanding of the infinitely suspended nature of erotic longing. Carson frequently cites and translates other writers, artists and historical figures, fashioning relationships that are intricately linked to her own creativity. She infiltrates the minds of her subjects to explore how they thought and wrote but also to find a part of herself there. Her inhabitations of the writers and thinkers who fascinate her are radical exercises in understanding, a kind of intimate twinship. Her attention to their use of language or metre is grounded in erudition, but it typically also entails a metaphysically unsettling encounter with the alterity of another mind across time and cultural difference. These engagements with otherness continually instruct us in the ways we might read Carson herself. Her writings often take melancholic loss as a central poetic category, both in the other writers she invokes and for the scatterings of her own autobiographical details. Grief becomes the propellant for what Carson has called elsewhere ‘psychic autopsy’, a delicate investigation of what is unspoken, unthought and unknown.12 Because knowing and unknowing are conjoined twins in Carson’s thought, it might be tempting to understand them as binaries, a juxtaposition of opposites. The relationship of these apparent antitheses is not, however, simply a pairing of opposed forces. Rather, each aspect is so intricately entangled with the other as to be inseparable, like the knot of life that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra called ‘intrinsicate’.13 One of the ways to glimpse this suturing is in Carson’s praise of the crossout, a typographical strikethrough; crossouts, she says, ‘are like death: by a simple stroke – all is lost, yet still there. For death although utterly unlike life shares a skin with it. Death lines every moment of ordinary time. Death hides right inside every shining sentence we grasped and had no grasp of.’14 ‘Sharing a skin’ and lining ‘every moment of ordinary time’ begin to capture the way the incognito inhabits consciousness, an insistent otherness that subtends and eludes awareness. Carson uses typography to fashion a lining in her sentence; the italicized middle – ‘although utterly unlike life’ – lies suspended in its negative formulation, enacting its covert message through syntax. Sigmund Freud described his encounter with unknowing in The Interpretation of Dreams as the ‘tangle of dream-thoughts’ that steadfastly resist unravelling. He calls this place ‘the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown’.15 Like the dream living room that lines Carson’s ordinary perception, like 107

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death that hides inside of sentences, and like the metaphysical silence inside of words themselves in Variations on the Right to Remain Silent, which like the navel of Freud’s dream, reach down to an etymological unconscious, experience is shadowed by its enigmatic other, its cryptic twin.16 This other may be most instructively approached in Carson’s thought through the hinge that joins and through the gap that separates, both of which suggest less an inert space than a dynamic transit.

Translating thresholds I aim here to test my hypothesis – that twins are the gateway into Carson’s figuration of a poetic unconscious – by focusing on a set of mythological twins from Carson’s book about poetic exchange systems, Economy of the Unlost. Before turning to explore more fully the constellated half-brothers, the Dioskouroi, who reappear multiple times in Carson’s text, it’s worth noticing that the book is itself structured dyadically in its apparently random coupling of two writers: Simonides, the ancient Greek lyric poet and writer of epitaphs, and Paul Celan, the Romanian poet and translator, who survived the Holocaust, settled in France after the war and wrote in German. Carson says that ‘they are side by side in conversation and yet no conversation takes place. Face to face, yet they do not know one another, did not live in the same era, never spoke the same language.’17 Their adjacency in Carson’s text catalyzes an implicit dialogue whose temporal and geographical improbability disturbs and propels, keeping it, says Carson, from ever ‘settling’. They are always ‘in transit’, both in relation to each other and to the reader. The experience of reading Economies of the Unlost is also unsettling, even uncomfortable, for Carson requires the reader to supply connections that are often implicit, just out of sight. This destabilization mimics Celan’s orientation to his own linguistic and national identity. German was Celan’s mother’s native tongue and the language of the Nazis who killed his parents. Choosing Celan as his pen name, an anagram of his Romanian surname, Ancel, accentuates the doubleness of his linguistic and national heritage, as if lodged inside his birth name was another self, the person he would become. Although connected to Romania, Germany and France, Celan nevertheless felt himself to be an outsider in each country. He was a translator, a go-between, a writer who shuttled linguistically and culturally between languages. Like Carson, who has made translation a material practice, a metaphorical act and a theoretical topic central to her poetic vision (most unforgettably epitomized in Variations on the Right to Remain Silent), both Celan and Simonidies (like Charon the ferryman of the underworld) are intermediaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead. If translation ferries meaning across the gap between languages, as its etymology proclaims (L. past participle of transferre, to carry across), it is twinned at the root with metaphor (G. meta, between + phero, bear, carry). The metaphoric enterprise of both poetry and translation moves continually between registers transferring the radiant, inscrutable unknown to the known and, crucially, transposing familiar knowledge into the otherness of the incognito. Carson orients herself to this perpetual symbolic commerce in her poetic engagement with literal 108

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translation: in an interview, she said that her mind ran in the groove between the facing pages of a bilingual edition, ‘in the little channel in between the two languages where the perfect language exists’.18 Translation as a theoretical subject or a practice always summons for her metaphysical and affective dimensions, for it entails traversing not only language and time but states of being and consciousness. Carson captures the doubling and halving integral to the fundamentally symbolic process of translation and poetic making in her image of the symbolon. She refers to the ancient practice of dividing a knucklebone in half in Eros the Bittersweet: one half is carried ‘as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning’.19 Carson likens the yearning for the other half to the primal longing Aristophanes describes in Plato’s Symposium: when Zeus cut previously conjoined human beings down the middle like flatfish, each side was forever destined to search for its missing symbolon.20 If longing and lack shape erotic relations, they also haunt language and the desire for meaning. The chronological and geographical space that Carson often navigates in her work accentuates the nature of these symbolic transactions, which, she reminds us, figures the ‘nonobjective life of objects’. Instead of envisioning the separated knucklebone as ‘broken off from the interior life of the giver’, it becomes ‘an extension of the interior of the giver, both in space and in time, into the interior of the receiver’.21 This intellectual, historical, and psychic interpenetration shapes Carson’s theory of reading, for it provides a connection that spans geographical distance and historical time. The linkages that symbolic meaning allows are at once fundamentally erotic in this sense and irretrievably melancholic, undergirded by desire and by the recognition that the lost object can never be fully recovered. Even if the desire to understand an ancient Greek poet stretches across millennia, it is also thwarted in its capacity to know, obstructed and yearning across chronological distance. Longing and loss are epitomized in Kastor and Polydeukes, mythological twins who embody doubling and halving in Economy of the Unlost. Homer says in the Odyssey that they were Leda’s sons, twin brothers who alternated between the world of the living and the realm of the dead. Classical sources disagree about the exact details of their parentage (Zeus or Tyndareos) and their rotation between worlds, but most agree that one twin was mortal and the other immortal. Refusing to be divided by death, the brothers arranged a compromise, eternally living a divided life, ‘infinitely half-lost’, alternating their time between the world of the living and underworld. They appear in Economy of the Unlost in Carson’s citation of Cicero, whose account of a banquet provides an origin story for the art of memory.22 According to the narrative, Simonides had composed a song to honor the aristocratic host of the banquet, Skopas. In addition to celebrating his patron, however, Simonides’s ode contained lengthy digressions in praise of Kastor and Polydeukes, the mythological twins who were transformed into the bright stars of Gemini. The extraneous tributes irritated Skopas, who was paying to hear a tribute about his own accomplishment and character. As retaliation, he cut his promised payment to Simonides in half, arguing that the mythological twins should pay the other half. At that moment, Simonides was called from the table by the arrival of two young men who urgently requested his presence, but when he got to the door, they had disappeared. 109

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During Simonides’ brief absence, the roof of the banqueting house collapsed, killing all of the guests. Quintilian, who wrote about this famous story long afterwards, speculated that the vanishing of the pair was a sign that they were indeed celestial visitors who were recompensing the poet for his praise by saving his life (Quintilian, 2001: 11.2, 65).23 The eerie appearance and disappearance of the twins depicts the Dioskouroi in their double nature; their capacity to alternate between mortal and immortal worlds affiliates them with epitaphs and elegy, poetic forms that join the living and the dead through memory. According to Cicero, the devastation wrought by the collapsing banquet hall roof was so great that the dead would have been unrecognizable had it not been for Simonides, who was able to identify each of the guests according to the place they occupied at the table. He was credited for that achievement with having been the first to discover an ars memoria. Skopas believed that he was paying Simonides for words that would enlarge his earthly reputation, but paradoxically, the longevity of his name was infinitely extended through the Simonides’ posthumous memorialization of him. Although Carson does not connect the halving and doubling properties of the symbolon explicitly with memory, the associations are richly suggestive. Memory returns the dead to us, although that reconstitution is always partial and fugitive. Even when poetry summons the dead in an epitaph or elegy, the operations of memory are still imperfect, vulnerable, as Carson’s father was, to the progressive erasures of dementia, and subject more generally to the erosions of time. Simonides, prolific writer of epitaphs, and poets in general are a ‘kind of hinge’, according to Carson, who organize the commerce between life and death. The art of poetic memory for Simonides was not just about hitching a name to a place, although it was also that. It was about having access to the ‘theater of memory’ in his mind and comparing it to what came afterwards. Carson argues that ‘the poet is someone caught between two worlds’, and she emphasizes the threshold quality of Simonides’ encounter with his divine visitors: he goes to greet the twins at the door who are defined by their alternation between worlds and who are both uncannily present and absent on that occasion. As he stands at the doorway to Skopas’ house, he holds the memory of the banqueting hall in his memory even as he witnesses its destruction, one part of his mind occupying the present even as the other conjures the recent past. The space between a lost past and the present is the gap within which the poet works, a process abetted by the actions of time and the ferment of unconscious creation. Carson suggests, as Paul Celan did, that poetry works by means of the ‘language mesh’. Celan saw words, like metals buried in the earth and chemically transformed by their interaction with other materials, as becoming ‘enriched’ and changed by underground processes.24 Not only do they accrue value during their long historical and subterranean life, in their transit between languages and through the minds and usages of writers, but poets use language to negotiate with the negative, to transform what is lost into the unlost. Unlost does not mean found, of course; it binds loss with its negation so that the positive and the negative are sutured together, straddling life and death in ways that might recall an epitaph. This capacity is the poet’s, and Carson’s, special province, an alchemy that ‘negates the negating 110

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action of death’, a ‘view that perceives presence as absence and finds a way to turn the relation inside out’.25

Rip in time Kastor and Polydeukes turn up again in Carson’s writing but in transformed guise. In Cassandra Float Can, one of Float’s twenty-two chapbooks, she introduces the figure of Gordon Matta-Clark. He was an architect/artist who called his projects anarchitecture, a condensation of creation and its negation, of architecture and anarchy (what Carson calls, following Simone Weil, ‘decreation’).26 Carson rechristens Matta-Clark with an acronym, GMC, perhaps a reference to her discussion of the phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, which immediately precedes her account of GMC in the chapbook. When Husserl died, Carson tells us, he left 30,000 pages of unpublished manuscript written in Bavarian shorthand. She speculates about his motivation and whether he sought to match the speed of thought to writing. As she wonders why shorthand might have appealed to Husserl, what he was trying to ‘disrupt or cut through’ in language, she begins to imagine how thought moves in the mind. She envisages a moment before thought forms itself into speech. In the same sentence that names sentences and communication, Carson slips backwards in time, reaching to the roots of language formation, towards something ‘earlier, rougher, more gripped, more frail, more saturated, something that will dry away like the dew or crumble like prehistoric paint as soon as it’s exposed to air, something that – compared to a sentence – is still wild’.27 Perhaps, she suggests, Husserl wanted in his 30,000 pages of shorthand to ‘cut things free from use and let it disappear into its own presence’.28 Like the incognito, the inside or conceptual prehistory of language formation is wild, an otherness signalled by Carson’s use of italics. Striking in its radical compression, shorthand is compacted into marks comprehensible only to the initiated. Shorthand and acronyms (GMC) make language abstract, symbolic, even disguised, and in this respect, they are cognate with the dream-work that Carson invokes in Every Exit Is an Entrance. Shorthand encrypts language by condensing it into signs, just as an acronym captures the compressed force of a name. GMC was born in 1943, and he died ‘untimely’ at age thirty-five.29 A strange word, ‘untimely’. It is perhaps a perfect translation for the anachronism of Cassandra’s prophecies, displacements and interruptions in ordinary time. ‘Untimely’ is, of course, also an allusion to the prophecy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth that Macduff was not of woman born but rather ‘untimely ripped’ from his mother’s womb.30 Prophecy and ripping are coupled both for Shakespeare and for Carson’s Cassandra.‘Who is Cassandra?’ asks Carson. Carson’s effort to describe the encounter with her piles up analogies, culminating in anachronistic simile: she was ‘like a lamp in a bomb shelter’.31 Ultimately, Carson resorts to sensory experience: ‘the smell of matter experiencing its own future. Scientifically, the smell of a rip in spacetime’ (Carson, 2016: n.p.). Carson reproduces the rips of Cassandra’s prophecies and the cuts of GMC’s anarchitecture in the chronological 111

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and structural cleavages of her own lyric essay.32 Significantly, ‘Untimely’, which names Carson’s procedures in this essay, first appears in lexical history in 1200 in Middle English as ‘untimelich’.33 That word evokes through its rhyme Freud’s unheimlich. If the uncanny describes the dissonant coupling of what is secret and manifest, familiar and unfamiliar, ‘untimelich’, like anachronism, records both conventional time and its disruption, a kind of uncanny chronology. Gordon Matta-Clark traffics with the untimely sense of the incognito. As Carson tells us, he ‘completed more than fifty artworks’ before his early death, and ‘not one of them is extant’.34 It is a cultivated disappearing act, since in order to know his works, you need to look at archival photographs or talk to eyewitnesses.35 This fact may be appropriate for an artist who worked with disappearance and cuts and holes. He typically chose buildings for his works that were already designated to be demolished, and having created his art, the condemned buildings would be destroyed along with his architectural interventions. GMC split buildings in half, and he carved enormous holes in walls and floors in order to reveal the inside, to ‘liberate’ ‘the ‘compressed force of a building’. He saw these works as a ‘retranslation’ of space, and he was regarded by the critics and by Carson herself as a prophet. But he was also a knowledge seeker. His cuts into buildings were ‘probes’ that allowed him to understand the construction of buildings. In the moment that Carson recognizes GMC’s intention, she pauses to consider the etymology of the word etymology, which derives from the Greek words etymos, real or true, and logos, story or analysis. But then she splits the word open, cutting etymos to reveal another buried etymology, from enai, meaning ‘to be’. Carson is a radical etymologist who makes cuts not just to reveal an older hidden meaning but to disturb the epistemological endeavour itself. It is a kind of linguistic anarchy, an act akin to anarchitecture or prophecy in the sense that it radically destabilizes space and time and ‘our whole way of knowing the truth’.36 It blasts a hole into the certainties that architect the stabilities upon which certain knowledge rests. Carson is captivated in Cassandra Float Can by people who ‘cut through things’. Disruption or breaking reveals different kinds of experiences, often ones that harbour emotion, trauma or an awareness that escapes ordinary discourse, time or rational thought. Later in Cassandra Float Can, Carson tells us that GMC had a twin brother who was mentally unstable. Her narrative about the Matta-Clark twins is interrupted by a digression about Cassandra’s famous scream in which the prophetess calls out Apollo’s name six times. Cassandra’s seventh cry inflects Apollo’s name slightly so that it reveals its etymological linkage with destruction and demolition. As Carson puts it, ‘Cassandra can designate the gods “my Apollo” and “my destroyer” at the same time in the same words.’ Carson associates the Trojan prophet with rips and cracks, and by extension, the gash Carson makes in her own account of the prophet. As if the prophet’s seventh invocation has summoned death into the twentieth-century future, Carson leaves Cassandra (‘we need a rest’) to return to GMC’s twin, who in 1976 died by jumping from the window of GMC’s office. In an act of commemoration, GMC built a memorial for his brother; he dug a hole in the basement of a Parisian gallery and ‘sculpted a staircase of shallow descending steps on either side of the hole’.37 During the labour of excavation, he 112

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was visible to people passing by on the street. When he finished the staircase, he covered it over, and the only vestiges of the crypt are the Polaroid photos of GMC digging. This is a disappearing act in several ways. A memorial is usually constructed to preserve a memory, but GMC’s obliteration of the monument would seem to encrypt it in oblivion. It may also provide a corollary to the psychic process of incorporating the lost object that Freud describes in Mourning and Melancholia. GMC is bound to his lost twin, hinged to the mortality of his other half like the Dioskouroi. The crypt that he fashions reproduces psychic loss, which in its traumatic form, incorporates within the body an unarticulated, encapsulated memorial of that absence. Yet the effacing of GMC’s crypt would seem to privilege not so much the erasure of a material monument as an emphasis on the performative process of digging and fashioning the stairway into the underground. The act of creating and then destroying the traces is consonant with Carson’s own impulse to keep things from settling, to disturb, to resist translation. Carson’s interjection of her brother into GMC’s narrative (‘I also had a brother’) becomes an intervention, a cut that probes the energies of mourning. She acknowledges that her own brother Michael was not a twin. Nevertheless, she wonders if for GMC (and herself) ‘having a brother who comes and goes from his mind all the time might make a person especially aware of holes and splits and disruptions’.38 In an interview, Carson remembers that when she was sixteen, her brother gave her the first volume of Roget’s Thesaurus ‘because he wanted me to be a writer and I wanted to be a writer. I still have this book. But it was in two volumes and he only gave me volume one. Never got around to volume two. It’s a clue to certain things about my writing.’39 As a storehouse of words, her brother’s gift becomes a metonym of desire and loss, which is then wrapped into the dark humour and ironic reflexivity of Carson’s memory. The first thesaurus volume figures Michael’s affirmation of Carson’s writerly imagining even as the absent half of the set signifies first his disappearance, and then in the moment that he seemed about to reappear (like Orpheus’s Eurydice), his vanishing in death. Carson’s 2010 book Nox is an epitaph that pairs Carson’s dead brother with the brother Catullus lost. Carson divides Carmen 101, the ten-line elegy that Catullus wrote for his dead brother, into lexical fragments and extends it into a book-length epitaph stretched across accordion pages that fold into a box. The book is structured like a diptych or a bilingual edition, with Catullus and Carson paired through their loss, yet the pages stretch open in their accordion pleats, as if they were joined by connective tissue. Carson says that she has a sense of her brother as a dark room in which she is groping for a light switch and a floor plan, and even so, she returns to the room every day to work on it.40 Catullus’s poem is like that, a disassembling, a dark process. Translation and loss mirror each other, and Carson discovers the entry into translating Catullus’s elegy not because she has found the right English words to approximate his Latin, but because she has glimpsed the silence in his words, the way they usher in the untranslatable. She writes of her lost brother, ‘He refuses, he is in the stairwell, he disappears.’41 Mourning is an inevitably temporal process, accomplished in unexpected ways and unpredictable pieces. Nox records this puzzling, fragmented experience, recreated in the dark room of the book box as Carson (and her readers) 113

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grapple with the palimpsestic nature of memory and the transactions with absence, darkness and night that mourning entails.

Shades As a way of imposing premature closure on a topic that is more extensive than I can explore here, let us turn to another kind of darkness, Carson’s catalogue of shade in ‘Each Day Unexpected Salvation (John Cage)’. In one sense, this is a return to the Dioskouroi, who are ultimately translated into the constellation Gemini. As stars, Kastor and Polydeukes adhere to the cosmic alternation of night and day, an astronomical expression of their oscillation between the world of the living and the dead. Carson originally published ‘Each Day’ in The New Yorker in 2015, and it then found its way into her performance piece, ‘A Lecture on the History of Skywriting’, which was first staged in New York City in 2016. In ‘Skywriting’, she takes on the voice and perspective of the sky: ‘I am the sky.’ Although time did not exist in the human sense of temporality, she recognizes that an account of her development might be usefully modelled on biblical creation, a hexameral narrative divided into days. On Thursday, the sky attempts to write a memoir of childhood but was overwhelmed by a ‘vortex of prehistoric pain’. She drew a big ‘X’ through the manuscript and deleted it. Like the X-ray of Carson’s father, consigning the memoir to demolition ushers in a different approach to memory and the unknown. In a footnote, the sky explains that memoir writing involves ‘long periods of quiet reflection’ with her mind ‘motionless’ and eyes ‘downcast’. Her favourite thing to look at turns out to be shade: Forest shade, lake shade, poplar shade, highway shade, backyard shade, café shade, down behind the highschool shade, cow shade, carport shade, blowing shade, dappled shade, shade darkened by rain above, shade under ships, shade along banks of snow, shade beneath the one tree in a bright place, shade by the ice cream truck, shade in the new car sales room, shade in halls of the palace as all the electric lights turn on, shade in a stairwell, shade in tea barrels, shade in books, shade of clouds running over a distant landscape, shade on bales in the barn, shade in the pantry, shade in the icehouse (the smell of shade), shade under runner blades, shade along branches, shade at night (a difficult research), shade on rungs of a ladder, shade on pats of butter sculpted to look like scallop shells, shade to holler from, shade in the chill of bamboo, shade at the core of an apple, confessional shade, shade of hair salons, shade in a joke, shade in the town hall, shade descending from legendary ancient hills, shade under the jaws of a dog with a bird in its mouth trotting 114

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along to the master’s voice, shade at the back of the choir, shade in pleats, shade clinging to arrows in the quiver, shade in scars.42 Tender and wry, this list ranges from the obvious – ‘carport shade’, ‘shade of clouds running over distant landscapes’ – to the ingenious – ‘the smell of shade’, ‘shade at night (a difficult research)’. As it assembles examples, the poem becomes increasingly intimate, funny and evocative, inviting a whole world of undersides and unseen spaces. The experience of reading the poem is an exercise in free association. It summons not only landscapes, ‘forest shade, lake shade’, ‘shade descending from legendary ancient hills’, but also the physical and sensory experience of inhabiting memory. ‘The shade by the ice cream truck’ might, for instance, evoke the pleasurable anticipation of childhood, waiting out of the sun, perhaps with impatience, for the sweet, cold taste of ice cream. The shade ‘down-behind-the high-school-shade’ might conjure through its hyphenated ligatures adolescent bonds of friendship or exclusion, or the secret, forbidden fumblings of teenage sexuality.43 The poem’s title in The New Yorker offers a clue to meanings we might find in this deceptively simple catalogue. ‘Each day’ captures the world of diurnal, often unremarked repetitive experience and objects we barely notice: pleats, ladders, butter scallops. ‘Unexpected salvation’ punctures those patterns with the surprise of epiphany, where something simple can be transposed by wonder. The reference to John Cage is set in parentheses, as if shadowed by the shade punctuation casts. It elicits the American experimental composer’s most famous piece, 4′33″, which records not the performers’ music but rather all the ambient sounds, everything in those 4 minutes and 33 seconds that is not the composed music we expect to hear. Similarly, Carson maps a world of underneaths, what is not seen, the negative space under the light and surface to which we naturally gravitate. What would it mean to notice the silence between words or the shadow that a body casts, its hidden underside? As Carson’s list progresses, it gathers associations that may move beyond the personal. The shade of the confessional could evoke an inner world of sin and shame shared within the dark space of a sequestered cabinet, and the shade at the centre of an apple core could elicit a regret about the end of pleasurable experience. Or it might gesture delicately to the more mythic connotations of eating forbidden fruit with its attendant loss of innocence. As we move through the shade catalogue, the poem’s associations darken, edging us obliquely towards death in the ‘shade under the jaws of a dog with a bird in its mouth trotting / along to the master’s voice’. This exercise in chiaroscuro is permeated by the pathos of the poem’s final lines: ‘shade clinging to arrows in the quiver, shade in scars’. The lines pivot on the semantic ambiguity of ‘shade’, a word as descriptive of light and dark as it is evocative of a classical underworld populated with ‘shades’ of the dead. This ghostly realm troubles the surface of the catalogue, as if the shadow side of the poem were a kind of unconscious, dense with associations, memories and presages of mortality. These lines bring to mind the structure of Men in the Off Hours, which is bracketed by lyric essays on time and grief; 115

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the volume concludes with ‘Appendix to Ordinary Time’, which begins ‘My mother died the autumn I was writing this.’ Joining her own process of loss with Virginia Woolf ’s, Carson mediates on the relationship between mourning and crossouts or ellipses, typographical gestures that figure death as simultaneous presence and absence. In ‘Each Day Unexpected Salvation’, the final line suspends time. The death-dealing arrow, still in its ‘quiver’, has not yet begun its flight, even though ‘quiver’ as a verb activates movement in the stillness of its leather receptacle. The ‘shade in scars’ may gesture in an exquisitely compressed three-word description to the recognition scenes in Homer’s Odyssey, where his nurse recognizes Odysseus’s identity by the scar on his thigh and where he defeats Penelope’s suitors with the great bow that only he can string. Or the words may gesture to a future when the arrow has left its quiver and found its mark, creating a wound that heals into a scar, a folding of time that anticipates a memory that has not yet been created. Carson’s poetry creates a skin between conscious knowing and its underneath, between past, present and future. The poetic elements of rhythm, cadence, silence and musicality produce the paradoxical effects that we both grasp and do not grasp, the joined twins of conscious and unconscious knowing, and a life that is lined with its hidden double, the shade that it will become.44

Notes 1. Wachtel (2012). In ‘Every Exit is an Entrance’, Carson relates that the dream occurred ‘in the house where we lived when I was three or four years of age’, but she is definite in recounting to Wachtel that she was three when she had the dream (Carson, 2005: 19–40: 19). 2. Carson (2005: 20). 3. Carson (1986). 4. Carson (2005: 20). 5. Personal communication with Anne Carson, March 2020. 6. The nineteenth-century physicist Wilhem Roentgen named the new kind of electromagnetic radiation he had discovered ‘X’ because the rays were unknown. 7. Carson (2005: 20). 8. Carson (2016). 9. The incognito lies in Carson’s sleeping house like the unconscious world at the centre of Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, which Carson describes as falling ‘asleep for twenty-five pages in the middle’ and which is central to Carson’s own exploration of the unrecognized and hidden in her sleep essay (Carson 2005: 22). 10. Carson (2005: 23). 11. The doublings (historical/contemporary Anna/Ann(a) Carson; Helena/Helen of Troy; Anna with the pseudo stigmata/Christ) in Canicula also have a literal aspect. Anna is afflicted with hemolysis, which we are told ‘indicates that she was to have been / a twin’ (Carson, 2000: 67). 12. Carson uses this phrase to describe Cy Twombly, but it could apply as well to her own process: https://lithub.com/anne-carson-the-sheer-velocity-and-ephemerality-of-cytwombly/.

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Shades 13. Shakespeare (2008: 5.2.295). 14. Carson (2000: 166). 15. Freud (1953: 525). 16. Carson (2016). 17. Carson (1999: viii). 18. Wachtel (2012). 19. Carson (2000: 75). 20. Carson (2000: 75). 21. Carson (1999: 18). 22. Carson (1999: 39). 23. Quintilian later subverts his own impulse to believe that it was a divine visitation by arguing that Simonides would hardly have been silent about it had he himself believed the young men to be Kastor and Polydeukes. 24. Carson (1999: 43, n. 83). Carson’s reference in the mining analogy comes from J. K. Lyon’s 1974 essay on Celan and the ‘geology’ of poetry. 25. Carson (1999: 106). 26. Carson (2005: 167). 27. Carson (2016: n.p.). 28. Carson (2016: n.p.). 29. Carson (2016: n.p.). 30. Shakespeare (2008: 5.10.16). 31. Carson (2016: n.p.). 32. The term ‘lyric essay’ is usually attributed to D’Agata and Tall’s coinage (1997). Ian Rae describes one significant aspect of its operations in Carson’s writing: ‘the main contribution of Carson’s lyric essays to contemporary poetics is to camouflage hypotaxis as parataxis, such that her seemingly fragmented poetry retains an element of rhetorical coherence and force, while at the same time undermining the element of subordination in the hypotactic logic of the patriarchal, classically inspired traditions of poetry’ (Rae, 2011: 183). His analysis describes her desire to bend and transgress poetic convention. I would suggest that another important consequence is that her use of parataxis actively solicits the reader’s engagement in supplying connections between apparently random elements. 33. OED, untimely, adv. 1. 34. Carson (2016: n.p.). 35. For a helpful overview of Matta-Clark’s work, see Attlee (2007). 36. Carson (2016: n.p.). 37. Carson (2016: n.p.). 38. Carson (2016: n.p.). 39. Wachtel (2012). Carson refers to the half gift, perhaps a version of the symbolon, in ‘The Wishing Jewel: Introduction to Water Margins’, Anthropology of Water (Carson, 1995: 246). 40. Carson (2010). 41. Carson (2010: n.p.). This is the last legible entry on the right-hand page on Nox. It appears opposite the lexical definitions for vale, the last word in Catullus’ elegy. As the lexical entry

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Anne Carson/ Antiquity demonstrates, vale can mean many things, which include the salutation ‘goodbye’, which is used at the end of letters and ‘in taking leave of the dead’. 42. Carson (2020). 43. The hyphens are present in The New Yorker version of the poem but not in the unpublished typescript of Skywriting. 44. I am grateful to the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto for a year-long fellowship that allowed me to write this essay, to Gordon Yanchyshyn for his many insights into the nature of twinship, to Timothy Harrison for the gift of clarity, and to Julie Joosten for her radiant understanding.

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CHAPTER 9 THE PARATEXTUAL COSMOS Paschalis Nikolaou

Between creativity and criticism Bernard Knox, reviewing The Autobiography of Red in 1998, begins by quoting his recommendation for Anne Carson’s first book (1986’s Eros the Bittersweet) for Princeton University Press: ‘This is an extraordinary book – the book of a poet, a subtle critic, and a scholar. It is also a brilliant piece of writing, flawlessly phrased throughout . . .’1 When later he saw Carson’s poetry for the first time (‘Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings’, which appeared in The Raritan), that sense was confirmed, of ‘the mind of a poet in her keen sensitivity to the complexities of the texts she was marshaling for her argument and the fine precision and pleasing rhythm of her prose’.2 The fact that, ‘Mimnermos’ the poem actually consists of translations/adaptations of fifteen of the twenty-five fragments surviving from the ancient lyricist’s work implies those productive cross-contaminations of scholarly, creative and translatorial activity propelling Carson’s output from early on. Although her publications might fit more closely to one category or the other, fluid interactions of mind frames routinely thought of as separate really define both her poetry and criticism – and traces of these interactions are variously witnessed, as this essay will argue, in the paratexts accompanying Carson’s classical versions. In my review of Carson’s ‘non-foundational’ An Oresteia, I already venture that her brief introductions to the three plays she engages there are ‘very much part of the fabric of these translations’3 – as also an act of criticism; and one inspiring further creativity. Meanwhile, such note-perfect paratexts are arguably a sign of ‘a literary translation’s true completion and part of the poetry’.4 How so? We should bear in mind that a lineage to poets considering and amplifying these relations goes back to the onset of literary modernism. In Carson’s case, as Josephine Balmer understands, she has really brought [. . .] scholarship into poetry, not only by including her radical versions of Catullus and Sappho in her 2000 volume Men In the Off Hours, but also by positioning academic essays, such as ‘Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity’, complete with full notes and marginalia, within the frame of the poetry collection. A truly innovative move, this not only suggests that poetry can embrace the academic but that, as Pound’s work had previously suggested, the academic is in itself creative and poetic.5 It is not only a matter of compositional modes of course, of a clear attitude towards production. This kind of writing (re)directs, calibrates our reading, affects reception: ‘The 119

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poet, in Carson, is a species of public intellectual. Publishing poetry and essays is a means of opening oneself to readerly scrutiny, even as it attempts to produce a specific style, at least in Carson’s case, of differential reading.’6 And mingling the two identities arguably induces a heightened state of interpretative performance on the part of Carson’s readers; indeed we empathize with the scholar and (poet-)translator as reader, someone personally invested in, and self-analyzing, their process. Carson herself seems to consider this mode a natural development when she was interviewed by Kevin McNeilly for a special issue of Canadian Literature. Her response, nearly twenty years ago, to his suggestion that she seems to be discovering ways in which the critical or the scholarly and the poetic collude or intersect – notwithstanding the fact, as he states it, that ‘[y]ou’re both a professor and a poet, and I know that some would say that the academy is not the place for poetry, that it thrives outside of its critical interpretation’7 – is telling: I never found it a problem because I just practically don’t separate them. I put scholarly projects and so-called creative projects side-by-side in my workspace, and I cross back and forth between them or move sentences back and forth between them, and so cause them to permeate one another. So the thought is not that different. There’s a different audience I guess, but nowadays this is less and less true. But the permeating, the cross-permutation is extremely helpful to me. Because actually the project of thinking is one in my head, trying to understand the world, so I might as well use whatever contexts are available. Academic contexts are available because they are ready; they’re given by the world. (my emphases)8 This essay will approach the paratextual material found in recent versions of ancient Greek dramas by Anne Carson, specifically Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (2006), An Oresteia (2009), Antigonick (2012), Bakkhai (2017) and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2020). The positioning of such material, and allusions within them to other creative work, as well as the forms these paratexts adopt are quite representative of Carson’s overall outlook. They further support an argument about how this inf(l)ected criticism is an integral part of, and results from, a poet-translator’s approach to originals. Blurred boundaries between classical translation, critical commentary and poetry as observed here also exist as textualization of more intense and subjective negotiation of this material. Scrutiny of the several other paratexts Carson has authored belongs to a more extensive, future study – not least as we already see ample evidence of her translating side connecting with themes and structures that pervade her work as a poet.

Paratextual selves and imagined voices We should remind ourselves that the notion of ‘paratext’, of the text ‘beside’ the text, can itself be problematic in terms of what it encompasses and overlap with other categories. In Seuils,9 the tome that drew our attention towards the liminal devices and textual 120

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conventions influencing how a book connects with its readers, Gérard Genette proposes that these ‘thresholds’, be they titles/subtitles, prefaces, dedications, epigraphs, pseudonyms, reviews as found both within and outside the book (in that case: peritexts and epitexts respectively), are undefined zones ‘without any hard or fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text)’.10 When a translation is offered, things become further complicated – not least because ‘according to this model’, as Kathryn Batchelor has argued in her study on Translation and Paratexts, ‘the author of the translated text is the author of the original text’.11 In this sense, the translation itself is already a paratext. Clarifying this quandary is among the reasons why Genette’s work has gained more attention in translation studies recently.12 Because, crucially, paratexts may be written by or for the author, say, by a critic or a translator, even though initially Genette appears to preclude from his definition a paratext for which the author – or one of his associates – does not accept responsibility. There are, however, ‘allographic’ prefaces, ‘written by [a] third party and accepted by the author’,13 and these may involve, for example, the prefaces of translations. In fact, ‘The translatorpreface writer may possibly comment on, among other things, his own translation; on this point, and in this sense, his preface then ceases to be allographic.’14 Batchelor rightly argues that this position is intriguing in terms of the conflict it creates. For what is implied here is that [. . .] the preface becomes authorial in such places. [Genette’s] note thus suggests that the translator is to be considered author of the translation process, but not of the final product; the work of the translator, and the responsibility for it, is to some extent embedded in the translated version, yet the text itself still belongs fully to the author. Another exception to Genette’s overall assumption that the translator is an authorial ally rather than assuming any kind of authorship of his own is found in Genette’s discussion of the way in which authors have historically appended ‘all kinds of nobilary ranks and all kinds of functions and distinctions, honorific or real to their names’.15 At the same time, authorship of a translation is predicated on, or certainly intensifies with, the existence of such paratexts – of comment, that is, on the work of translation. Others have noted Genette’s ambivalence or qualifiers here, among them Tahir Gürcağlar who has offered a terminological distinction: if the translated text remains ‘text’ rather than reverting to paratext, then an ‘extratext’ may refer to ‘the general metadiscourse on translation circulating independently of individual translated texts’.16 Hence a paratext, when it comes to literary translation will ‘refer to presentational materials accompanying translated texts and the text-specific meta-discourses formed directly around them’.17 Batchelor is also conscious of the significant overlap or ‘complementarity’ of the terms paratext and metatext following Genette, in the sense that some paratexts comment on the text – hence they are metatextual – and metatexts that are consciously crafted 121

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thresholds to the text are of course paratextual.18 Even more interesting for Batchelor in this sense is the interplay between metatext and metadiscourse – or ‘discourse about discourse’ – which in the case of translation necessarily involves discussions about the phenomenon of translating. It is a domain – and here she draws on Theo Hermans – ‘in which translators observe their own translations and those of others’;19 this domain, crucially, may exist within paratexts that offer reflections beyond the text being translated, as well as sometimes staged within translations. How do Carsonian paratexts reflect or complicate the above? If we remember that non-verbal elements are included in the definition, then cover design and, even more so, illustrations affect if not participate in the reception of translated/versioned text. Thus the connections and schemata, intended or arbitrary, caused between the versioned text of Sophocles and Bianca Stone’s suggestive images in Antigonick. At the end of Grief Lessons we come across the dramatized opposite of allography: Carson goes as far as adopting the voice of Euripides and imagining his own response, in ‘Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra’.20 The Athenian tragedian now inhabited by – or possessing – the translator addresses his audience like this: In general I like women. I like glossing around in women’s language, so different from men’s. But this one seized me as no other character ever had – that first Phaidra, the pure chainsmoking nihilism of her, pacing the cage of her own clarity. What rushed through her speech wasn’t fuss about mirrors and chastity. Only a fool would have asked her for a moral position. Her people feared her. Her own spirit feared her. You feared her.21 As opposed to standard paratexts, such as the one Carson signs at the start of the very same volume (‘Tragedy: A Curious Art Form’),22 how do we perceive this ventriloquized reflection ‘by Euripides’ – where he discusses with us his own reasoning, in the present? As perhaps performative commentary, a critical-creative remainder provoked by the emotional investment and identifications the translation process engenders? Or those ‘History of War’ prose lesson plan outlines interjected across the verse parts of Carson’s inventive, sung and spoken (‘melologue’) performance piece riffing on Euripides’s Helen, her attempt to connect, in Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, that ancient ‘avatar of female fascination’ with its modern equivalent, Marilyn Monroe? A more tenuous and productive relationship than suggested by Genette’s contradictory statements emerges in Carson’s work, because she arguably sets on realigning and considering the form and conventions of paratext, time and again. And even further than the inventive monologue she attributes to Euripides, what to make of a paratext that resembles more of an original (visibly a poem) as those that greet us in the second edition of Antigonick, and later in Bakkhai? There is reason for assigning metadiscursive value to the intention and content of a poetic text positioned thus. Not least because, beginning from title(s), we are involved in recognition of the creative dimension operating within the critical and translational side of the version’s author. 122

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Spaces for a poet-translator’s thinking Despite acknowledging the impact of various modes of illustration and of non-verbal paratexts in general on reader’s perceptions,23 Genette does not pursue the matter further. And more so since any consideration of the visual might conceivably include elements of typography, spacing, layout and even book size (also as part of alluded-to traditions of publishing). But with Carson, the book as artefact and the choices made through the dialogue between poet and publisher are certainly worth exploring. Especially as some early translation efforts by Carson have coincided with reflection – on the level of layout no less – on the position of the translator as commentator, provider of marginalia and exegeses. Most notably in the case of Sappho,24 where the absent text by necessity creates – for any modern translator, not just Carson – a tension among varied drives and intentions: a possible restitution of some material through the evolving discoveries of scholarship, the further imagining and/or completion of so many absent words and lines, or a foregrounding of the fragmentary lexical traces in ways that may denote both our immense distance from the ancient past and our desire for connecting with the personality and conditions of someone like Sappho, Archilochos – or Mimnermos. When it comes to Carson, she does announce, paratextually, her own desired absence: ‘I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through.’25 The layout of If Not, Winter preserves and further iconizes the condition of the original, seeks to amplify it by making us look through and imagine what lies in the place occupied by the emptiness of lost text. Elsewhere, and in what turns out to be a case of an autobiographical, experimental translation, Nox dramatizes a telling of painful experience through the very staging of the process of offering an English text. This project of translating Catullus’ poem 101 doubles as a lament for Carson’s dead brother; it exists as the opposite of a disappearing, invisible translator. The book itself is a carefully considered artefact, with unfolding, non-numbered pages resembling a draft contained in a box. Again, space and typography are key: the right-hand pages present one of the words of the original, facing its dictionary definition in the left-hand page. And yet, even as we gain further meaning through the device of paratext and exegesis as themselves content/text, Carson’s handling of the source-as-talisman is indebted to narrative purpose rather than fidelity. As Josephine Balmer quotes her, from ‘an interview discussing an early version of Nox, her entries, while presented as direct quotations from the “real” dictionary, are often artificial; “when the lexical entry didn’t relate,” she says, “I changed it . . . so that the whole tells the story of the translation of the poem” ’.26 In Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, this thinking is readjusted to lead us into exegesis that further expands – not least through critical language –the intense anachronisms that permeate this version of Helen staged in the spring of 2019 at the Shed’s Griffin Theater in New York. The ‘History of War’ lesson plan outlines are always initiated by some translation of an ancient Greek word. (In fact, translation, transcription and efforts to understand form the very premise of this piece, as we find it in the programme notes reproduced in the Shed’s website: ‘It is 1964. An office manager has hired one of his stenos to come in at night and type out his translation of 123

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Euripides’s Helen, but his obsession with the recently dead Marilyn Monroe kidnaps the translation.’)27 And thus, following a verse section (21–3) that starts, ‘Enter Norma Jeane as Mr. Truman Capote’ then proceeds to also quote Stevie Smith’s poem ‘Persephone’ and ends with lines on rape as ‘the story of Helen, / Persephone, / Norma Jeane, / Troy’,28 readers and audience arrive at: ἁρπάζειν ‘to take’ HISTORY OF WAR: LESSON 3 If you pick a flower, if you snatch a handbag, if you possess a woman, if you plunder a storehouse, ravage a countryside or occupy a city, you are a taker. You are taking. In ancient Greek you use the verb ἁρπάζειν, which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum and gives us English rapture and rape – words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.29 Seemingly a comment on preceding action on the stage, while sufficiently poetic, these ‘lesson plan’ pages will announce ‘DISCUSSION TOPICS’ (‘Compare and contrast catching a spear in the spleen with utter mental darkness. Consider ancient vs modern experience. Consider whether any of these is what is meant in poetry by “a beautiful death” ’)30 or a ‘TEACHABLE MOMENT’ (‘We have already reflected on Helen’s first appearance in Homer’s Iliad (Book III, verses 126–129) where she sits in her room live-streaming the war at Troy onto a tapestry. Her thread weaves in and out of living skulls’).31 It is important to state here that the nature of the original and the overall context (page or stage) in which a translation will operate, rather than some inflexible theoretical inclination, is what mostly provokes a treatment and decides the distances between what we may term contextualized classical translation or outright versioning. In another interview, alongside Robert Currie, given to The Kenyon Review, Carson appears wary of agreeing to a programmatic attitude for when/how she translates. She is asked about the way in which one moves between ‘honoring the “source” and the “somatic vehicle” that brings that source into the present by the act of translation’. Indeed, ‘should the mark one leaves on translations be resisted, celebrated, or neither’?32 In her response, she notes that a translation [. . .] usually has a specific purpose. If it is a commission for a certain theatre director or company, the translator will be given parameters as to what kind of translation is required. If it’s a free adventure of creativity, the translator will have their own attitude to that. I generally try to work first and most attentively out of the grammar, syntax, allusions of the original while keeping the language alive in a 124

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way that interests me, then later crazy it up if that seems appropriate. I put Hegel and Brecht into Antigonick because those readings of her are part of how she lives in our minds. I put Beckett in because Antigone would have liked him.33 These anachronisms manifesting inside Antigonick might normally be just another element confined to a translator’s paratextual explanations to their intended reader. The Hegel-and-Brecht-quoting Antigone, beyond the presence of the ‘silent witness’ Nick who is reflected in the conflation of the title, is exactly what steers such work from a designation of translation as merely paratext. The ways in which Marilyn Monroe can be seen as, indeed, ‘of Troy’ are constantly brought home through anachronisms permeating both the text and those only apparently paratextual ‘lesson plans’ that are very much part of a performance and the creative construction and intent of Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. When asked in an interview about the relationship between the verse and prose sections, Carson responds that this reflects an understanding of the ancient dramatist’s own achievement in form: Euripides’s Helen is a tragicomedy, a genre he invented. It allows absurdist situations and semi-comic characters to drift downstage into darkness and doubt. In a similar way I tried to let dark realities materialize dimly, through language lessons, in the ‘History of War’ sections that alternate with narrative/lyric scenes. Language is a way into moral life. I believe in words and their power to clarify belief systems, even when these systems are confused, contradictory, or crazy.34 What is more, it is this wealth of references populating even the more formal paratexts of Carson which also verify a poet’s eye permeating the process. In one of the short introductory essays included in An Oresteia, Carson thinks of singer Björk when she tries to find an English tenor for Cassandra’s voice.35 Yet the poignant paratextual admission of these – sometimes arbitrary and personal – connections are invested with a poet’s confidence, even though they might occur to any translator trying to find a way into a piece of literature. Turning to near aphorisms, they serve to direct us beyond some provision of the original’s philological history and towards an imagining, alongside Carson the poet, of analogies of intention and form, moving us towards a situational awareness of how it is to reconvey the energies of the original. At the same time these paratexts cease to be ‘allographic’, for they present themselves as certainly more agitated and expressive than is the norm: there is literary perception escorting us into a play by Aeschylus: ‘It’s like watching a big forest fire. Big, violent, and the sound not like anything else. Every character in Agamemnon sets fire to language in a different way.’36 In Grief Lessons, another set of translations that adopt a poignant title, we find Carson comparing Euripides’ Hippolytos to the city of Venice: ‘A system of reflections, distorted reflections, reflections that go awry. A system of corridors where people follow one another but never meet, never find the way out. There is no way out, all corridors lead back into the system.’37 Similarly, this is how the Preface to Alkestis opens: 125

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There is something of Hitchcock about Alkestis, with its big sinister central house where life becomes so confused with death as to split the architecture in two. Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt features such a house as well as a household of people blind to each other’s realities, blind to their own needs, and a killer at the heart of it all.38 Carson’s careful orchestration of striking images, comparisons drawn from cultural production across time – and pop culture, suggesting no preference of ‘high’ over ‘low’ manifestations of it, because there is in fact a recognizably ‘nobrow’ sensibility permeating these texts – conveys a process of understanding the original, demands of us further reading and the sort of knowledge, links and ideations that assist in understanding both the original text and the climate in which it was translated/versioned.

Art of collaboration: visual understandings The visual arts, and painting in particular, have consistently inspired Carson, going all the way back to her responses to Edward Hopper’s ‘urban pastoral’ works. A series of frames and their subjects are assigned excerpts from St Augustine’s Confessions; the modern poet realizes a new whole in the conjoining of the contemporary paintings, and the – translated – voice belonging to Augustine, as they comment on one another.39 At least since then there is an insistence on understanding and explaining the work of others through analogies with non-verbal work. The translator of Agamemnon recalls the painter Francis Bacon – and Bacon responding to translations of Aeschylus40 – when she considers how ‘violence is intrinsic to Aiskhylos’ style. He uses language the way Bacon uses paint, especially in the Kassandra scene where he stages the working of her prophetic mind – the veils, the screens, the violence, the clearing away. She is a microcosm of his method.’41 The oil painting of an empty chair on the cover (Absent Presence 2004 by Ken Currie) reminds us of the chair that hosted numerous of Bacon’s screaming Popes. Yet the most ambitious engagement of the visual and the literary remains the experimental rearticulation of Sophocles in Antigonick, where the spacious handwritten and rarely punctuated version of the original play from Carson, in all caps, is interspersed with illustrations by Bianca Stone (herself a poet). The result lies somewhere between an ancient drama picture book and an elliptical graphic novel. The relations between translated text and images, especially in the way they overlap through translucent vellum paper, prompted several reviewers to query how the watercolour and ink images affect our reading. ‘How far are they meant to correlate with the written text’ asks Josephine Balmer: Should they be viewed as potential stage backdrops? Or do they present a second meta-text, a commentary running alongside the translation? Carson, who worked as a commercial artist while completing her classical studies, understands the power of the non-literal. As she once commented wryly of her radical versions of 126

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Catullus ‘[they] bear about the same relation to translation as Francis Bacon’s paintings do to mug shots’.42 Another review, by Rachel Galvin, presciently exemplifies how one of these relations may work, arguing that these overlays [. . .] slow down the time of reading and often interrupt the text, creating a kind of amplified enjambment. For example, Antigone says to her sister Ismene, ‘Can a person be so completely conscious of being unconscious that she is guilty of her own repression, is that’ – and before we arrive at ‘what I’m guilty of,’ an image of a bourgeois domestic interior is interposed, with a chair, floral carpet, radiator, and window with plants. Such suspensions are part of the book’s architecture, so that the rhythm between text and images is often surprising and their relationship mysterious. The reader must move the images away to get to the text, but because of the transparent paper on which they are printed, the images remain visible once the page has been turned. (my emphasis)43 Stone’s own reflections on the collaboration, in an interview for the short-lived California Journal of Poetics, reveal the level of instruction she received from Carson herself (along with Robert Currie, who also collaborated in the project), including visual references to her own work. ‘Anne’s drawings that she showed me were a huge influence. She had beautiful little line drawings of various things, some of which I adapted to my own. When I felt stuck and frustrated I would go back to them again and again.’44 What is more, the dynamics established early on, including questions about knowledge of the text to be illustrated, affected the very logic and construction of the book. As Stone tells it, I tried illustrating the text line by line, but Anne and Currie wanted me to move away from the literal. It’s important in collaborations to establish some parameters, and Anne and I were having a hard time figuring out how to bring it all together. Currie was so important to the collaboration. He’s brilliant at assembling ideas and forming a concept. At one point he said, ‘OK, something needs to be established so we get this going.’ He came up with the idea of vellum paper to overlay the text, so I wouldn’t have to write out the translation into the work (which wasn’t working with the amount of text there was), and to hand-write the text. From there Anne and I could really begin. They also decided that I wouldn’t see the hand-written text until I was done. The only suggestions they had with the drawings was to a) move away from the human figure and b) to use these pictures they gave me of Iceland. (my emphases)45 The above allow us to retrieve the problematization resulting from such a curious treatment of Sophocles’ tragedy, those penetrations and enhancements of the paratextual as they operate within both process and product of later Carsonian versions. Yet what perhaps goes a long way in suggesting how a visual imagination and the ideas inside the 127

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(original) text lead to further creativity, even beyond the 2012 project, is, conversely, the figure of Antigone slipping into Stone’s own poetry – as occurs in lines from ‘Dear Sister’, published a few years later: [. . .] In my mind for days after: Antigone. Antigone, whose portrait I was drawing as a horse that couldn’t be tamed. A wild horse with goggles who disrupted dinner parties. Antigone, who couldn’t stand the idea of her brother’s body out there with the wolves, and dug up a grave with a shovel and her bare hands, all alone in the creepy night – Antigone, whose sister wanted to row out into the darkest water with her – [. . .].46 Poetry out of the process One more facet of this poetics of paratext is perhaps located in the opening pages of Antigonick and, more recently, Bakkhai. While the second book is still announced as ‘a new version by’, experiments with the possible forms – or limits – of translation do not reach the levels previously seen in Antigonick. Here, the only obvious dialogue with illustration exists via the painting by Ragnar Kjartansson of a smoking female figure on the cover, seemingly emerging from a column and surrounded by outlines of several bottles (The End, created in 2009). Yet at the outset we are met with a recognizably poetic arrangement, titled ‘i wish i were two dogs and then i could play with me (translator’s note on euripides’ bakkhai)’,47 while the following six pages consist of three-line stanzas, elliptically introducing the figure of Dionysus that essentially dominates the play, announced as a ‘foreign’ god, whose incursion the Greeks staged ‘into polis after polis / in stories like the one / in Euripides’ Bakkhai’ (stating next, for Carson’s – and Euripides’ – readers: ‘A shocking play’).48 These short lines soon acquire density, illuminating the energies of the play, imparting critical information about a god ‘always just arriving’, defining him through a compressing of critical notes, in poetic discourse: ‘Dionysos does not // explain or regret / anything. He is / pleased // if he can cause you to perform, / despite your plan, / despite your politics,// despite your neuroses, / despite even your Dionysian theories of self ’.49 Further mentions of Stephen Hawking and Sigmund Freund associate with an awareness of what Euripides intended. All the while, there are Carson’s prompts to our reading of this translation: ‘Previousness / is something a god can manage / fairly well (“time” // a fiction for him)’50 – while mortals are less able to do so (including the Bakkhai, ‘those poor passionate women’ who ‘had a prior existence once’).51 And in this manner, such a ‘translator’s note’ manages to simultaneously recall and negate requirements of criticism and analysis; and through this form attune us more appositely – along with the anachronism of the cover – to the nature of Dionysus, ‘god / of the beginning / before the beginning’.52 This sense is compounded by the content of the back-cover blurb which Carson, rather than the publisher, appears to control53 – especially 128

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as there are no endorsements by anyone else. It is worth quoting in its entirety, precisely because it allows us to observe how Carson’s statement is echoed in the front cover and how both reflect concerns and themes of hybridity and subversiveness that stimulate and are embedded in Carson’s own practice as critic and translator: Euripides was a playwright of the 5th century BC who reinvented Greek tragedy, setting it on a path that leads straight to reality TV. His plays broke all the rules, upended convention and outraged conservative critics. The Bakkhai is his most subversive play, telling the story of a man who cannot admit he would rather live in the skin of a woman, and god who seems to combine all sexualities into a single ruinous demand for adoration. Dionysos is the god of intoxication. Once you fall under his influence, there is no telling where you will end up. (my emphases)54 (And similarly, with regards to issues of gender and the then-recent rise of the #MeToo movement, on the back cover of Norma Jeane Baker of Troy: ‘There is a stark awareness nowadays that we need new ways of thinking about female icons like Helen and Marilyn Monroe, new ways to revolve the traditional male version of such events 180º and find different, deeper sorrows there.’)55 In the case of the preceding Antigonick, the opening poem is longer and more expansive in terms of how critical understandings and creative instincts synergize. The title is appositely followed by an address to the person of Antigone. It also coincides with a naming of, and reason for, the translating act itself: Dear Antigone: Your name in Greek means something like against birth’ or ‘instead of being born’ what is there instead of being born? It’s not that we want to understand everything Or even to understand anything We want to understand something else56 – before Carson proceeds to read how others before her have read, and staged, Antigone: ‘I keep returning to Brecht / who made you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back’57 (later on she also imagines the opening night of Jean Anouilh’s version of the play in 1944 in Paris and in the presence of French Resistance leaders). Twenty-five lines and four stanzas into ‘The task of the translator of Antigone’, Carson instructs herself and her readers – ‘let’s footnote here Hegel calling woman “the eternal irony of / the community” / how seriously can we take you?’58 And after this ‘footnote’, embedded in free verse, follow a string of names and critical-creative readings or appropriations of Antigone and her meanings. These include Jacques Lacan, George Eliot, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler (who even played Kreon in a performance of Antigonick).59 The poet further adds that ‘to several modern scholars you / (perhaps predictably) / sound like a terrorist’.60 129

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These are perspectives that could be covered and discussed in a more traditional preface of course; yet it is arguably probable that they turn to lines of poetry in a project that does include anachronistic reference to Hegel inside the text of a transcreational Antigonick. It is only another instance of boundaries blurred, of process slipping and extending ‘beside the text’ and of critical reflection textualized within it. The wealth of such critical review on the part of Carson is what energizes the creativity of the approach, quickens it beyond translation. At the same time, what essentially allows this prefatory ‘task of the translator of Antigone’ to go further than ‘criticism-in-verse’ is the way it is inspired by, and brings us to empathize with the process behind, other art: Carson quotes one of John Ashberry’s earliest memories, about trying peel off wallpaper in his room, or Samuel Beckett’s admitted aspiration towards language (‘ “to bore hole after hole in it until what lies behind it seeps / through” ’); she also reaches for 4′33″, the avant-garde musical piece by John Cage, its duration comprised entirely of silence, right after she considers the etymology of ‘autonomous’ – an epithet for Antigone – and dramatically asks herself, just as happens with the name at the start, ‘how to translate this?’ It is often such previous conceptions of art that propel the work of translation and assist Carson’s understanding, in this case, of Antigone’s character. They partake of an essentially personalized and invested translation process that inevitably leads into something new (and new enough to trouble George Steiner, who felt the outcome was too subversive, not enough of a celebration of the original).61 The effort, however, remains exactly one of survival: of preserving and translating Antigone’s screams – calling upon another poem by Ingeborg Bachmann – as that very ‘task of the translator’. All this, even in a project that has decidedly shifted beyond translation proper, not least through visual collaboration, and enough to change its title and add to the cast of characters. In this sense also, what is demanded is poetic complement instead of a normal paratext, with ‘task’ in the title, that loaded word – in translation studies at least, since Walter Benjamin’s foundational 1923 introduction to his German translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens62 – pointing us in a metadiscursive direction. The poempreface, as happens later in Bakkhai, also reflects on itself: it exists as comment on its function, a possible form, and beside the possible form these plays may adopt in English. In what is more clearly a new work in Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, with the scene described as ‘Troy and Los Angeles’, what before took place mostly within ‘the task of the translator of Antigone’ now essentially consumes the entire project: it explicitly exists as a reflection on a translating/versioning process that constantly locates and provokes connections. It is a process that appears to be constantly discussed, dramatized and reflected upon.

A way forward From the very beginning, critical and creative capacities combine in Carson’s output: the poet and the commentator are disposed in ways that illuminate and dramatize the 130

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dialogue of the two within the mind of one. It has proven a most productive condition, especially in how Carson works through the classical inheritance, producing originals and translations, from Red [Doc] to Bakkhai, that enliven the ancient past and rearrange its characters and psychologies inside contemporary experience. It is a concern that reaches an apex of intensity in Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, also clearly correlating with formal experimentation as the modern poet echoes and explains Euripides’s Helen through anachronism and multiple framings of translation. What becomes increasingly evident is that the critical animus originating from Carson’s concurrent academic engagement with the classics propels (meta)textual experimentation and hybridity, further shaping some of the voices – and revoicing – found in several of her publications. Equally, however, the paratexts attached to translations and/or versions of ancient drama and poetry are also threaded with poetic understanding and imagery. What is more, they are constantly problematized as form: these paratexts are incited by the creativity of the translation process. We register not just a conscious recalibration and questioning of paratext as style and content, but also poetry occupying its place, with critical perspective that can now be spread in the course of lines and stanzas. And part of the same picture, arguably, is the staging of poignant dialogue also through the manufacture and positioning of pseudo-paratext – as happens with the resurrected voice of Euripides at the end of Grief Lessons. These prefaces, translator’s notes and introductory material evidence a deeply engaged process of versioning – and arguably Carson’s methods and views of translation cannot be understood without them. An offering such as Bakkhai is suggestive of the importance of reading these parts together: text and paratext, translation and creative intent blend together. The utilization of further aspects of paratextual expression, incorporating collaboration with other (visual) artists, instances of handwriting and particular modes of book publishing, also invites us to look into the earlier volumes more systematically – including, of course, Carson’s original work – and towards establishing correlations, for instance depending on the degree of intervention in translation, or mode(s) of deploying material from ancient sources, that should help establish a more clear typology of Carsonian paratexts.

Notes 1. Knox (1998). 2. Knox (1998). 3. Nikolaou (2014: 56). 4. Nikolaou (2014: 57). 5. Balmer (2013: 40). Further examples abound: The Beauty of the Husband is described as a ‘fictional essay’, for instance. 6. McNeilly (2003: 8). 7. McNeilly (2003: 14). 131

Anne Carson/ Antiquity 8. McNeilly (2003: 14). Elsewhere, interviewed by Peter Streckfus, she qualifies how the way she treats the distinction between her ‘academic and aesthetic writing’ from Eros the Bittersweet onwards: ‘When I was writing that book, I was at the beginning of my academic career, teaching at Princeton, trying to get tenure, etc. etc. I bought into those distinctions then. But gradually, on the path of my thought I couldn’t separate the strands of it all. So, I gave up on it.’ Streckfus (2015: 221). 9. The original appearing in French in 1987, but truly arrived with the English translation ten years later. It is also the last part of Gerard Genette’s trilogy of books on textuality, starting with Introduction à l’architexte (1979) and Palimpsestes. La Littérature au second degré (1982), the first concerned with misreadings of Aristotle’s Poetics, texts that play a part in the architextual system which, Genette argues, the history of later Western poetics can be seen to ‘transcend’. In this schema, ‘hypertexts’ stretch beyond their own domain to incorporate all relations within and between texts and between texts and their readers, with a key implication of this transtextual system being the dialogue between hypertexts and hypotexts, essentially the object of Palimpsests, the later study. 10. Genette (1997: 2). 11. Batchelor (2018: 21) 12. As Anna Gil-Bardají, Pilar Orero and Sara Rovira-Esteva admit from the outset of their edited volume, Translation Peripheries, ‘[t]he notion of paratext is an unquestionably important consideration for many lines of research in translation studies: the history of translation, literary translation, audiovisual translation, and the analysis of ideological discourse in translation or self-translation’ (2012: 7f). See also Pellatt (2014). 13. Genette (1997: 9) 14. Genette (1997: 264). 15. Batchelor (2018: 54). 16. Tahir Gürcağlar (2002: 44). 17. Tahir Gürcağlar (2002: 44). 18. Batchelor (2018: 151). 19. Batchelor (2018: 151), drawing on Hermans (2007: 33). 20. Carson (2006: 309–12). 21. Carson (2006: 311f). 22. Carson (2006: 7–9). 23. Given its potential to shape readers’ perception, he still regards it as ‘an immense continent’ (1997: 406). 24. On the matter of the challenges and dilemmas in translating Sappho especially, see Rayor (esp. 1991 and 2016) 25. Carson (2003: x). 26. Balmer (2013: 223n; drawing on Aitken (2004: 171ff.)). 27. The Shed (2019). 28. Carson (2020: 23). 29. Carson (2020: 25). 30. Carson (2020: 20). 31. Carson (2020: 58). 32. David King (2012) 132

The Paratextual Cosmos 33. David King (2012). 34. The Shed (2019). 35. Carson (2010: 4). 36. Carson (2010: 3). 37. Carson (2006: 163). 38. Carson (2006: 247). 39. For a relevant discussion, see also Greenfield (2015: 98–9). 40. Carson (2010: 4–5). 41. Carson (2010: 6). 42. Balmer (2012). 43. Galvin (2013). 44. Lussier (n.d.). 45. Lussier (n.d.). For responses that describe this same situation from the perspective of Carson and Currie, see David King (2012). 46. ‘Dear Sister’ (Stone, 2018). 47. Carson (2017: 7–12). 48. Carson (2017: 8). 49. Carson (2017: 11–12) 50. Carson (2017: 10). 51. Carson (2017: 11). 52. Carson (2017: 7). 53. Provided that Genette terms peritext as ‘the zone that is the direct and principal [. . .] responsibility of the publisher’ (1997: 16), it is obvious how it emerges as an area for justifying (the mode of) publication, and for promoting the author overall and the work specifically, often drawing on epitexts, for instance reviews not originally appended to the text. (In this sense of course, peritext also heavily involves visual, non-verbal aspects of what is paratextual, including cover images/design.) 54. Bakkhai, back cover (n.p.). 55. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, back cover (n.p.) 56. Carson (2015 (2012): loc. 6). 57. Carson (2015 (2012): loc. 5). 58. Carson (2015 (2012): loc. 5). 59. The performance took place at NYU, on 22 February 2013 (Carson herself played the role of the Chorus). 60. Carson (2015 (2012): loc. 5). 61. Steiner (2012). 62. Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ (trans. H. Zohn) (1968 (1923)).

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CHAPTER 10 AN ESSAY ON AN ESSAY ON IRONY Yopie Prins

In the long history of Sappho translations, Anne Carson has her own story to tell: ‘It seems to me I was always translating Sappho, or at least since 1967 when Mrs. Cowan started teaching me Greek [. . .] bless her memory.’1 Starting with ‘it seems to me’ (already translating phainetai moi, the opening of Sappho Fr. 31) Carson recalls a lifelong process of ‘always translating’ and retranslating and re-retranslating, and so on, the fragments of Sappho. Until the publication of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho in 2002, these translations were mostly embedded in Carson’s critical essays, and it was through her essays that Carson sought to translate Sappho into different forms, as she incorporated another Sapphic fragment into the very title of Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986). Beginning with its first sentence, ‘It was Sappho who first called Eros “bittersweet” ’ and ending with ‘the testimony of lovers like Sokrates and Sappho’, Carson’s essay (more like a prose poem) is a meditation on eros that returns again and again to translating fragments of Sappho. Indeed, it would seem, the ongoing process of translating Sappho repeats the paradoxical logic of ‘the untranslatable adverb deute’ that Carson discovers in reading Sappho: in the chapter entitled ‘Now Then’, she describes the combination of the Greek particle de, which ‘signifies vividly and dramatically that something is actually taking place at the moment’, with the adverb aute, which means ‘again, once again, over again’ and so ‘peers past the present moment to a pattern of repeated actions stretching behind it’.2 The combination of those two words produces a complex temporality, as Carson observes: ‘De places you in time and emphasizes that placement: now. Aute intercepts ‘now’ and binds it into a history of thens.’ A simultaneous experience of ‘now then’ is the paradoxical effect of Eros, according to Carson: ‘the lover perceives more sharply than anyone else the difference between the “now” of his desire and all the other moments called “then” that line up before and after it’.3 But it is also an effect of translation, as we see Carson ‘always translating Sappho’, intercepting now and binding it into a history of thens, each time with a difference. This temporal disjunction produces an irony exemplified in Sappho Fr. 130, embedded in the title of Eros the Bittersweet and amplified in Carson’s various translations of the fragment. The first word of the fragment in Greek is eros, immediately followed by deute, ironically emphasizing the iterability of a seemingly singular experience in the present. In translating Fr. 130, Carson emphasizes the irony of this reiteration: first ‘Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me’4 and then more dramatically, ‘Eros – here it goes again! – the limb-loosener whirls me.’5 More than a decade later, in retranslating the fragment for If Not, Winter, she marks the adverb in parentheses for greater 135

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emphasis: ‘Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me’,6 and in her translator’s notes she discerns ‘a tinge of irony or skepticism’ in deute, ‘like English “Well now!” ’.7 In each translation, Eros is experienced again ‘as if ’ for the first time, with an increasing sense of irony. Around 2000, a few years before publishing If Not, Winter, Carson created a handpainted mini-book that reflects further on the irony instantiated within the ‘now then’ paradox of reading and translating Sappho. Measuring three inches by four inches, it contains around 100 pages lettered by hand in black ink with color illustrations, and it includes a partial translation of Sappho Fr. 58, embedded in a longer text she calls An Essay on Irony. This mini-book is not (yet) published but Carson loaned it to me for a while because, as she wrote in a cover note, ‘it does not exist without a reader’. I include images of some pages from her essay, with her permission, in the pages of my essay. It is tricky to describe the material object in its particularity, and even trickier to transcribe the experience of reading it: how does it feel to turn the pages slowly by hand, giving yourself the time to look at the words page by page and trace the texture of the illustrations with your fingertips? Each time feels different and that is precisely the point, as this mini-book turns out to be a reflection on living, and reading, in time. Moving between Greek and English and between images and words, Carson’s mini-book presents multiple forms of multi-directional translation in order to make something else visible: something glimpsed obliquely, ‘like fawns’. The fawn simile is drawn (literally and figuratively) by Carson from Sappho Fr. 58, where a fragmentary reference to young fawns appears in contrast to old age, and the simile reappears at various intervals in her essay on irony, translated and transformed, as we shall see. *

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The full title of Carson’s mini-book, as it appears on the first page, takes an ironically pedagogical tone: My Life as a PaedErast: An Essay on Irony. The relationship between erastes and paidika, eroticized in the Socratic model, turns into a trick question: what can the teacher learn from the beloved pupil, as a vanishing figure of the child that the lover once was, and now again desires? In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson observes that ‘the experience of eros is a study in the ambiguities of time’8 but in the years between writing ‘an essay on eros’ and ‘an essay on irony’, her perspective has changed: rather than seeing temporal disjunction as an effect of Eros, Eros is the effect of a temporal disjunction that structures ‘my life’, and any life. This paradox is illustrated on the second page of Carson’s mini-book, where a cartoon-like drawing of a child (boy or girl) announces in bright red letters, ‘Life is really very simple’ (see Figure 5). But as this enigmatic figure seems to be falling backwards (or is it forwards?) in time, we are drawn into the black holes of its eyes and gaping mouth, a little glimpse into the abyss of time. And we are not reassured by the next illustration, featuring a predatory animal with burning red eyes and bloody teeth, in red ink that bleeds through to the other side of the paper. Time pursues and devours us. 136

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Figure 5 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 2–3). What follows is a dialogue (of sorts, mediated by Carson as essayist and artist) between Socrates and Sappho, who personify two ways of thinking about time: philosophically and poetically. But as far as Carson is concerned, the ancient quarrel of philosophy vs poetry was over before it began; Socrates already knows Sappho has the answer to a question that he cannot ask directly. The Socratic method (insofar as it is a method) involves asking questions indirectly, as Carson observes: ‘Trick questions have a structure akin to Sokratic irony,’ a line she translates into the outlines of a face emerging from a mottled yellow background, with an ironic smile and Sokrates spelled out in Greek letters below (see Figure 6). It is a personification of Socrates, whose name is transliterated in English on the next page, where Carson explains that ‘Sokrates uses “irony” to draw a veil over the question that is jutting out from him’, and then further illustrates how the lines of his face disappear into a yellow veil of swerving vertical lines (see Figure 7). ‘The veil is made of lesser questions and feints and half-burnings,’ writes Carson, slyly summing up the entire history of Greek philosophy at its origin: ‘Why not ask the real question?’ Socrates cannot put into words what that question is, much less how to answer it, and Carson illustrates his predicament in an image that adds new layers of colour to the veil (see Figure 8). Blue and green and purple are superimposed on the yellow background, with a few words showing through underneath, though barely legible: Sokrates cannot say. Eironeuetai. He cannot say. 137

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Figure 6 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 5–6).

Figure 7 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 7–8). 138

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Figure 8 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 10–11). The partially effaced Greek verb eironeuetai (‘he speaks ironically’) tells us that Socrates cannot say what he thinks: he knows that he knows nothing, nothing is what he knows. So instead of speaking, ‘he hums a little song’ that seems to conjure up a figure without words: emerging from the yellow but veiled in blue is the outline of a fawn (see Figure 9). Where it comes from is not revealed until we turn the page, when we read in parentheses: ‘(It is a song of Sappho’s)’. To ask the real question, Carson turns from ancient philosophy to archaic lyric, from Socrates to Sappho. The song that he hums is Sappho Fr. 58, known as ‘the old age poem’ and itself worn out by age; Carson calls it ‘a very old song / of which only fragments remain any more’. Its fragmentation is illustrated by Carson in an abstract mini-collage (see Figure 10). Here tiny Greek letters printed on paper and torn like confetti from an unidentified classical text are glued on the page, alongside thick blue brushstrokes and coagulated drops of red paint. In the middle is a white splotch of hardened paint that blots out what is underneath, like a lacuna in a papyrus fragment, but allowing this lack to be visualized and materialized in the medium of painting. Making the disappearance of Sappho’s text visible and tangible in the texture of paint, Carson illustrates what remains of this ‘very old song’: not much, just a scrap of papyrus punctured with lacunae. Carson introduces the fragment parenthetically as (P. Oxy. 1787), referring to a papyrus unearthed in Egypt and published in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (1922) by Grenfell and Hunt.9 Carson’s painted collage seems to follow the contours of this tattered papyrus as it appears in their photograph, and also in the jagged vertical column of their transcription (see Figure 11). In transcribing the papyrus, Grenfell and Hunt did their 139

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Figure 9 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 12–13).

Figure 10 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 14–16).

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Figure 11 P. Oxy 1787, Oxyrhynchus Papyri XV (detail from Plate II, and transcription from page 28).

utmost to present what is written, and to represent what cannot be read, using a system of brackets and dots to indicate missing words and letters. Based on their scholarly representation of the Sapphic papyrus, Carson sees an opportunity to re-present ‘the papyrological event’ in other ways, as she writes in her introduction to If Not, Winter. The section on ‘Marks and Lacks’ describes her poetic process for translating Sappho’s texts read from papyri, using brackets ‘to give an impression of missing matter’. Idiosyncratically (and by now famously) for Carson, these ‘brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record of it’, in order to dramatize the experience of reading the Sapphic fragments: ‘Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp – brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.’10 The more fragmentary the text, the more space for adventure – as we see in Carson’s published translation of Fr. 58. It begins with a vertical column of brackets, not only to indicate what is missing from the papyrus but also to make sure you do not ‘miss the drama’ of seeing what is (not) there: ] ]

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] ] ] running away ] bitten ] ] ] you ] makes a way with the mouth ] beautiful gifts children ] songdelighting clearsounding lyre ] all my skin old age already hair turned white after black ] knees do not carry ] like fawns ] but what could I do? ] not possible to become ] Dawn with arms of roses ] bringing to the ends of the earth ] yet seized ] wife ] imagines ] might bestow But I love delicacy and this to me – the brilliance and beauty of the sun – desire has allotted. Bracketed in Carson’s translation is a series of fragmentary phrases that seem to be praising youth (‘beautiful gifts’ associated with children and celebrated by the ‘songdelighting clearsounding lyre’) and lamenting old age (‘all my skin old age already / hair turned white after black / knees do not carry’). With the passing of youth, what remains in the present is the ongoing experience of aging: here the fragment alludes to the myth of Tithonus, doomed to grow forever old while his wife (‘Dawn with arms of roses’) is forever young, rising with each new day.11 The last two lines (if they belong to the fragment)12 pivot out of mythical time into the present indicative verb ‘I love’: a renewal of the present time, ‘the brilliance and beauty of the sun’ made possible (once again) by desire. Ironically, this fragment about the passage of time is preserved on a papyrus also ravaged by time, forever aging yet renewed by our desire to read it. Carson’s manipulation of typography on a mostly blank page activates (we might even say, manipulates) the desire of the reader for the missing text: the brackets demarcate the edge of words printed in black on white paper, outlining a negative space for us to imagine the relationship between what we see and what we don’t see, between what once was there and now is gone. As we read this complex interplay between past and present, presence and absence in Carson’s translation of Fr. 58, we come across a simile in the middle of the fragment 142

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without a clear temporal or spatial location: ] like fawns. It is preceded by a bracket to indicate letters that are missing in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus, both before and inside the Greek phrase: ]esth’isanebri . . sin (as transcribed in line 15 of Figure 11). Out of this lacuna the simile appears. What is its referent? Is it referring back to childhood or ahead to its passing? If it refers back to the children ‘like fawns’, is it from the perspective of ‘then’ or ‘now’? (Based on the reconstruction of the fragment from a different papyrus, it may be possible to read the simile as a description of old age, when knees are no longer able ‘to dance like fawns’.) By placing an open bracket in front of the fawns, Carson turns them into a free-floating simile that hovers ambiguously between ‘then’ and ‘now’, in the passing of time. We will be tracking these fawns as we read on. The spatialization of the printed page in If Not, Winter is one way for Carson to dramatize the experience of reading the papyrus fragment, ‘to give an impression of missing matter’ and to visualize how it may be impressed (indeed, imprinted) upon the imagination of the reader. But before this publication, in the process of creating her mini-book, Carson is also experimenting with other ways to imagine ‘the papyrological event’. Marking the pages with handwritten brackets and letters as well other images drawn in black ink and coloured with paint, Carson makes each page into a remarkable mini-event. Furthermore, the difference in medium, between hand-painted and printed book, also creates a different temporal experience in her writing and our reading of the translation. While the published version of Fr. 58 is printed all on one page, the unpublished version involves turning many pages by hand, fast or slow, depending on the pace of the reader. In my transcription below, each new line indicates another page turn: by mouth ] beautiful gifts boys girls songlove shrill lyre all skin old age now white became hair after black knees do not carry you were ] like fawns but what could I do? not possible to become arms of roses dawn edges of the world carrying took deathless one in the bed thinks might give but me I love delicacy and this for me the bright thing eros and of the sun 143

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yes the beautiful thing has given me as my lot. We can compare the variations between Carson’s two versions of Fr. 58 by looking at this transcription, but that is not enough for reading it. To experience the translation as it unfolds over time, we have to look at the mini-book itself. The handwriting does not follow the standardized margins of a printed book, nor does it strictly follow the lineation of words in the papyrus. Carson skips down several lines in the papyrus fragment, in order to start with the Greek word stomati on the right page, translated into English on the left page (see Figure 12). Beginning the translation ‘by mouth’ suggests a cue for oral performance, recalling that the fragment is introduced in Carson’s essay on irony as if Socrates is humming Sappho. But on the next page, the appearance of a bracket reminds us that the song is just a fragmentary papyrus (see Figure 13). Here the phrase ]pon kala dora paides (beginning with a partially bracketed word in Greek) is separated into five lines, emphasizing the gap in the Greek by isolating the initial bracket with space around it, and adding even more space around each word in English: ] beautiful gifts boys girls

Figure 12 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, p. 17). 144

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Figure 13 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, p. 18).

The spacing after the bracket is not merely empty space, however; it implies what Carson calls ‘a space for imaginal adventure’, making room to imagine and desire what falls in the column under ‘beautiful’: the gifts of youth, boys and girls. Translating paides into ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ (the latter written in a different colour ink, perhaps an afterthought), Carson seems to differentiate between Socratic and Sapphic objects of desire, while also opening up a space for desire to circulate more freely around both, to make boys and girls into desiring subjects. Thus, compared to the fixed typography of If Not, Winter in print, Carson’s mini-book creates more variable space for writerly experimentation and the mobilization of readerly desire. Her handwriting makes the eye move in multiple directions, as we see on the next page where the words philaoidon and liguran and khelunnan on the right side are translated into ‘songlove’ and ‘shrill’ and ‘lyre’ on the left side (see Figure 14). Unlike Carson’s published translation of this line (‘songdelighting clearsounding lyre’ preceded by a bracket), the handwritten words are disconnected and scattered across both pages, prompting the eye to move from right to left and left to right, or top to bottom and bottom to top, or in circular, criss-crossing and zigzagging motions, or in any other direction the eye desires. Even the translation of philaoidon into ‘songlove’ can be read forward and backward (making ‘song’ both the subject and object of love, and ‘love’ both the subject and object of song), thus connecting the movement of desire to the movement of reading. What sets desire into motion for Carson (and her reader) is the very process of looking back and forth across each page, 145

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Figure 14 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, p. 19).

and turning the pages back and forth, in order to keep moving through the space between English and Greek. Turning several more pages we return to the fawns, also hovering between Greek and English (see Figure 15). But in this translation, Carson grounds the free-floating simile in a second-person address, perhaps to those children as objects/subjects of desire: you were ] like fawns She locates the verb ‘you were’ (although this is conjecture) after the bracket in the Greek ]estha, but in relocating the bracket from before to after the verb in English, she attaches it more closely to the fawns: ] like fawns. Here we might even see the bracket itself (turned on its side) as antlers sprouting on yearling fawns, reaching adolescence. Fanciful as it might seem, this visual association is anticipated by the image we saw earlier, when Socrates began humming Sappho, of a fawn with antlers. Has this vanishing vision of youth, veiled in colour, been translated into or out of the bracket that marks its disappearance? The [bracketed] fawn is a poetic figure that ironically appears to keep disappearing, again and again, throughout Carson’s essay on irony. Indeed, it is a figure for poetic irony, translated from Sappho to give us another perspective on a long tradition of philosophical thinking about irony that extends from Socrates to Friedrich Schlegel and beyond. After reading Carson’s translation of Fr. 58, we turn the page to discover an abstracted face 146

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Figure 15 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, p. 23).

painted in bold strokes of green and blue (is it Schlegel?), followed by an excerpt from one of Schlegel’s Critical Fragments: Irony contains and excites a feeling of insoluble opposition between the unconditional and the conditional, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication.13 This definition of romantic irony is a paradoxical experience of simultaneous conjunction and disjunction that ‘excites a feeling of insoluble opposition’ – a feeling that Carson compares to the encounter with Sappho’s fawns, as she turns the simile ] like fawns into an extended comparison: as fawns come up sideways and you may think out the side of your eye it’s a flame. as fawns, yes. If irony is a momentary glimpse of a contradictory condition (the conjunction of the unconditional and the conditional), that is also the moment when the fawns appear. They ‘come up sideways’ so that you see (or think you see) ‘out the side of your eye’ their transfiguration into the self-consuming flame of irony. 147

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Figure 16 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 48–9).

To illustrate how the simile is transfigured, Carson paints an extraordinary picture (see Figure 16). Superimposing fiery red paint over the Greek letters isa nebrioisin, she uses Sappho’s fragment to transform Schlegel’s fragment into a vision of irony more poetical than philosophical. But it is impossible to stay in that moment, as we keep turning pages. The intensity of the red flame is blotted out by a white smear of paint in Figure 17 (larger and thicker than the papyrus lacuna materializing as white paint in Figure 10), and the poetic meditation on fawns is displaced by a cool rhetorical question: ‘But (fawns aside) is irony philosophically useful?’ What follows is a logical explanation in two long sentences, unfolding in a series of rapid page turns, about how irony works in Socratic dialogue: not to provoke direct assent but to keep an interlocutor with you or to repel his stupid argument without repelling him. – the gesture is connective not disjunctive. it contains a compulsion to persist in reaching the other even at the very moment 148

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Figure 17 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 51–2). when he shows himself to be a person you cannot or will not or do not want to reach. Caught between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication, the philosopher keeps his interlocutor in dialogue by posing trick questions. Thus Carson circles back to the opening proposition with which she began her essay: ‘Trick questions have a structure akin to Sokratic irony.’ While Socratic irony stays at the level of this paradox, Carson now introduces another angle that we may call Sapphic irony. Hearkening back to the child-like cartoon at the beginning of her mini-book (see Figure 5), she inserts ‘girl’ (again the word is written in different colour ink) alongside ‘boy’ to reiterate their simple truth (or rather, a complex truth in simple terms): and really the boy/girl is right. life is very simple. a set of simple facts. the simplest of all is time. how simply 149

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time carries us down the river of trick questions. Sappho was someone who understood this. she calls time ‘the great simplifier.’ she watches the river. she is unsurprised when certain people become for her by their very existence a trick question. Unlike Socrates pursuing ‘trick questions’, Sappho is not worried about the impossibility and necessity of complete communication as a philosophical problem; she understands it is simply a condition of living in time. She sees the child as the vanishing figure for each of us as ‘time carries us / down the river of trick questions’, and she ‘watches the river’ even as she is also floating in it. Recognizing that every ‘now’ is already a ‘ then’ (deute), she has a sense of existential irony that leaves her ‘unsurprised’ when others become ‘by their very existence a trick question’, beyond reach in each passing moment. Carson gives a face to the trick question, in an illustration reminiscent of Paul Klee (see Figure 18). She combines drawing and writing in pen and ink to outline the features of a quizzical face covered with scattered Greek letters. The lines drawn for eyes, nose, mouth, chin and hair are continuous, moving in a labyrinthine pattern that we can try to trace with

Figure 18 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 87–8). 150

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our fingers, although it is easy to get lost in those loops. Meanwhile the letters written across the face are disconnected from each other, difficult to decipher as words in Greek or to translate into English. The visual and verbal components of the image work together to make it enigmatic, without demanding a specific reading and remaining open to contemplation. It has a mottled yellow and green background, like the portrait of Socrates ironically smiling through a yellow veil (see Figure 6), but the image is not identified with a name. Could it be the face of a papyrus fragment? A portrait of Sappho? A self-portrait of Carson? A mirror image of the reader, trying to puzzle out how to read the image? Although the trick question has no answer, Sappho gives it another name as Carson’s essay continues: she calls these people ‘fawns,’ ironically. for once we understand that the simplest fact of life is time, we see also that the simplest component of time is its irony. yet if you ask Sappho about irony Sappho cannot say. she cannot say. Here ‘fawns’ reappear (translated in quotation marks) to explain how Sappho sees them ‘ironically’ as the instantiation of time itself, gone the instant they appear. Therefore Sappho ‘cannot say’ what they are, although what we have seen of them of them so far in different colours is conjured up in a veil of coloured paints (see Figure 19). This illustration recalls the painted colours we saw earlier, veiling the words ‘Socrates cannot say’ (see Figure 8), but without the verb eironeuetai. And herein lies the critical difference between philosophical and poetic irony: in contrast to Socrates who can only speak ironically about the real question, Sappho cannot speak about irony except by asking the real question in poetic form. So, like Socrates, ‘Sappho just hums a little song.’ This time, the words are not translated from a papyrus but written by Carson herself as a kind of poetic incantation on the passage of time: neither decay nor rust nor any shadow neither exhaustion nor winds nor the failure of winds neither silence nor perfect sleep nor contradiction that leans among the traps can pull my heart away from praising the beautiful thing that love was when love was the world. In cadences vaguely biblical or Shakespearean, this passage proclaims something that survives: not even irony (‘contradiction that leans among the traps’) prevents Carson’s 151

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Figure 19 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 95–6). Sappho from ‘praising the beautiful thing that love was’, even though it has disappeared into the past. And at this very moment, in the final pages of the mini-book, we catch another passing glimpse of Sappho’s fawns: first in an abstract painting (a flame of colours in green and yellow and red), then in Greek (isa nebrioisin) and in a final illustration (see Figure 20). This delicate image traces the contours of a fawn by pen in squiggly lines (almost like writing) over a vague brown shadow with hint of orange and pink already starting to fade into the brown page of the back cover: appearing and disappearing ‘once again’, ironically, at the end of this essay on irony. *

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Emerging out of a lacuna in a Sapphic papyrus, Carson’s fawns go through multiple transformations, as we have seen: transcribed and printed in Greek letters, translated into English ‘like fawns’ and ‘as fawns’, transferred into brackets and quotation marks, transfigured in ink drawings and in flaming colours, and transitioning between visual and verbal representation, between what can and cannot be seen, what can and cannot be read, what can and cannot be said. And there is one more ‘translation’ of this figure in a poem that Carson published in 2007, about seven years after making her mini-book. Here Carson looks back on the silent figure of the fawn in Fr. 58, and gives it the final word. Entitled ‘Deer (not a play)’, the poem is set on a country road in England, and presented as a script for a cast of three characters: a deer, Jimi Hendrix and a limo driver (the latter 152

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Figure 20 Anne Carson, An Essay on Irony (unpublished, pp. 108–9).

two on their way to the airport).14 It begins with directions for the deer to come out of the woods (and the brackets): [Enter deer from woods on right. Stops, stands still on road] DEER: Heart is wild muscle Hum With the ‘wild muscle’ of its heart pounding out a different rhythm, the deer embodies a strange hum that recalls how Socrates or Sappho hum ‘a little song,’ but its humming is not human. DEER: Thin to the leap goes exactly what tired you up what bracken breaking Hum To keep on Hum Leaping through the ferns, the deer is interrupted (‘bracken breaking Hum’) by the sound of the limo. The deer stands still for a moment, and the limo driver comments: ‘Young one. Fawn.’ And then it leaps away, refusing to be trapped by this human perspective on its animal existence: 153

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DEER [now gone in wood]: My eyes can see 310 Degrees around every lick you sail with your tickets gurgling Why have you tied all that to your arms and legs Drinking black trees clawing milk from the mushrooms no I’m not your shy friend This is an ironic reflection on reading the fawn as a figure for poetic irony : it can see around and beyond us (310 degrees, precisely) and will not be seen by us as our ‘shy friend’. And yet we want it to speak to us as the limo driver wonders, ‘what is it about deer’, a trick question to which Hendrix replies, ‘They’re clear then they’re gone. As if it didn’t happen type thing.’ However something does happen, as the deer continues humming after the humans have finished their conversation and exited the poem: leap exactly Hum Hum over this Try zones blown lungs so strangely relaxed have you whitecold as if I were earth so strangely relaxed Piss down my leg flag up a whitetail You stand here there breaking with hints My stain goes to you open like this I dip I and vanish [Exit] In this final soliloquy, Fr. 58 of Sappho has been translated from Greek into a language that is ] like fawns, allowing at least one to leap off the page and hum, before vanishing and returning to its life in brackets.

Notes 1. Quoted from email correspondence (21 December 2020). See also Carson’s comments in Shane (2018): ‘I can never be grateful enough to Mrs. Alice Cowan, my Latin teacher in grade

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An Essay on An Essay on Irony thirteen of high school, who volunteered to teach me ancient Greek on my lunch hour in the final year of my time at Port Hope High. We read Sappho together and worked through an old primer of ancient Greek that she found at home. It changed my life.’ Carson’s translations of Sappho in If Not, Winter are dedicated to another ‘beloved teacher’, Emmet Robbins, Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto. In turn, I can never be grateful enough to Anne Carson, who taught me how to read Sappho when I was a graduate student, and later lent to me her hand-painted mini-book, My Life as a PaedErast: An Essay on Irony. Through this genealogy of beloved teachers, I wish to emphasize the pedagogical relationship that structures affective bonds across generational divides, and also, as indicated by Carson’s alternate spelling of ‘PaedErast’, to distinguish the word from its contemporary significations. I am also grateful to Kathryn Babayan, Virginia Jackson, Artemis Leontis, Adela Pinch and Elizabeth Wingrove for reading drafts of this essay. 2. Carson (1986: 118–19). 3. Carson (1986: 117). 4. Carson (1986: 3). 5. Carson (1986: 119). 6. Carson (2003: 265). 7. Carson (2003: 357). On different translations of deute, see also Silverblank (2020). Silverblank observes that ‘from the 1986 translation to the 2002 translation, we witness the translator’s voice change over time in her management of desire’, which may be another way of saying that over time the irony intensifies. 8. Carson (2003: 117). 9. Carson’s translations of Fragment 58 are based on Voigt’s edition of Sappho, reconstructed from P. Oxy. 1787 in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Vol. XV, ed. Grenfell and Hunt. Carson translated this version of the fragment several years before a different version was discovered in 2004 on the Cologne papyrus; see Greene and Skinner (2009). 10. Carson (2003: xi). 11. Carson recalls that Tithonus is one of the first Greek myths she encountered, in Willis Barnstone’s translation of Sappho: ‘Most pointedly I remember reading from that book the myth of Tithonus. Tithonus was the young man who fell in love with the goddess of the dawn and they were having a pleasant affair; then one day he asked her to make him immortal. He wanted to be a god and live with her forever. So she went to Zeus and said, “Can you make Tithonus immortal?” And Zeus said “Sure” and made him immortal but he didn’t make him ageless. So poor Tithonus withered away into a little cricket of himself and that wasn’t much fun for the goddess of the dawn anymore.’ See Wachtel (2012). 12. Fr. 58 in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus continues with these lines, but they do not appear in the Cologne papyrus. For comparison of the two versions as different reflections on aging and time, see Greene (2009). 13. Schlegel, Critical Fragments 108. 14. Carson (2007).

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CHAPTER 11 THE STESICHOREAN ETHOS P. J. Finglass

Stesichorus was hardly an obvious choice. Anne Carson’s Toronto PhD dissertation, Odi et amo ergo sum (1981), from which derived her book Eros the Bittersweet (1986), focused on Sappho, the poet whom Carson would later translate in her acclaimed volume If Not, Winter (2002). But Sappho was a household name all over the world long before Carson; her status as the main female poet from Greco-Roman antiquity, and the passionate emotion vividly expressed by her poetry, have long secured her an appreciative international audience.1 By contrast, Sappho’s contemporary, the poet Stesichorus, was virtually unknown except among classicists,  and scarcely familiar to many of them – something which makes him, at first glance, a surprising choice as the ancient intertext of Carson’s ‘novel in verse’, Autobiography of Red (1998), which was intended for, and received, an audience far beyond the narrow world of Stesichorean specialists. Those of us who work on Stesichorus may celebrate Carson’s decision to engage with Stesichorus’ poetry; after all, it is thanks to her efforts (scarcely ours) that more people have encountered the name of Stesichorus today than at any time since classical Greece. But that decision both requires and repays scrutiny. Accordingly, this chapter looks at why Stesichorus – no knowledge of whom is assumed on the reader’s part – makes such an effective intertext for Carson, and how familiarity with his poetry can enhance our appreciation of her work. For Carson, Stesichorus ‘came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult period for a poet’.2 This epigrammatic remark captures a key truth: Stesichorus is the first poet known to have engaged systematically with Homer’s poetry and to have made of it something new. Born in south Italy and closely associated with Himera on the north coast of Sicily, he was active roughly in the first half of the sixth century bce; the Iliad might have been somewhat over a century old at this point, the Odyssey (almost certainly by a different poet, though ‘Homer’ is a convenient shorthand to refer to both works) rather less. For Stesichorus these poems were already classics, if relatively recent ones. Whereas Homeric epic was designed for recitation by a single performer, Stesichorus composed lyrics which were sung by a chorus; his very name means ‘He who sets up the chorus’. Shorter than Homer’s, Stesichorus’ poems were still substantial works – probably in the low thousands of lines, compared to about 12,000 for the Odyssey and 15,000 for the Iliad. Like Homer, they dealt with great narratives of myth; their titles, such as The Sack of Troy, The Games for Pelias, Oresteia, Helen, Cerberus, Scylla, indicate the range of the topics that he covered.3 After Stesichorus’ death, his poetry continued to be read in antiquity for centuries; he was included (alongside Sappho) as one of the nine canonical Greek lyric poets, the 157

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greatest representatives of their genre. But he fell victim to the contraction of learning during the later Roman Empire and, from the third century ce onwards, his poems were no longer copied by scribes, and existing copies of his works were lost. For centuries, the only Stesichorean poetry that survived consisted of a few quotations in other authors whose works had survived the end of antiquity. Then from the 1950s onwards the publication of various papyri – fragments of ancient books, preserved in the Egyptian sands – greatly increased the amount of Stesichorus which scholars could access. These fragments revealed the truth behind ancient assessments of Stesichorus which labelled him ‘most Homeric’ – his poetry clearly owed a great deal, in language, style and ethos, to the Iliad and Odyssey. At the same time, though, the papyri showed how creative that relationship was. One of these papyri, from the early second century ce, contains a commentary on lyric poets, probably composed some time between 150 bce and 100 ce, part of which (numbered fragment 90 in my collection of Stesichorus’ fragments)4 captures the essence of Stesichorean poetry:5

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[μέμ– φεται τὸν Ὅμηρο[ν ὅτι Ἑ– λέ]νην ἐποίηϲεν ἐν Τ[ροίαι καὶ οὐ τὸ εἴδωλον αὐτῆ[ϲ, ἔν τε τ[ῆι] ἑτέραι τὸν Ἡϲίοδ[ον μέμ[φετ]αι· διτταὶ γάρ εἰϲι πα– λινωδ[ίαι ]λλάττουϲαι, καὶ ἔ– ϲτιν ῆ μὲν ἀρχή· δεύρ’ αὖ– τε θεὰ φιλόμολπε, τῆϲ δέ· χρυϲόπτερε παρθέ·ν·ε, 冀ερ冁ὡϲ ἀνέγραψε Χαμαιλέων· αὐ– τὸ[ϲ δ]έ φηϲ[ιν ὁ] Στηϲίχορο[ϲ τὸ μὲν ε[ἴδωλο]ν ἐλθεῖ[ν εἰϲ Τροίαν, τὴν δ’ Ἑλένην π[αρὰ τῶι Πρωτεῖ καταμεῖν[αι· οὕ– τωϲ δὴ ἐκ[α]ινοποίηϲε τ[ὰϲ ἱϲτορ[ί]αϲ [ὥ]ϲτε Δημοφῶντ[α μὲν τ[ὸ]ν Θηϲέωϲ ἐν τ[ῶ]ι νό– ϲτωι με[τὰ] τῶν Θε·[ ]δων· [ ἀπενεχ[θῆναι λέγ]ειν ε·[ἰ]ϲ [Αἴ– γυπτον, [γενέϲθα]ι δὲ Θη[ϲεῖ Δημοφῶ[ντα μ]ὲν ἐξ Ἰό[πηϲ τῆϲ Ἰφικ[λέουϲ, Ἀ]κάμαν[τα δὲ ἐκ] Φ · α·[ίδραϲ,] ἐκ· δ·ὲ τ·ῆϲ Ἀμ[α– ζόνοϲ Ἱππο]λ·ύ·τη[ϲ] ·ε·λη ·[ ] περὶ τ·[ο]ύτων· [ ]τηϲ [Ἑ]λένηϲ[

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]ε Ἀγαμέμ[ν– ] ·ον τον·[ Ἀ]μφίλοχον[

[. . .] he finds fault with Homer, because he put Helen at Troy, and not her phantom, and in the other he finds fault with Hesiod. For there are two different Palinodes, and the beginning of one of them is ‘Come here once more, goddess who delights in song’, and of the other, ‘Golden-winged maiden’, as Chamaeleon wrote. For Stesichorus himself says that the phantom came to Troy, but Helen resided with Proteus. So innovative was he in his treatment of mythology that he said that Demophon, son of Theseus, on his voyage home with the sons of The—, was brought to Egypt, and that Demophon was born to Theseus by Iope daughter of Iphicles, and that Acamas . . . and from the . . . concerning these . . . of Helen . . . Agamemnon . . . Amphilochus . . . ‘So innovative [literally ‘new-making’] was he in his treatment of mythology’ – this is the key phrase for our purposes. Pride of place goes to Stesichorus’ claim that Helen of Troy never in fact went to Troy, but spent the war in Egypt, while a phantom was sent to the city in her stead. Cancelling the entire reason for the biggest enterprise undertaken during the age of heroes, something central to both the Iliad and the Odyssey, was an astonishingly bold move for a poet; from our perspective it seems entirely postmodern, and yet here it is all the way back in archaic Greece.6 The text also highlights how Stesichorus had Demophon, an Athenian prince and son of Theseus, call in at Egypt, presumably on his return from the Trojan War – a version which has left no trace in any other source, and opens up all kinds of questions.7 The tantalizing bare names that conclude the fragment quite possibly introduced further transformed myths, all justifying the commentator’s characterization of Stesichorus’ innovative approach. He notes that Stesichorus ‘finds fault with’ Homer and also Hesiod, that other great writer of epic verse: it seems that Stesichorus deliberately positioned himself an innovator who transformed epic narratives of myth. Stesichorus’ radical take on the Helen story was known before the publication of this papyrus, thanks to its discussion by Plato in his Phaedrus (243a = fr. 91a Finglass); Plato’s mention ensured that it became famous in antiquity, the one thing about Stesichorus that any educated person could be guaranteed to know. And since Plato’s works were never lost, engagement with Stesichorus in poets from the Renaissance onwards meant engagement with his Palinode, as Schade demonstrates in his analysis of Stesichorus’ pre-Carsonian reception.8 But apart from that, too little of Stesichorus’ works remained to allow an assessment of his originality. Indeed, in the only other example of twentieth-century reception of Stesichorus known to me, Margaret Goldsmith’s 1938 novel Sappho of Lesbos. A Psychological Reconstruction of her Life,9 Stesichorus (who makes a cameo appearance, taking a protective interest in Sappho and tutoring her in poetry when she visits Syracuse) is described as ‘old-fashioned, conventional and a little pompous’,10 with ‘a tremendous respect for traditions, [and] slightly suspicious of 159

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new departures in literature’,11 and who ‘consistently pretended to be unmoved by the miseries of the world’.12 The ancient description of Stesichorus as ‘most Homeric’ encouraged this kind of assessment: Stesichorus, in this view, was largely an echo of his epic forebear. The papyri changed all this, revealing that the Palinode was no isolated fluke, but one of numerous poems in which Stesichorus took a fundamentally different approach from Homer to the same inherited material. So his Oresteia examined the psychology of Clytemnestra, exploring her reasons for killing her husband Agamemnon on his return from Troy (rather than simply condemning her, as happens in Homer’s Odyssey), and giving her action some justification, by tying it to Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia to ensure the safe arrival at Troy of the Greek expedition.13 The Sack of Troy opens not with a glorious hero, as do the Iliad and Odyssey, but with a lowly water-carrier, a mere servant to the kings: Epeius, on whom the goddess Athena takes pity and inspires to build the Wooden Horse, a weapon that will capture the city that had survived a ten-year siege (fr. 100 Finglass).14 The story pattern that this opening presupposes unexpectedly suggests Cinderella rather than the martial world of epic. An unnamed poem on the Theban cycle gives a powerfully authoritative voice to Oedipus’ widow as she issues instructions to his two sons on how to divide his inheritance, lending this female character a surprising importance in a story traditionally dominated by men. But of all the papyrological discoveries, the richest by far was P.Oxy. 2617, which contains a text of Stesichorus’ Geryoneis.15 Its publication in 1967 allowed us for the first time to observe the shaping and ethos of the poem.16 In particular, the presentation of Geryon in these fragments came as a shock. Heracles’ tenth labour, which saw the hero travel to the distant west to kill the three-headed monster Geryon, steal his cattle and bring them to Greece,17 was in origin probably a kind of metaphorical conquest of death,18 with Geryon featuring as a demon that had to be defeated for the hero to secure immortality; the labour thus foreshadowed Heracles’ actual entrance into the Underworld in his twelfth and final labour to recover Cerberus, the hound of Hades. Yet in Stesichorus’ hands this monstrous demon, with his three heads and wings, becomes a markedly sympathetic character, to whose emotional world the audience is given privileged access, and who seems entirely human in his family relationships. So we encounter him debating aloud the question of whether he should go into battle against Heracles (fr. 15.5–12 F.): 5

10

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“μή μοι θά[νατον . . . τα δεδίϲκ[ε(ο) . . . μηδέ μελ[ . . . αἰ μὲν γὰ[ρ . . . ἀθάνατοϲ . . . μαι καὶ ἀγή[ραοϲ . . . ἐν Ὀλύμπ[ωι κρέϲϲον[ . . . ἐ– λέγχεα δ[ . . .

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5

10

‘Do not, I ask, death . . . terrify . . . nor . . . for if [immortal . . . and ageless . . . on Olympus . . . better . . . reproaches . . .

The sense of these scraps becomes clearer when we realize that they are echoing a speech of Sarpedon, an ally of the Trojans from the Iliad, who justifies his decision to enter conflict as follows (12.322–8, translated by Kelly 2015: 42):

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My friend, if we two escaping this war were always to be ageless and immortal, neither would I fight among the first nor would I send you into battle where men win honour; but now, since the fates of death stand hard by, fates innumerable, which a mortal cannot escape nor avoid, let us go, whether we grant the boast to another or someone to us.

Heroic sentiments indeed –  but Stesichorus places them in the mouth not of a great warrior, but of a monster. He reapplies the words of Homer in a paradoxical context, humanizing Geryon and putting him on a level with the greatest fighters of the Iliad. Moreover, while Sarpedon freely chose to fight, travelling far from his homeland to support the Trojans and win glory, Geryon is under attack in his own island, where he had been peacefully minding his own business: in reality, there is scarcely any choice for him here. By transforming the Homeric speech for his own purposes, Stesichorus is asserting his own status as an innovative poet. The fragments also provided glimpses of Stesichorus’ relationship with his mother (frr. 16.4–7, 17.2–5 F.):

5

“νίκα[ ] κράτοϲ[ . . . ϲτυγε·[ρ . . . γματε . . . ν· λευκ[ . . . · π]είθεο τέκνον· [ . . .

Victory . . . strength . . . hateful . . . white . . . obey, child

5

. . .] ἐ· γὼν· [μελέ]α καὶ ἀλαϲ– · τοτόκοϲ κ]αὶ ἄλ·[αϲ]τ·α· π·α·θοῖϲα . . . Γ]αρυόνα γωναζόμα[ι, αἴ ποκ᾿ ἐμ]ό·ν τιν μαζ[ὸν] ἐ· [πέϲχ . . . 161

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I, unhappy woman, miserable in the child I bore, miserable in my sufferings . . . I beseech you, Geryon, [if ever] I offered you my breast Geryon’s mother Callirhoe asks her son to obey her and not to fight Heracles, appealing to him by the breast which have him sustenance as a child. Here too these words recall a prominent speech from the Iliad: when Hecuba, queen of Troy, begs her son Hector by her breast to come within the walls and not risk his life against Achilles (22.79–89). Here too the context transforms the Homeric original: for while imagining a heroic warrior as a baby is one thing, imagining the same of a three-headed monster is quite another. The effect is both bizarre (especially in the context of breastfeeding) and intensely moving: the monster was young once, and even now needs his mother to care for him. The destruction of one of Geryon’s heads by Heracles is depicted in the largest surviving papyrus fragment:

40

45

ϲιγᾶι δ᾿ ὅ γ᾿ ἐπι– κλοπάδαν ἐ· νέρειϲε μετώπωι· διὰ δ᾿ ἔϲχιϲε ϲάρκα [καὶ] ὀ·[ϲτ]έ·α δαί– μονοϲ αἴϲαι· διὰ δ᾿ ἀντικρὺ ϲχέθεν οἰ[ϲ]τ·ὸϲ ἐπ᾿ ἀ– κροτάταν κορυφάν·, ἐμίαινε δ᾿ ἄρ᾿ αἵματι πο·ρ·φ·[υρέωι θώρακά τε καὶ βροτό·ε·ντ·[α μέλεα. –––––– ἀπέκλινε δ᾿ ἄρ᾿ αὐχένα Γ·α·ρ·[υόναϲ ἐπικάρϲιον, ὡϲ ὅκα μ[ά]κ·ω·[ν ἅτε καταιϲχύνοιϲ᾿ ἁπ·α· λ·ὸ·ν· [δέμαϲ αἶψ᾿ ἀπὸ φύλλα βαλοίϲα· ν·[. . .

and in silence he thrust it cunningly into his brow, and it cut through the flesh and bones by divine dispensation; and the arrow held straight on the crown of his head, and it stained with gushing blood his breastplate and gory limbs; and Geryon drooped his neck to one side, like a poppy which spoiling its tender form suddenly sheds its petals The comparison of death to the cutting of a poppy is found in the Iliad, where the warrior Gorgythion’s death is ennobled by a moving simile (8.306–8). Stesichorus reapplies this image to the destruction of one of Geryon’s heads – though not to his death, since he has two heads left, both of which must be dealt with before Heracles can claim victory. Again, there is a bizarreness – the tender poppy simile is not the end, and will have been followed by yet more bloody fighting – but also feelings of sympathy for the wounded monster. Here and in the other fragments, we can see that the view of the poem advanced by one scholar before the papyrus was published, that ‘one purpose of the Geryoneis was the 162

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glorification of the brave Greeks who were winning new lands for Greek settlement’,19 can be ruled out: audience sympathies are clearly meant to lie not with Heracles but with the monster that he kills. We observe the systematic transformation of motifs from the Iliad to humanize Geryon and to emphasize what is lost through Heracles’ completion of his labour; any sense of triumph or achievement is completely absent. Autobiography of Red can at first seem wholly different from Stesichorus’ poem. Carson’s Geryon is no three-headed monster, but a human adolescent, who shares with Stesichorus’ Geryon only a name and a pair of wings. Far from battling Heracles, Carson’s Geryon falls in love with him; rather than being confined to a mysterious island in the distant west, there is nothing remarkable about where he lives, and he later takes a trip to the decidedly unmysterious Buenos Aires. Stesichorus’ Geryon is a herder of cattle; Carson’s Geryon is a schoolboy who takes up a career as a photographer. For sure, the introduction to Carson’s work may emphasize Stesichorus, citing fragments supposedly from his work and talking about his poetic achievement; but the section entitled ‘Red meat: fragments of Stesichorus’ paradoxically contains no actual fragments of Stesichorus. As Beasley puts it, ‘Carson creates fragments of a nonexistent poem under the camouflage of translation and then comments and riffs on it, taking liberties not with Stesichoros but with her own imaginative creation of how a Stein-infused “Stesichoros” ought to sound.’20 The three appendices – appendix A, ‘Testimonia on the question of Stesichoros’ blinding by Helen’, appendix B, ‘The Palinode of Stesichoros by Stesichoros (fragment 192 Poetae Melici Graeci)’, and appendix C, ‘Clearing up the question of Stesichoros’ blinding by Helen’ – all have self-consciously academic titles that (apart from the phrase ‘Clearing up’) would all be unexceptional headings for appendices in an actual academic book. But while the first two do indeed contain Stesichorean testimonia and a fragment, it is rather the third, an engagingly whimsical and inconclusive series of conditional statements, which seems more in tune with the style and content of the novel that follows. This difference is emphasized in scholarship which contrasts Stesichorus’ archaic take on the myth with Carson’s postmodern approach, or which speaks of Carson transforming the myth in a postmodern direction. Let us now rapidly survey that scholarship, before subsequently assessing the validity of the contrast which it draws. So for McCallum, Carson’s introduction ‘foregrounds the form of the fragment and renders Stesichoros a rather postmodern poet’;21 Murray too refers to Carson’s work as a ‘postmodern comingof-age story of a young boy who is, as in Stesichoros, a “strange winged red monster” ’;22 and Burkitt repeatedly calls Autobiography a ‘post-epic’.23 According to Beasley, ‘Carson’s version de-monsterizes Geryon, eliminating his three conjoined bodies, his gigantism, with even his wings and redness – markers of his monstrosity – downplayed throughout much of the narrative.’24 Indeed, Logan laments, ‘You wish she’d made more of Geryon’s being a monster’;25 so too Wahl remarks, ‘I wanted the wings (and the whole “monster” premise) to play a less passive role, and affect the book’s narrative events.’26 As for Geryon’s Stesichorean antagonist, Guriel calls Herakles ‘more asshole than hero’,27 highlighting in rather pointed terms what he sees as a contrast between Carson’s poem and the Greek myth which supposedly inspired it. 163

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Moreover, for Hall, Autobiography of Red gives Geryon a subjectivity which he had lacked in previous tellings of the myth, including by Stesichorus. In Carson’s work, Hall writes, ‘Geryon’s right to subjectivity triumphs over his millennia-long objectification as the creature who existed simply to be slain in Heracles’ tenth labour. Geryon displaces Heracles from the centre of his myth, and himself take centre stage, substituting for his own death or his own treatment as a beast of burden an erotic triumph over the lover who had once (in Carson’s story) rejected him’;28 and Geryon ‘goes from his archaic self, existing in a poem as the object slain by the macho culture hero Heracles, to what the poem itself calls his “fast” self, in which he emphatically becomes the subject of an intimate experience in an aeroplane’.29 The idea of taking a traditional Greek myth, turning it on its head(s) and presenting it from the perspective of the victim, depicting his interior struggle, his relationship with his family and presenting his struggle with his antagonist in markedly sympathetic terms –  all this is indeed done superbly by Carson. As Halliday writes, ‘Carson is so devoted to the emotional fluctuations of her protagonist; one feels that her favorite moments are those when Geryon broods in beautifully tortured solitude’.30 But as we have seen, it was also done superbly by the poet who has inspired her work.31 Stesichorus’ innovative approach to the myth brings out Geryon’s internal struggle before he faces Heracles in battle; it depicts his mother’s impassioned and intimate appeals to him, and his consequent defiance of these appeals; it portrays the loss of one of his heads with profound sympathy and not a hint of triumphalism. Carson herself acutely remarks that ‘if Stesichoros had been a more conventional poet he might have taken the point of view of Herakles and framed a thrilling account of the victory of culture over monstrosity. But instead the extant fragments of Stesichoros’ poem offer a tantalizing cross section of scenes, both proud and pitiful, from Geryon’s own experience.’32 It is precisely Stesichorus’ emphasis on Geryon’s subjective experience that led him to downplay his monstrosity, making Geryon seem as human as possible so as to align his audience’s sympathies with him. Such an emphasis would have seemed radically different, perhaps even confusing, to its original Greek audience; one wonders if Stesichorus received some of the same criticisms as Carson did from contemporaries who thought that more should have been made of Geryon’s monstrous nature. Such criticism misses the point, both for the Geryoneis and for Autobiography of Red, in which ‘Stesichoros’ “master-text” undergoes the same overhaul to which the lyricist subjected his epic predecessors’;33 we might even say that ‘Carson’s verse novel can be taken as an effort to imagine the poem Stesichoros might have written if his Geryon lived now.’34 So when we read35 That was also the day he began his autobiography. In this work Geryon set down all inside things particularly his own heroism and early death much to the despair of the community. He coolly omitted all outside things. 164

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While the idea of a five-year-old writing an autobiography has clearly nothing to do with Stesichorus or ancient Greece, the association of Geryon with heroism (instead of monstrosity being opposed to heroism), and the focus on ‘inside things’ rather than ‘outside things’, are eminently Stesichorean. That focus, indeed, gives a clue as to how to read passages of this nature against their Stesichorean background; by concentrating on internalities rather than externalities we can get an impression of how an allusion is subtly being put to work. Like the Geryoneis, Autobiography of Red gives an important role to Geryon’s mother. The following passage is important for her relationship with her son:36 Outside the dark pink air was already hot and alive with cries. Time to go to school, she said for the third time. Her cool voice floated over a pile of fresh tea towels and across the shadowy kitchen to where Geryon stood at the screen door. He would remember when he was past forty the dusty almost medieval smell of the screen itself as it pressed its grid onto his face. She was behind him now. This would be hard for you if you were weak but you’re not weak, she said and neatened his little red wings and pushed him out the door. Going to school and fighting Heracles are obviously distinct activities; but in each case the mother’s advice is crucial. Yet whereas in Stesichorus the mother’s care for Geryon is clear, in Carson the mother is not as focused on her son’s well-being,37 with her ‘cool voice’ and somewhat distant words of encouragement. The earlier striking remark ‘She had on all her breasts that evening’,38 which seems designed to provoke thought, could evoke fr. 17 (cited above), but the reference is clearly sexual, unlike in Stesichorus where the breast is mentioned for maternal reasons. Later, before he leaves with Heracles, ‘Geryon wrote a note full of lies for his mother / and stuck it on the fridge’:39 this again is far from the close relationship between mother and son envisaged by Stesichorus. Carson here makes use of the Stesichorean intertext to highlight her own take on Geryon’s relationship with his mother. Chapter XI is entitled ‘Hades’, the name of Herakles’ home town, ‘a town / of moderate size and little importance’40 to which Geryon and Herakles travel to see the volcano nearby: an appropriate choice, given the mythical associations of this labour with the conquest of death as noted above. We might think it absurd, perhaps delightfully so, for Hades, the Greek underworld, to be located in a specific above-ground location in this way. Yet this too has good Stesichorean precedent: for it was Stesichorus who first located Geryon in a specific place, on an island at the mouth of the River Tartessus, today’s Guadalquivir, whereas previous tellers of the myth had merely placed him in the distant west, where the world of the dead was traditionally but vaguely located. Stesichorus’ choice brings the myth up to date, setting it in a land newly familiar to his contemporaries 165

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thanks to their pursuing ever longer trade routes during the seventh and sixth centuries bce; such an action will have seemed as surprising, as strikingly novel, to his audience as a modern-day ‘Hades’ settlement will have been to Carson’s. The poppy image occurs in Carson’s work too, though during Heracles’ seduction of Geryon rather than an attempt to kill him:41 He felt Herakles’ hand move on his thigh and Geryon’s head went back like a poppy in a breeze as Herakles’ mouth came down on his and blackness sank through him. Onto the original Stesichorean simile ‘Carson overlays a more carnal logic in which the phallus (which presumably is like an arrow) provokes sexual ecstasy (Geryon’s head, back “like a poppy in a breeze”).’42 Beautiful though the image is, the audience will recall the use to which it is put in Stesichorus, since it is mentioned in Carson’s fragment XIV (‘Herakles’ arrow’): Arrow means kill It parted Geryon’s skull like a comb Made The boy neck lean At an odd slow angle sideways as when a Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze According to Tschofen, ‘When Carson translates the fragment [. . .] she reveals a greater sensitivity [sc. than in a literal translation by D. A. Campbell] to the poetic quality of the adjectives [. . .] What in Campbell’s translation suggests passivity – “drooping” his neck, “shedding” its petals – becomes, in Carson’s translation, active and erotically charged [. . .] Carson prepares us here to envision Geryon’s strength rather than his weakness.’43 It is not, however, a question of Carson’s showing greater sensitivity than an academic translator, whose aims in translating are naturally different from hers. Rather, the prominence of the poppy in the fragment prepares readers for the use of the same image in Geryon’s seduction, directing them towards the idea that this encounter will not end well for Geryon. After all, ‘the Dionysian Herakles is all brawn, a brute physicality that counters Geryon’s brooding interiority’44 – just like in the fragments of Stesichorus, where there is no reflection of Heracles’ interior life, nothing to attract the audience’s sympathy. As a codicil, we may note that Autobiography of Red is not Carson’s only engagement with Stesichorus. Her more recent work, Red Doc> (2013),45 contains both Geryon and Herakles from her earlier poem; but Geryon is now simply ‘G’, no longer a photographer but a herder of musk oxen, while Herakles, who has just completed a stint in the army, is known as ‘Sad but Great’. (Perhaps a nod to ‘El Caballero de la Triste Figura’, the title adopted by the protagonist of Cervantes’s Don Quixote? He too, after all, undertakes a lengthy adventure, having recruited a farmer as his companion, in what is another postmodern work ahead of its time.) The pair are reintroduced by a third party and go on an adventure together, encountering others named after figures from classical myth (though not otherwise associated with the Geryon story): Hermes, Io. The work, in which, as in Autobiography of Red, ‘the characters live from set piece to set piece’,46 166

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concludes at the bedside of G.’s mother, where ‘the manic lassitude of the previous chapters shifts without warning into the dismal claustrophobia of impending mortality’.47 The continuing importance of the mother figure – so evident from Stesichorus – is clear. It is intriguing to see Stesichorus as an author with whom Carson seems to feel a special link; we may wonder if more poetry inspired by Stesichorus might come. Through this persistent engagement with papyrological fragments (Silverblank, forthcoming), Carson follows a distinguished literary tradition, which includes figures such as H.D. and Ezra Pound.48 Just as they responded to successive papyrological discoveries in the early twentieth century, recalibrating the ancient fragments as modernist poetic texts, so too Carson has repeatedly sought inspiration in fragments first published in the late 1960s for her own postmodern writings. Paradoxically, however, as we have seen in this chapter, this engagement involves both a postmodern transformation of the original and a nurturing of the postmodern elements already intrinsic to this most remarkable of ancient texts. The process involved, we might conclude, is eminently Carsonian, eminently Stesichorean: a postmodern conservatism, a conservative postmodernism.

Notes I am grateful to the editor of the volume for the invitation to contribute to this volume, and for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1. Finglass and Kelly (2021). 2. Carson (1998: 3). 3. For a more detailed introduction to Stesichorus, see Finglass (2014a); also Finglass (forthcoming). 4. Finglass (2014b). 5. In the Greek text, a dot printed under a letter means that there is some doubt as to whether this is in fact the letter represented on the papyrus; a dot underneath an empty space indicates that ink from a letter is present, but the letter in question cannot be read. Gaps on the papyrus are represented by square, [ ]; text within these brackets represents a scholar’s conjectural supplementation of the missing text. When letters are printed that are not found on the papyrus, they are placed within arrow brackets, < >; letters written by the scribe but subsequently deleted by him are placed within double brackets, 冀 冁. Such textual paraphernalia have an aesthetic as well as a practical value, as Carson herself points out in If Not, Winter: ‘Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp – brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure’ (2002: xi). 6. For thoughts on postmodernity in literature, see Malpas (2004). 7. Finglass (2013a) 8. Schade (2015: 164–79). 9. Goff and Harlow (2021). 10. Goff and Harlow (2021: 115). 11. Goff and Harlow (2021: 116). 12. Goff and Harlow (2021: 116).

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Anne Carson/ Antiquity 13. Davies and Finglass (2014: 490–1). 14. Finglass (2013b). 15. For the Greek text of the fragments, see Finglass (2014b: 100–21); for a commentary, see Davies and Finglass (2014: 230–98). 16. Barrett (2007: 1–37). 17. Finglass (2021). 18. Davies (1988). 19. Dunbabin (1948: 330). 20. Beasley (2015: 75; see further 74–7). 21. McCallum (2007). 22. Murray (2005: 103). 23. Burkitt (2012). 24. Beasley (2015: 79). 25. Logan (1999: 67 = 2005: 63). 26. Wahl (1999: 83). 27. Guriel (2013: 571). 28. Hall (2009: 236–7). 29. Hall (2009: 237, referring to Carson’s subheading ‘From the archaic to the fast self ’, ch. XIX). 30. Halliday (1998). 31. Rae (2008: 232–4). 32. Carson (1998: 6). 33. Rae (2000: 27). 34. Halliday (1998). 35. Carson (1998: 29). 36. Carson (1998: 36). 37. Despite Schade (2015: 181–2), who refers to the mother as ‘supportive’. 38. Carson (1998: 30). 39. Carson (1998: 46). 40. Carson (1998: 46). 41. Carson (1998: 118–19). 42. Tschofen (2004: 42). 43. Tschofen (2004: 42). 44. Murray (2005: 108). 45. On which, see Scranton (2014), Hoang (2015). 46. Guriel (2013: 573). 47. Scranton (2014: 211). 48. Goff and Harloe (2021); also Sean Gurd’s chapter in this book.

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CHAPTER 12 CUNNING INTELLIGENCE Ian Rae

In Andrea Rexilius’s contribution to the 2015 collection of essays, Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, Rexilius laments that Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001) invokes ‘stereotypical cultural mythologies about men and women’1 but ‘does not seem to provide a solution, a way out of the tango toward a healthy version of desire’.2 Carson’s vast erudition as a scholar of ancient Greek does nothing, in Rexilius’s opinion, to improve the situation: ‘References to the Greek gods make desire cruel, vindictive, impossible to satiate.’3 However, Rexilius overlooks the imprint of the Greek goddess Metis, the wronged first wife of Zeus, on Carson’s writing. Metis permeates Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, as I have argued elsewhere, precisely because the tactics associated with the cunning intelligence of Metis wrest the characters’ stories free from the destructive constraints of better-known mythologies celebrating patriarchal power.4 In Carson’s writing, Metis appears nowhere as a character but everywhere as a mode of intelligence dependent upon ruses. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant clarify this double sense of mètis in their landmark study, Les ruses de l’intelligence. La mètis des Grecs (1974), translated by Janet Lloyd as Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (1978): From a terminological point of view mētis, as a common noun, refers to a particular type of intelligence, an informed prudence; as a proper name it refers to a female deity, the daughter of Ocean. The goddess Metis who might be considered a somewhat quaint figure seems, at first sight, to be restricted to no more than a walk-on part. She is Zeus’ first wife and almost as soon as she conceives Athena she is swallowed by her husband.5 This chapter will illustrate how Carson develops a literary theory around the topic of erotic and literary ruses in her PhD dissertation at the University of Toronto, Odi et Amo Ergo Sum, submitted under her married name Anne Carson Giacomelli (1981). It will then proceed to illustrate how Carson connects metis to women’s writing in the prose poem ‘Candor’ from Float (2016) and how Carson thereby gestures toward ‘a way out’ of unhealthy relationships. However, Carson’s dissertation illustrates that her theory of Eros is rooted in notions of competitive ‘gamesmanship’ (ii), of erotic contests wherein there are clear winners and losers, a sensibility which, to underscore Rexilius’s point, does not foster healthy long-term relationships. Although the topic of erotic and literary ruses receives its own dedicated chapter in Carson’s celebrated first monograph on desire in ancient Greek lyric, Eros the Bittersweet 169

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(1986),6 reviewers have underestimated the larger importance of ruses to her critical and creative projects. For example, Louis Ruprecht Jr, in ‘Reach Without Grasping: A Retrospective Appreciation of Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet’, struggles to identify antecedents to Carson’s first book and therefore contextualizes her work as part of a ‘nonconformist classical tradition, one largely Nietzschean in inspiration’.7 Although Ruprecht cites the phrase about hate and love from Catullus 85 that gives Carson’s dissertation its title, he appears unaware that Eros the Bittersweet distils arguments from a much more conventional piece of scholarship that takes pains to identify its antecedents and to contextualize its theses, not merely through citations of classical scholarship but also through extensive footnotes about analogous literary phenomena in English, particularly in the works of Shakespeare, Donne, Dickinson and Woolf. The abstract for Carson’s dissertation establishes that her ‘thesis takes the (Snellian) view that Greek consciousness had a history’8 and that the rise in individualism in Greek society was stimulated by particular material, political and aesthetic factors. Carson therefore contextualizes her close readings of Greek lyrics through a larger meditation on consciousness that is indebted to Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (1953). Yet Carson ultimately departs from Snell because, as she says in Eros, ‘Snell neglects an aspect of ancient experience that cuts straight across his record and might have furnished compelling testimony for his thesis, namely the phenomenon of alphabetic literacy.’9 Carson therefore supplements her Snellian interest in the private consciousness of individuals with a broader consideration of the sensual, cognitive and social impacts of literacy, especially as theorized by Eric Havelock and the Toronto School of Communication.10 Finally, Carson combines this scholarship on print consciousness with Ernest Crawley’s anthropological ‘notion that human societies are a network of prohibitions against human contact and ruses for getting round these prohibitions’.11 Carson then proceeds to examine Greek courtship customs, gift exchanges, marriage rituals, purification rites and erotic poetry as ‘ruses of contact’12 that find ways to circumvent societal prohibitions and to remedy the psychic isolation and erotic misfortune of the anguished lover in Greek poetry. Critics coming to Odi et Amo Ergo Sum after reading Carson’s early books might be forgiven for thinking that they had stumbled upon her unpublished Summa Theologica because it lays the intellectual foundations of Eros the Bittersweet, Economy of the Unlost, ‘The Gender of Sound’ and ‘Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity’, among other essays. Yet there is one crucial difference between Carson’s dissertation and the later work, and this difference pushes the poet further toward consideration of Metis: Carson the doctoral candidate is interested in the erotic moment of first contact, the social and poetic ruses for overcoming this crisis of contact, the charged temporal lag between ‘ “I love you” and “I love you too” ’,13 and the rituals and laws that channel (or resist channelling) this erotic energy into marriage and heteronormative procreation. To make this argument, Carson draws heavily on the works of Detienne and Vernant in French and in English translation. She reads these works principally for their analyses of courtship and marriage customs, but the texts also examine cunning intelligence in, for example, the chapter on Prometheus in Vernant’s 170

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Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (1974; trans. 1990). If Metis lurks in Carson’s dissertation research, she looms large in Carson’s early long poems, which the poet orients around the romantic fate of the betrayed wife, the spurned lover, the couple falling out of love. Temporally, the poet fixates on the moment of erotic rejection described by the speaker of ‘The Glass Essay’: I know my source. It is stunning, it is a moment like no other, when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.14 Yet Carson’s protagonists do not resign themselves to loss and abandonment. The narrative arc of Carson’s early long poems typically involves a protagonist’s pursuit of some form of reprieve from the blighted condition of the forsaken lover. The emotionally wrought protagonists attempt to contrive an escape from their emotional predicaments through intellectual enquiry and through an artistry that reconfigures the textual, mythic and often painterly or photographic fragments of these enquiries, especially in lyric essays such as ‘The Anthropology of Water’, ‘The Glass Essay’ and ‘Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve’. The broken-hearted, then, have recourse to ruses as much as the newly smitten. To understand the signs and logic of Carson’s intellectual ruses, it helps to consider the plight of Metis. Homer never mentions Metis, so, as Lillian Doherty observes, most of what scholars know about the origin story of Metis derives from fragments of Hesiod’s Theogony (886–90) and from a fragment (343) attributed to Hesiod by Chrysippus that tells of a contest between Hera and Zeus: As a result of this quarrel, [Hera] bore her famous son Hephaestus without [her husband] aegis-bearing Zeus – Hephaestus, who surpasses in handicraft all the Uranian gods; but [Zeus] lay with [Metis,] the lovely-haired daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, far from Hera of the fair cheeks, deceiving Metis, shrewd though she was. Seizing her in his hands, he put her in his belly, fearing that she would give birth to something else mightier than the thunderbolt. It was for this reason that the high-throned son of Cronos, the sky-dweller, swallowed her without warning. She at once conceived Pallas Athena, to whom the father of gods and men gave birth through his head on the banks of the river Triton. But as for Metis, she sits hidden beneath the entrails of Zeus, Athena’s mother, crafter of right, most knowing of gods and mortals.15 Metis, ‘the trickster tricked’,16 thus operates out of sight and by wiles alone. Her nominal absence as a character in Carson’s work has probable cause because, as Michel de Certeau asserts, metis (as cunning intelligence) is a temporal practice that ‘counts on an accumulated time, which is in its favor, to overcome a hostile composition of place’.17 As the ‘undoing of the proper place (le lieu propre) [. . . metis] disappears into its own action, as though lost in what it does, without any mirror that re-presents it: it has no image of 171

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itself ’.18 Hence, Metis (the character) is an absent presence in Carson’s writing, a hidden goddess exerting an influence on the world by cunning intelligence alone. At the same time, many Carson protagonists experience a fate analogous to that of the absent Metis character. A standard Carson narrative in the 1990s and 2000s depicts an intelligent young lover whose tragic flaw is to be overly attached to a kingly body. These bodies belong to figures with names such as El Cid, the Emperor, Danaos, Herakles and the Husband, whom the wife concedes she ‘boosted [. . .] up to Godhood and held [. . .] there’,19 in much the same way that Metis’s counsel bolsters hot-headed Zeus. The patriarchs attempt to enclose and claim the powers of the lovers, as Stephanie Nelson observes of Zeus: ‘With the swallowing of Metis the possibility of genuine generation among the gods virtually ceases. The gods of the next generation are almost entirely the children of Zeus, and are all, essentially, simply aspects of Zeus’ new order.’20 However, Carson’s lovers, like the water goddess Metis, make tactical use of their supposedly innate formlessness to violate patriarchal boundaries21 and move toward realizing Hesiod’s dreaded ‘something else’. These transgressions are not, of course, a passive accident of female or queer natures, but rather willed acts of the defiance of boundaries through cunning intelligence. Hence Geryon learns to counteract his greatest fear, a cage, with caginess.22 Elizabeth Bishop ‘detach[es] the prefix “un-” from its canniness’.23 And of the persecuted Russian poet Anna Ahkmatova, Carson says that ‘[f]rom cunning life she always took what she needed for her craft’.24 In Carson’s long poems, she typically puts her erudition to use in plots that depict attempts to counteract the power of the male body with the force of cunning, which is appropriate considering that the goddess Metis was embroiled in a contest that pitted craft paired with brute strength (Hephaestus) against craft paired with shrewdness (Athena). In The Beauty of the Husband, for example, this contest arises between a war historian, the Husband, and a poet, the principal speaker, whose marital relationship the poet explicates through allusions to the struggle in Greek myth between Hades, Persephone and the bride’s outraged mother, Demeter. At first, Carson seems to align her own marriage and publication history with that of the speaker and the doomed Persephone,25 but the perspective of the narration subtly shifts away from that of the wife/Persephone toward a series of more radically indeterminate subject positions as the reader becomes aware that Carson is playing tricks on her readers, as in the final lines of the book, in the thirtieth of a titular series of 29 Tangos: Some tangos pretend to be about women but look at this. Who is it you see reflected small in each of her tears. Watch me fold this page now so you think it is you.26 Who is the addressee here in ‘HUSBAND: FINAL FIELD EXERCISE CUT OUT THE THREE RECTANGLES AND REARRANGE THEM SO THAT THE TWO 172

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COMMANDERS ARE RIDING THE TWO HORSES’? The wife? The reader? The Husband himself? Stabilizing these subject positions is not important to the poem; highlighting the unsettled quality of desire and the tactical power of ruses is. Given the narratological imperative in Carson’s long poems for the caged to become cagey, it is not surprising that Metis emerged as an icon among feminist classicists in roughly the same period that Carson earned her literary reputation. In 1983, Ann Bergren argued in ‘Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought’ that ‘the myth of the marriage of the goddess Metis and Zeus becomes an aition [explanatory strategy] of the semiotic power assigned to the female and its (re-)appropriation by the male’.27 Amy Richlin picks up on this idea in ‘Zeus and Metis: Foucault, Feminism, Classics’, which she published in 1991. Richlin criticizes Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality by claiming that ‘Foucauldian work tends to erase women and feminist work. Much like Zeus swallowing Metis and bringing forth Athena, this work reinvents what feminists have done before.’28 In the preface to Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey, Doherty agrees that the myth of Metis serves as a ‘cautionary tale for scholars, and especially for feminist scholars, as they become more conscious of the ideological dimensions of their work’.29 Classicists work with an androcentric canon, but Doherty insists that ‘if feminists leave the study and teaching of such works to those who see their androcentric focus as “natural” and normative, they will leave unchallenged one of the bulwarks of the prevailing ideology’.30 Rather, she urges feminists to take up the contest of wits between Zeus and Metis, for ‘only in the resolutely patriarchal view of a Hesiod must the contest be over once and for all’.31 Most comprehensively, Ingrid Holmberg reads the succession battles of Greek creation myths, the invention of the lyre by Hermes and the entirety of The Odyssey as a contest for control over different forms of metis and their generative powers. In these contests, ‘[a]bstraction, symbolic thought, metaphor’ and symbol systems in general are ‘properties of the male; the female is completely excluded from meaningful symbolic communication’.32 These feminist critics clearly aim to reverse the derogatory association of cunning with women, as opposed to the lauded cunning of warriors such as Odysseus or rebels such as Prometheus, and writing is the most powerful symbol system with which to wage this battle. As de Certeau observes, following Detienne and Vernant, ‘mētis is the “ultimate weapon” ’ because it ‘is a principle of economy: obtain the maximum number of effects from the minimum force’,33 which nicely summarizes Caron’s poetics of parsimony in Economy of the Unlost. Carson makes a similar point about the double standard of cunning intelligence for men and women in Greek society in a footnote of her dissertation where she comes close to naming Metis: Against the general argument here advanced, that females in myth characteristically lose or resist fixed form and violate boundaries, might be set male counterexamples of shape-changers like Proteus, Dionysos in Euripides’ Bacchae and the amorous Zeus, or boundary-violators like Paris and Aigisthos. It remains my impression that a thorough and impartial survey would produce many more female than male examples of these phenomena. Moreover, it is notable that men 173

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who shift their shape seem generally able to shift it back again at will, that is, to command form even within change. That Zeus can pass through bestialization (e.g. as a swan for Leda) or feminization (e.g. as mother of Athene or Dionysos) to recovery of his proper form seems an assertion of his self-control, in sharp contrast to the helpless case of many of his paramours.34 In this light, the lingering question for a feminist argument, such as the one Carson makes in her dissertation chapter on ‘Eros and Women’, is how women might defy the apparent helplessness of the ‘paramour’ in patriarchal narratives and craft a weapon ‘mightier than the thunderbolt’, to cite Zeus’s fear of Metis in Hesiod (trans. Doherty, 1–2). Typically in Greek verse, as Carson notes, the ‘arts of women are metaphors for the ensnaring wiles of love (weaving, spinning, cooking). Such wiles, and the dark places where they are planned and executed by shadowy women, carry connotations of uncleanness and vice.’35 How could women make an empowering art out of their despised cunning and traditional crafts? Happily, these traditional crafts resemble the intellectual properties of metis as well as aptly summarizing some of Carson’s major obsessions: watchfulness, economy and a fixation with time, traps, knots, weaves, water and mutability and technical agility. Let us see how Carson deploys this cunning in ‘Candor’, a three-page prose poem that first appeared in Bomb magazine in 2011 and that resurfaces as an unpaginated ‘chapbook’ within the 2016 collection Float. The ‘Performance Notes’ in Float explain that ‘Candor’ was ‘[c]ommissioned by artist Roni Horn for a subject index of her work, with a set of instructions that I misunderstood and misapplied, but she printed it anyway’.36 This rather perplexing explanation of the poem’s ‘performance’ probably alludes to the fact that the original Bomb publication includes a subtitle which states that the five subsections of ‘Candor’, which bear names such as ‘Could 1’ and ‘Then 3’, respond to the titles of five Horn ‘sculptures’.37 As far as I can tell, the poem in fact responds to Horn’s paintings and photographs, which can be viewed online as part of a Tate Modern exhibition, Roni Horn aka Roni Horn.38 It is difficult to identify the exact artworks that inspire Carson’s subsections because Horn titles her work in series with multiple variants, such ‘Distant Double 2.21’ and ‘2.26’, which Carson simply renders as ‘Double 2’.39 In any case, a circuitous form of wily, but not random, errancy is a crucial component of Carson’s transgressive approach to generic expectations, as Robert Stanton illustrates in his essay, ‘ “I am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you”: Anne Carson’s Errancy’. Whatever the exact inspiration for ‘Candor’, Carson grounds her poem in female artistry, textually (Horn’s titles) and ekphrastically (Horn’s artworks). The first section of ‘Candor’, the verse paragraph ‘Could 1’, begins with the proposition: ‘If you are not the free person you want to be, you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere.’ Like Metis trapped in the belly of Zeus, this unfree person feels an imperative to tell a truth so powerful the need to compose it resembles a biological imperative such as digestion (if the ‘skein’ in the belly alludes to Metis’s position beneath the entrails of Zeus) or menstruation (if the skein 174

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invokes Metis’s procreative power). However, Carson’s principal poetic interest is in women who carve out identities distinct from their procreative power. Hence this skein (a tangled ball of thread) woven out day after day becomes, in her hands, something closer to the compulsion for weaving of the virgin Athena and of the three fates in Greek mythology. Carson’s poem proceeds from this imperative to offer some concrete options for unfree people to express their truths: ‘You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself.’ This passage enacts a quick transition from oral to print communication, which will become the focus of the remainder of the poem. It also foreshadows forms of writing (the letter, the curse tablet) that the reader will encounter later in the poem, in what seem like random transitions but are in fact threads of a narrative weave. From the middle of ‘Could 1’ onward, the focus of Carson’s poem becomes women and writing, including the very possibility of women’s writing – hence the first section of the poem is printed in Float using a font that permits the confusion of numeral and pronoun to form the question, ‘Could I?’ The gender-neutral ‘you’ of the poem’s opening lines quickly shifts to an anonymous woman ‘looking down at a piece of paper’ and inscribing marks on it: ‘she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name’. The rest of ‘Candor’ explores various ways in which women figure in, and reconfigure, this practice of inscription. For example, ‘Then 3’, the section below ‘Could 1’ on the first page – which numerically might follow ‘Double 2’ on the facing page – introduces Jane Wells, wife of the writer H. G. Wells, who holds in her hand ‘a letter from her husband’s mistress, Rebecca West’. Women’s writing is here doubled in that Rebecca writes the letter but Jane ‘adds a few faint underlinings and exclamation marks that make it a document of a different kind’, namely a document that highlights the false-sounding tone of Rebecca’s sympathy for Jane’s illness. Candour motivates Jane to add these marks even though it was ‘[u]nlikely she expected anyone to ever read the page. But there were considerations of privacy and accuracy that moved her hand to perfect it in a certain way, to have her mood recorded, to whisper on paper some resistance to the falsity of the other woman’s sentences.’ A conventional paragraph would round off this anecdote by returning to the introductory definition of candour as an imperative to tell the truth, whether anyone will read it or not. Instead, ‘Then 3’ concludes abruptly with an analogical leap to another writer-in-secret: ‘ “Candor – my Preceptor – is the only wile,” wrote Emily Dickinson in a letter to T.W. Higginson, February 1876.’40 This citation, rather than providing a conclusion to the story about Jane Wells, provokes a further question: how can candour, seemingly a form of forthrightness, constitute a wile? Carson responds to this question with a classical example. ‘Double 2’ invites the reader to ‘Consider Helen’, in the same manner that ‘Then 3’ began by inviting the reader to ‘Consider Jane’. The analogy seems somewhat fraught, given that Helen of Troy outwardly resembles Rebecca more than Jane, since Helen was the mistress of Paris of Troy and a renowned adulterer. However, Carson connects Helen to Jane, Emily and the anonymous writer in ‘Could 1’ because of Helen’s artistry, more than her infamous marital relations. 175

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Carson’s speaker notes that Helen charmed everyone in Greece and Troy, and that the charm ‘was partly her beauty, partly her accurate private mind. Homer doesn’t bother describing her beauty but he gives us a close-up of her mind.’ The speaker illustrates this claim about Helen’s mind by citing a crucial scene in Book 3 of the Iliad (126–9), in which ‘Homer cuts away from the battlefield to everything quiet in Helen’s chamber’. Carson’s translation of this scene calls attention to Helen’s intellectual candour, as she sat coolly: in her chamber weaving a great cloth doublefolded and red and she sprinkled into it the many contests of horsetaming Trojans and bronzeclad Achaians which for her sake they were suffering at the hands of Ares.41 Helen’s frank appraisal of her historical moment, in the midst of the siege of Troy, distinguishes her artistry from the craft of ordinary textile makers: ‘Of course all the women in Homer weave, it is the quintessential female work – because a household needs cloth. Because the designs of women are as tangled and purposeful as webs. Because of that skein in the belly. Yet Helen’s weaving is special – double and red and weirdly now.’ Temporally, Helen’s cloth is striking because Homer appears, on a mimetic level, to be working ekphrastically from Helen’s embroidered depictions of the war, which are necessarily prior. Yet, on a metafictive level, Helen seems to be appraising her situation in Homer’s tale in the midst of Homer’s telling, which brings her work into the present tense of the narration; similarly, on the level of the contemporary reader, Helen offers her perspective on Homer’s tale at the same time that the reader encounters it. Thus this portrait of the unapologetic female artist feels ‘weirdly now’ because it intrudes on the present tense of reading and composition, and because Helen’s agency as an artist seems very contemporary. Helen is weaving the fates of the warriors even as she works on her cloth, and hence Carson portrays her as a skilled maker who shapes events according to her own tangled desires: Since antiquity critics have admired this reciprocal paraphrase of Helen and Homer. They are both in their different ways deeply unfree, deeply wiley, makers of marks. Into his telling hers is ‘sprinkled’ – funny verb, like salt or seeds – in a sort of infinite regress of candor. She is not just another object taken up and used by a man for the sake of his art, she glances out. This ‘glancing out’ is also more powerful in excerpt because the ensuing lines of the Iliad depict Helen swooning with nostalgia for her first husband, her parents, her old city – indeed, the entire patriarchal structure that would contain her – but Carson crops this material out of her reader’s focus. The fourth section of Carson’s poem, ‘Too’, reveals the double identity of ‘Mrs. H.G. Wells’, whose real name was not ‘Jane’ but ‘Amy Catherine’: Wells ‘rechristened her Jane, a name he thought embodied her domestic ability’. Catherine seems a pathetic figure at 176

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first, defined by domestic servitude and shorn of both her preferred middle name and maiden name. However, Carson cites a passage from H. G. Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography that situates Catherine in an analogous position to that of Helen glancing out defiantly from within Homer’s epic artifice: ‘Yet sometimes, [H.G.] says he saw Amy Catherine “look at [him] out of Jane’s brown eyes, and vanish”.’ Her doublefolded identity, as the writer Catherine Wells who kept ‘rooms of her own in Bloomsbury, rooms [H.G.] never saw’, points, in both the Carson and Wells accounts,42 toward a means of escape. In Carson’s fifth section, ‘Her’, the poet offers, ‘for comparative purposes’, a final example of erotic contest in a binding spell on an amatory curse tablet, from Boiotia, circa ‘fourth century bc’. The doublefolded text of the lead tablet, ‘written on both sides, rolled and pierced by a nail’, seems to enact the most extreme example yet of patriarchy restraining powerful women: I bind down Zois of Eretria, wife of Kabeiras, before Earth and Hermes, her eating her drinking her sleep her laughter her sex her playing the lyre her way of going into rooms her pleasure her little buttocks her thinking her eyes43 L. Prauscello and Alicia Deadrick posit that the author of this curse is a rival desirous of Kabeiras,44 while Kevin Solez notes that the unknown author of the curse might be a frustrated rival for Zois’s affections or a relative of Kabeiras worried about the family reputation.45 Whatever the case, Zois’s combination of sex appeal, intelligence and musical ability is a triple threat. Like Helen among the Trojans, Zois has charmed and alarmed the author of this curse with her looks and her cleverness. Although there is some debate about whether Zois’s playing of the cithara is a metaphor for sexual activity (Prauscello), rather than musicality (Solez), both denotations work for Carson’s purposes. Yet Solez is correct to note the curious critical resistance toward taking the diction of the curse literally46 – that is, to speak candidly of beauty, intelligence, sexual appetite and artistry in reference to one woman. Solez illustrates that ancient Greek society agonized over female performers, ‘often assimilating them to prostitutes. This does not mean that every female lyre-player was a prostitute.’47 Carson thus anticipates Solez’s argument by celebrating Zois as a lyre-player within a networks of female artists. Side B of the cithara-curse continues to condemn Zois in a stereotypical manner: ‘and before Hermes I bind down her walk her words her hands her feet / her evil talk her entire soul’. The curse feels weirdly modern because of its use of asyndeton, but the syntax is in fact typical of such tablets.48 The ancient curse would seem to restore the patriarchal bindings on the threatening woman, but Carson has a few ruses left in her arsenal. Like Catherine Wells, Carson has added a few marks to another’s text to record her impressions. Epigraphically, the endings of the curses on both sides of the tablet are lost in fragments. Solez ends the curse on Side A with ‘thought, sight [. . .] to Gaia’ and he ends Side B with ‘[d]eeds, evil speech, and [. . .]’.49 Carson offers a more intimate and 177

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empathetic portrait of Zois by portraying her eyes in place of the mere faculty of sight on Side A, by not committing these thoughtful eyes to Earth on Side B, and by interpolating ‘her entire soul’ into the final gap in the original. The overall effect of Carson’s translation is to make Zois more soulful and less ‘an object taken up and used’ by the author of the curse. Carson counteracts the curse by encouraging the reader to recognize the humanity of Zois and by making the author of the curse seem cruelly vindictive by comparison with the lyricist, whose ‘appealing qualities [. . .] would make her delightful to be around’.50 Thus the catalogue of body parts in the text of the curse reads, within the context of Carson’s poem, more like a blazon of Zois’s positive attributes. She glances out playfully and defiantly from the inscription. The informed prudence of Carson’s poetic style, then, involves sagacious erudition combined with well-timed literary echoes, interwoven biographies, knotted diction, surprising shifts in genre, and tactical translations. For example, some translators of the Iliad render the regal colour of Helen’s cloth as ‘purple’,51 but for Carson52 it is ‘red,’ like the blood of war, like the sheddings of the uterine ‘skein in the belly’, like a homonym for the past participle of ‘to read’. Even Carson’s choice of the ancient Greek curse tablet is significant: Solez notes that the ‘cithara-curse’ is ‘exceedingly rare because it curses a musical composition, performance, or skill, and it may be unique in this regard’.53 Thus Carson uses her scholarship in ‘Candor’ to enhance the artistry of other women while revising the often negative connotations that such artistry carried for the ancient Greeks. Carson’s poetry thereby ties these women and their crafts together in a tangled but mutually empowering web of metis, a form of intelligence closely aligned with the power to encode, decode and recode signs.54

Notes 1. Rexilius (2015: 107). 2. Rexilius (2015: 108). Research for this essay was supported by a postdoctoral grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by an internal grant from King’s University College at Western University. Special thanks to the encyclopedic W. H. New at the University of British Columbia who first suggested that I read Anne Carson.  3. Rexilius (2015: 108). 4. Rae (2007). 5. Detienne and Vernant (1978: 11). 6. Carson (1986: 12–17). 7. Ruprecht Jr (2019: 141). 8. Carson (1981: n.p.). 9. Carson (1986: 41). 10. Watson and Blondheim (2007). 11. Carson (1981: i). 12. Carson (1981: i).

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Cunning Intelligence 13. Carson (1981: 295). 14. Carson (1995c: 30–1). 15. Doherty (1995: 1–2). 16. Doherty (1995: 4, n. 9). 17. De Certeau (1984: 82). 18. De Certeau (1984: 82). 19. Carson (2001: 23). 20. Nelson (2005: 337). 21. Giacomelli (1981: 229–32) 22. Carson (1998: 32–3). 23. Carson (2005: 22). 24. Carson (2000: 111). 25. Rae (2007). 26. Carson (2001: 145). 27. Bergren (1983: 73). 28. Richlin (1991: 160). 29. Doherty (1995: 4). 30. Doherty (1995: 7). 31. Doherty (1995: 7). 32. Holmberg (1997: 30–1). 33. De Certeau (1984: 82). 34. Carson (1981: 277, n. 98). 35. Carson (1981: 279, n. 112). 36. Carson (2016: n.p.). 37. Carson (2011: n.p.). 38. See the Horn exhibition at: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ roni-horn-aka-roni-horn/roni-horn-aka-roni-horn-explore-exhibition. 39. See: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/roni-horn-aka-roni-horn/ roni-horn-aka-roni-horn-explore-15. 40. See the original letter at: http://archive.emilydickinson.org/correspondence/higginson/l450. html. 41. Carson (2016). 42. Wells (1967: 389). 43. Carson (2016). 44. Prauscello (2004: 334); Deadrick (2011: 73). 45. Solez (2015: 97). 46. Solez (2015: 87–8). 47. Solez (2015: 93). 48. Prauscello (2004: 334). 49. Solez (2015: 86).

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Anne Carson/ Antiquity 50. Deadrick (2011: 73–4). 51. Murray (1928: 127). 52. See also Lattimore (1961: 103). 53. Solez (2015: 86). 54. Holmberg (1997: 27–8).

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CHAPTER 13 MYTHOPOETIC IMMERSIONS Vanda Zajko

Much is misnomer in our present way of grasping the world. Anne Carson, Red Doc> Writing about myth commonly entails working towards some kind of definition, towards a mode of description capacious enough to do justice to what is notoriously a troublesome category. Carson’s approach is different, as befits a poet renowned for her subversion of genre and form. Whereas for some writers myth functions as a repertoire of characters and scenarios which provide the opportunity for analogy or metaphor, for the movement away from the quotidian towards a more figurative realm, Carson superimposes the different temporalities she works with in a way such that they are very difficult to prise apart. This means that the usual questions of whether a mythological figure is a convincing comparator or whether an ancient plot is effective at illuminating a modern dilemma do not do justice to the complexity of her mythopoetic practice, a practice which does not privilege one chronological domain. It is in part Carson’s professional training as a classicist which allows her this referential insouciance, but it also reflects the view, which she attributes to the ancients, that poetry ‘puts you in a circuit where mortal time connects with immortal time so that now is also forever’.1 The quote from Red Doc> in my epigraph points towards three concepts crucial for understanding the role myth plays in Carson’s work: language, time and the possibilities and limits of representing experience. This chapter examines the interrelation between these themes, particularly as they play out in the recent theatre piece Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019) (hereafter NJBT), as well as in Autobiography of Red (1998) and Red Doc> (2013). In the hands of a more impoverished poet, the equation of Helen of Troy with the equally iconic Marilyn Monroe might seem merely arch or simplistic, and it is surely the case that Carson is toying with the expectations of her audience when she sets out to draw parallels between the ancient and modern ‘femme fatale’. The comparison between the woman infamously credited with causing the Trojan War and the Hollywood star who tempted a president potentially reinforces a familiar narrative about the exploitation of beautiful but vulnerable women by powerful men, and illustrates the propagation of misogynist tropes across centuries and cultures. But in terms of the way she works with myth, the relationship she evokes between the two women is knottier than analogy and dependent as much on ancient models of gender and language as on contemporary feminist thought. For while Carson’s creative dynamic is resolutely modern, even when she points her readers towards a specific text or figure from antiquity, it is a modernity which is infiltrated by the sensibilities of bygone ages, by the nuances of ancient 181

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etymologies and by the remnants of earlier struggles to stake out the territory of the human. Idealizing neither the past nor the present, she moves between different temporal registers and positions, and overlays ideas and characters drawn from diverse sources without undue regard for historical propriety. This aspect of her practice is continuous across different works, as we shall see, and the traces of mythic narratives which emerge upon close analysis function like hypertexts, providing the reader with multiple interpretative choices. Let us consider the opening lines of NJBT as they appear in the printed text: Enter Norma Jeane Baker. Prologue. This is the Nile and I’m a liar. Those are both true. Are you confused yet? The play is a tragedy. Watch closely now how I save it from sorrow. I expect you’ve heard of the Trojan War and how it was caused by Norma Jeane Baker, harlot of Troy. Even in this short passage, there is a lot going on. The protagonist enters with a performative flourish, identifying themselves in the third person and immediately shattering the fourth wall, purporting to explain to the audience the scene that is about to unfold. However, the use of ‘the liar paradox’ which originated in the ancient world and which subsequently became famous as a mainstay of modern mathematical logic simultaneously poses the question of whether any of this character’s pronouncements are to be trusted: is the play really set in Egypt? Is it really a tragedy? The onlookers are left unsure, and while they are indeed likely to have heard of the Trojan War, they are also more likely to associate the story of its origins with Helen, queen of Sparta, wife of Menelaus, than with the twentieth-century film star. And, in any case, the attribution of blame to Norma Jeane (that was one of Marilyn Monroe’s previous names, wasn’t it?) can make no sense, surely, because the Trojan War took place in the ancient world and Marilyn died in 1962. And what about the use of the word harlot: isn’t that rather judgmental, in the era of #metoo? Wasn’t there a debate even in the ancient world about whether Helen was to blame for the war ostensibly fought to preserve her honour? Is this piece similarly going to try to recuperate her reputation . . .? On the occasion of its premiere at the Kenneth C. Griffin theatre in New York in 2019, Carson’s treatment of the Helen myth was widely recognized as something of a hybrid, both a play and a poem. It was directed by Katie Mitchell, well known for her productions of Greek tragedy, and although she made major interpretative decisions which were presumably designed at least in part to ease the wrong-footedness of the audience, such as introducing two characters, a playwright and a stenographer, whose role was to provide a frame and explanation for the opening scene above, several reviewers 182

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commented on the high number of walk-outs in the ninety minutes of the show. There was no consensus about the success of the production, but overall there was a sense that it was ‘hypnotic and exasperating’ in about equal measure.2 Immersion in the play script without the benefit of directorial exposition can produce a similarly varied experience for readers depending on how relaxed they are about allowing an intertextual moment to remain unintelligible or obscure. For while sometimes the aggregation of past and present figures vibrates with possibility and appears meaningful in multiple ways, there are also times when the links between ancient and modern characters and situations are much harder to decipher. The primary challenge posed by Carson’s mythopoetic practice is not so much one of identifying the sources of possible correlations, but of permitting a rather more haphazard and contingent commentary to emerge. This indeterminacy, rather than demonstrating a muddiness of thought on the poet’s part or a lack of rigour, reflects her preoccupation with the impoverishment of linguistic creations when it comes to capturing the experience of the world. It certainly seems to be the case that those who most enjoyed the staging of the play at the Griffin recognized Carson’s Helen as Euripides’ Helen. The main premise of the plot, that Helen did not go to Troy at all, ‘that cloud scam’ as it is described by Norma Jeane, is reproduced to the extent that ‘the gods’, here updated as the movie moguls at MGM, have whisked her away to the Chateau Marmont in LA to make the film Clash By Night with the director Fritz Lang. Her husband Arthur, ‘king of Sparta and New York’, is under the illusion that he has reclaimed his wife, ‘his casus belli’, after discovering her high on drugs and locked in a bathroom at Troy. In episode three, once he has washed up on Venice Beach, Norma Jeane reveals the truth about the hoax, whereupon he is so outraged that he bursts into flames and has to be extinguished with a bathrobe. There is a melodramatic and absurdist flavour to the action here, and in this aspect Carson’s play also mirrors Euripides, the poet for whom she has been described as having ‘a truly devotional irreverence’.3 For Helen has long been regarded as a complex and genreflexing work, combining parodic elements with serious philosophical discussion, and utilizing the foundation myth of the Iliad to interrogate ideas about appearance and reality. In his recuperative study of the value of the play, Charles Segal argued that the late works of the fifth-century poet evince more than sensationalist theatricality: They reveal a mind involved in continual experimentation and in the ingenious elaboration of new forms as the vessels of new ideas, a restless spirit playing incessantly with new combinations of convention and innovation to bring the problems of his time – often, mutatis mutandis, those of ours – into sharper focus and starker outline.4 It is an evaluation which well suits Carson too, for although it is clear that the some of the details of the ancient play have provided her with a model, taken as a whole, her piece synthesizes ancient and modern elements to muse upon contemporary issues. One of the themes of Helen that Carson elaborates is the relationship between Helen and Persephone. On the face of it, these two female characters from ancient Greek myth 183

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appear very different, the former renowned for her sexual precocity and the latter an emblem of innocence. However, in the fantastical landscapes of the two plays the sexual status of women is not so clearly demarcated and the boundaries between the worlds on the stage and their allegorical entailments are not consistently discernible. In Euripides’ play, Helen’s anomalous position is partly conveyed by her indefinable status when it comes to marriage: although she was already the wife of Menelaus when she was snatched away to Egypt and an empty image given to Paris in her place, the opening of the play sees her resisting a forced marriage to the new king of Egypt, Theoclymenus, who will not protect her as did his self-controlled father Proteus. Her resistance is depicted in terms of the resistance of the parthenos, the unmarried young woman, which is habitually expressed in myth and ritual, and her rescue and return to her husband as her legitimate (first) marriage. In other words, it is as if the Egyptian interlude gives Helen the chance to start again with Menelaus, a sort of wish fulfilment fantasy for the Homeric Helen whose actions led to the war. The audience, moreover, must suspend more than their usual degree of disbelief: they must not only acclimatize to the version of the myth in which Helen did not go to Troy at all, but also accept the representation of the notorious, sexually-experienced, middle-aged woman as an exemplar of the unattainability and desirability of youth, the most famous example of which is Persephone. A long-standing interpretative issue about Helen has been how to make sense of the choral song that is sung towards the end of the play about Demeter’s search for her daughter Persephone after she was abducted. For a period of time, this lyric passage was considered a stand-alone intervention on the part of the Euripides, a kind of masterful display of mythic prowess that did not need to be thematically linked to the rest of the play in order to be successful. Alternatively, the fact that it was not easy to see how it fitted was judged to be a sign of the carelessness of Euripides which was most widely evidenced in his later plays. Just over a decade ago, in a persuasive and comprehensive essay, Laura Swift demonstrated that one way to understand this passage is to think about it in relation to women’s sexuality and the ancient Greek tropes of the partheneia: considered in this context, the myths of both Helen and Persephone form part of a broader nexus of ideas which were rehearsed and dramatized in multiple settings and which explored, however implicitly, profound cultural anxieties about men and women, about sex and marriage. The details of Swift’s analysis will not be repeated here: suffice to say, on this reading, already in the fifth century Helen is a play whose protagonist is enmeshed in contemporary debates about desire, consent, reputation and fake news.5 The way that Carson treats this material is instructive: rather than incorporating the ancient figure of Penelope into her developing plot, she chooses instead to scatter throughout her play references to a poem by the twentieth-century poet British poet Stevie Smith. Persephone, the intermediary between the worlds of the living and the dead, is a reoccurring presence in the work of Smith, a great deal of whose poetry also ‘occupies an uncanny inter-realm between life and death’.6 The poem cited here is the only one of hers in which Persephone is the speaker and identifies herself by name and it is a strange combination of survivor narrative and recollections of enforced time in the underworld, ‘this wintriness’, that was really not all bad. The ambivalence of Smith’s 184

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Persephone about her relationship with her peers, her abductor and the difficulty of prising apart her own experiences from the ways that they have been reported by others is made clear the first time the poem appears and may appear to suit well the context of Norma Jeane’s self-exposition: I am that Persephone Who played with her darlings in Sicily Against the background of social security. Oh what a glorious time we had. Or had we not? They said it was sad.7 But there is another layer of mediation between the ancient and modern Persephones in the person of Truman Capote, who is, surprisingly, impersonated by Norma Jeane at this point in the play. The ventriloquism involved is complex because although Norma Jeane herself makes it clear whom she is portraying (‘Enter Norma Jeane as Mr Truman Capote’), she goes on to state that this is the first choral song, that she is her own chorus and that she thinks of her chorus as her good friend Truman Capote. In performance, the nuances of the interplay between the different voices here would be relatively easy to deliver, particularly given Capote’s distinctive vocal style which is self-consciously referenced in a gorgeously decadent image (Truman / had a voice like a negligee, always / slipping off one bare shoulder, / just a bit); however, on the page, the movement between the first and third persons and the performative and the confessional in the scene which follows is harder to decipher. And the larger question springs to mind: what is Truman Capote doing in the play at all? There is no obvious single answer to this query, but several possibilities. Capote was a larger-than-life character in the artistic circles of 1950s New York City, and he was friends with Marilyn with whom he spent a lot of time in the spring and summer of 1955 when he was writing his novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Subsequently, he made clear that she had been his first choice for the character of Holly Golightly in the film version, even though his plans were thwarted by the bosses at Paramount Studios to whom he sold the rights. In 1980, he published a collection of short fiction and non-fiction pieces (the boundaries between these two genres are not always sustained in Capote’s writing), including an account of a day spent with Marilyn during the April of that shared time, entitled A Beautiful Child. This depiction of their relationship suggests an easy-going, tolerant, bickering rapport, as they attend a funeral, drink champagne and range around Manhattan. The dialogue is supplemented by passages of commentary by Capote, and the insights he displays here could conceivably be the inspiration for Norma Jeane’s declaration in Carson’s play that ‘He was a good friend, he told me the truth’8 and the idea that one of his functions in her life was to offer an interpretation of its drama in the manner of an ancient Greek chorus. Alternatively, if more tangentially, Capote’s materialization in the play might have been suggested by his own status as a comic-tragic figure (perhaps akin to Menelaus in Euripides’ Helen), whose alcoholism, physical appearance and personal vanity led to him becoming something of a caricature, even as he chronicled the lifestyles of the rich and famous. There is also a suggestion made by his 185

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official biographer that Capote envisaged his acclaimed work of literary non-fiction, In Cold Blood, as an American version of a Greek tragedy and in his mind’s eye constructed the grain silos of the Midwest as the pale facades of Greek temples. In this he was heavily influenced by the stage directions of Eugene O’Neill in his adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Mourning Becomes Electra.9 In an episode towards the end of the play, Norma Jeane as Truman Capote delivers a monologue which articulates the connections between the private and public dimensions of war and desire, ‘the gods of love and hate’ who turn out to be the same.10 Juxtaposing the conflict at Troy with the domestic arguments he had with his lover, Jack, the writer delivers what is one of the most poignant monologues of the play, a lament for the hell that is other people which compresses the age-old search for blame and the origins of conflict into the course of one night’s vicious, repetitive quarrel: ‘Breathless, blaming, I’m not blaming! How is this not blaming! Hours pass or do they. You say the same things or are they different things? Hell smells stale. Fights aren’t about anything, fights are about themselves.’11 The inadequacy of language becomes even more acute at moments of crisis like these, and it also becomes the vehicle of aggression: ‘War pours out of both of you, steaming and stinking. You rush backwards from it and become children, every sentence slamming you back into the child you still are, every sentence not what you meant to say at all but the meaning keeps contracting, or flaring, flaring and contracting, as sparks drop on gasoline . . .’12 A merely temporary truce comes with the abandonment of words and a drift into unconsciousness, but nothing is resolved: You both decide without words to just – skip it. You grip one another. In the night, in the silence, the grip slowly loosens and silence washes you out somewhere onto a shore of sleep. Morning arrives. Troy is sill there. You hear from below the clatter of everyone putting on their armour. You go to the window.13 This last sentence does some contracting of its own, as it pulls back from the night-time nowhere terrain to the dawn of another day at Troy and a perspective that, given the vantage point over the battlefield, would seem more easily to belong to the Homeric Helen than to Truman Capote. Howsoever we make sense of Capote’s ventriloquized presence in the play, and this will depend in part on the extent of our own awareness of his relationship with Monroe and of the details of his literary output, this scene is affecting and potent and enacts Carson’s preoccupations with the roles of language and time in configuring human experience. It also sharpens our sense of Carson’s compositional practice. We have seen that her allusive repertoire is succulent and that she freely savours the work of artists from different periods, as well as the learned commentary about them. Another way of conceptualizing her activity is as an example of translation, not just of the inter-lingual variety, although that is certainly is one of its aspects, but of the messy, inner worlds of the human being into the impoverished representations of language. The passing references to texts, artists and contexts, the Euripidean incorporation of sometimes surprising material, and the refusal to make 186

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explicit the rationale for her cast of characters, all testify to a conviction that certainty and comfort are no prerequisites for interpretative pleasure. But there is a far-reaching implication here too, that the experience of literature involves a dynamic imbroglio of reader and text and that, in the words of Clive Scott, ‘Literature is something which constantly calls up, reorganizes, invests with new value, elements that are virtual within us.’14 The Trojan War between Capote and his lover domesticates the political but, more than that, it illustrates vividly how the instinctual forces of aggression and desire struggle for articulation and are always invested with personal memories and experiences, and how the expression of pain and trauma is always an act of translation. There are other characters and episodes whose inclusion would profit from openminded and curious scrutiny: Pearl Bailey, a contemporary of Monroe’s who won a Tony Award in 1968 for her performance in a famous all-black production of Hello, Dolly! on Broadway; Hermione, Helen’s daughter in myth, here Monroe’s daughter, reputed to be in a coma in New York having taken an overdose and an absent presence for her mother throughout; the aforementioned Stevie Smith; the movie director Fritz Lang; the apocalyptic final scene where Norma Jeane as Mr Truman Capote joins Norma Jeane as Norma Jeane to sail out of a Los Angeles that has been destroyed in a flood. All these features of the play potentially act as triggers for an associative kind of readerly response or for more systematic scholarly research, and they enhance the sense of the play’s hypertextuality, proffering numerous interpretative pathways for its audience. The central questions of who precisely Norma Jeane is and what she is up to are not securely resolved; as also in Helen, Helen’s multiple identities and motivations are explored from a number of angles. The result is that Carson’s text performs a mimesis of Euripides’ in aspects other than plot, exploring the possibilities of representation and, in the words of Charles Segal about Helen, ‘embracing the ethical side of the questions about the nature of reality as well as epistemological questions about the role of language, myth, and art in communicating that reality’.15 Another strategy used by Carson for widening the referential scope of her work, present in NJBT, and also, as we shall see, in other work, is her use of supplementary material related to, but not directly part of, the main text. In NJBT, the scenes of dialogue are interspersed with nine prose passages, each a meditation on an ancient Greek term or concept central to the themes of the play, and each subtitled portentously ‘History of War: Lesson 1’, ‘History of War Lesson 2’ and so on. These segments purport to be a dictionary-style analysis of the history and usage of the word or phrase in question: for example, the third one takes as its focus the verb ἁρπάζειν, here translated as ‘to take’, and the layout of the words on the page certainly reinforces that impression. In terms of content, however, there is nothing disinterested about these passages. Rather, they combine instruction about etymology with a highly-charged meditation on its potential relevance for the play. The third ‘Lesson’, for example, proceeds thus, after the initial translation of the verb which is its subject: If you pick a flower, if you snatch a handbag, if you possess a woman, if you plunder a storehouse, ravage a countryside or occupy a city, you are a taker. You are taking. 187

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In ancient Greek you use the verb ἁρπάζειν, which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum and gives us English rapture and rape – words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its eyes as it speaks.16 Here, the examples selected to illustrate the use of the word are intimately connected with Carson’s mythmaking project and the exegesis demonstrates both her familiarity with ancient languages and cultures and her hard-earned nonchalance about their representation. The pseudo-lexicographical entry does contain accurate information about the contexts for the verb ‘to take’ within ancient Greek contexts – it is used for the stealing of property and the sacking of cities, for example, but the juxtaposition with the theft of handbags sends us spiralling off into another era altogether, and has the effect of reinforcing the impression that the word being described here is used above all for a particular variety of gendered violence, of violence against women that is often trivialized within mainstream culture. The plucking of flowers relates back to the cultures of partheneia invoked by Euripides, which link Persephone and Helen, and the loss of blood that permeates the passage thus recalls both menstruation and the blood shed at Troy. The time frame encompassing the ‘very early’ and the ‘very late’ is both extensive and compressed, since etymological accounts of language skip over vast tracts of evolving discourse, pinpointing only selective moments; and the association of the end of the world with ‘hysteria’, the concept drawn from early Greek medicine and later popularized by Freud, connects the violence enacted by male authority with apocalyptic visions of civilizations’ decline. The point here, then, is not to give neutral information about what ἁρπάζειν means, but to enact a mode of thinking about meaning which illuminates the roles of language, time and representation in the work as a whole. Above all, the final sentence, urging upon language a sense of shame, highlights the complicity of linguistic expression with the inequities of the world. The potential subversion of scholarly forms of knowledge and enquiry is perhaps most clearly showcased in Carson’s much-admired prose-poem or novel-in-verse Autobiography of Red, which appeared some twenty years before the premiere of NJBT. This work also contains items of supplemental commentary that hold out the promise of explication but in the end withhold, and mysterious allusions to another modernist female poet, in this case Gertrude Stein. Autobiography of Red audaciously transforms some of the surviving fragments of the Geryoneis by the seventh-century lyric poet Stesichorus concerning the tenth labour of Heracles into a poignant narrative about the red winged Geryon’s coming of age and bruising erotic relationship with the worldly hero. But there are thematic connections here with NJBT because a dominant strand in the modern reception of Stesichorus is the anecdote which depicts him as having been blinded by the recently deified Helen of Troy. She took away the poet’s sight, so the story goes, because he wrote scurrilously about her along the lines of her portrayal in Homer; she restored it when he recanted and composed the Palinode in which she is depicted as never having been in Troy. This latter work may have prompted Euripides 200 years later to write Helen, which, in turn, some 25,000 years subsequent to that, was one of the 188

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sources of inspiration for NJBT. Carson thus positions herself as the receptive beneficiary of a chain of storytellers spanning the centuries who have imagined different possibilities for Helen. Included in the volume are various proemia comprising an introductory essay and a selection of some of Carson’s hybrid translations which combine splinters of the surviving fragments of Stesichorus with details derived from the narrative sections of her own poem. There are also three appendices positioned prior to the main body of the text: the first cites the ancient sources for the story of Stesichorus’ blinding; the second offers a glimpse of Stesichorus’ Palinode; the third works through a rather arch syllogistic inquiry into the truth or otherwise of the circumstances of the blinding. Next comes a stand-alone poem by the nineteenth-century American writer Emily Dickinson, one of her ‘volcano poems’, often read as an allegory of the hidden dimensions of the smouldering self, until then, finally, we come to the forty-seven interrelated narrative sections of Autobiography of Red. After the last of these, a concluding piece consists of what appears to be a transcribed conversation between an interviewer, I, and an interviewee, S, in which the S that denotes the name of the interviewee quite quickly seems to come to represent Stein rather than Stesichorus, despite the appearance of the ancient poet’s name floating mischievously on the page in brackets after the title ‘Interview’.17 The relationship of all this material to the main body of the text has been considered in detail by others, most compellingly by Ian Rae in his article in Women and Poetry.18 Rae argues that we should think of this material in terms of a Derridean parergon, that is to say, rather than dismissing it as an adjunct to the principal work of art, we should take it seriously as contributing to the effect of the piece, of performing the function of mediating the work’s boundaries. He suggests that Carson here employs this mediating power ‘to shift the focus of the story and resituate Stein, Helen, and Dickinson – women marked as extrinsic to the history of Stesichoros, Geryon and Herakles – in more intrinsic positions’.19 It is certainly the case that when puzzling over the appendices, one of the least fruitful interpretative manoeuvres is a limited analysis of the use of Stesichorus from a traditional scholarly perspective. This is not the same as saying, of course, that her use of the Stesichorean fragments is uninteresting. But, as the discussion of her treatment of Euripides’ Helen has shown, linear historical emplotment is of no interest to Carson, and she does not configure the relationship between ancient and modern stimuli in terms of the monodirectional traffic between source text and translation. Her profound understanding of the conventions of genre as they pertain to ancient texts allows her to identify the radicalism of Stesichorus’ poetics and to associate it with the similarly radical experiments in form of literary modernism, so that the contingent fragmentariness of the ancient poet for a twentieth-century reader forms the basis of the correlation with Stein. But there are numerous potential ways of explaining the presence of the highmodernist innovator in a poem which explores, among other things, the cruel experiences of being an outsider, the vicissitudes of same-sex desire, and autobiographical writing without the use of the authorial ‘I’ (Stein’s famous 1933 work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, is often described as a quasi-memoir and was written by Stein in the voice of Alice Toklas, her life partner). Just as the significance of Truman Capote or Stevie Smith in Norma Jeane Baker of Troy may be inferred by referring to their literary publications 189

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or incidents from their lives, but may also remain largely mysterious, depending on the knowledge and inclinations of the reader, so too the potential relevance of Stein and Dickinson to the story of Geryon and Heracles may remain evocatively unresolved. It certainly will not be clarified by Carson herself. The work which begins with a citation from Stein about the wilfulness of language (‘I like the feeling of words doing / as they want to do and as they have to do’) seems to invite an equally wilful response from its readers. As previously mentioned, Autobiography of Red was very well received, perhaps because its dominant trajectory is the familiar one of the gay bildungsroman. Its sequel fifteen years later, Red Doc>, attracted less consistently fulsome reviews, and this may be precisely because the practice of overlaying ideas and characters drawn from different sources which we have been examining is more unapologetically pronounced. Running through this work are references to Proust and to the much less well-known Russian surrealist writer, Daniil Kharms, both of whom Geryon (here abbreviated to G) has been reading. The main plot-line is a road trip taken by G and Heracles (here known as Sad, short for Sad But Great) and a mutual friend of theirs, Ida, to a clinic set in the frozen north. But a description of plot does not help much with the experience of this text since the journey for the reader is as much backwards and forwards through historical time and the time of the two loosely-connected poems as it is in the car with the aging exlovers. Another feature which works to disrupt any sense of continuous narrative is the interspersal of segments focalized through the ‘Wife of Brain’ that function like an ancient Greek chorus, sometimes scene-setting and commenting on the action, sometimes adopting a more lyrical voice. Even the typology itself flaunts a lack of orthodoxy, with the text of the main narrative printed in a justified two-inch column down the centre of each page. Writing in The Quietus, Erin Lyndal Martin interprets Carson’s experiments with form and transformation of the named protagonists of her earlier work into more symbolic, timeless figures as an only partially successful attempt to write a contemporary epic, revisiting familiar characters and beginning in medias res.20 The epigram which opens the poem, the famous quote from Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho – ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ – could conceivably be cited to support this reading, but other interpretations are possible. While a young scholar beginning his career at Trinity College Dublin, Beckett published a study of Proust whose work he much admired. It is a dense and unwieldy monograph that combines passages of textual analysis with whirligigs of musing on aesthetic and metaphysical topics, but it is clear that Beckett identifies closely with some aspects of the older writer’s artistic project and is preoccupied above all with his innovative means of representing reality. Commenting on Beckett’s admiration for what he calls ‘Proust’s basic insight into the centrifugal tendency of the human mind’, John Pilling asserts that a source of fascination for Beckett is Proust’s demonstration ‘that personal identity is not a matter of stable, fixed, one-to-one correspondences, but a confused and occasionally volatile chaos brought about by oscillations in the relationship between the inner self and the outer world’.21 In his own fictional writing, Beckett continued to explore the limitations of positivistic worldviews and in his later works 190

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‘systematically makes the world of time and space subservient to the world of his imagination’.22 Carson too operates with this kind of hierarchy and although she rarely provides explicit methodological statements, it is possible to identify passages from within her work which do enact a process of being, and entanglements with language and memory that are reminiscent of both Beckett and Proust and perhaps partly explain why they are two of her intertexts for Red Doc>. One such example comes when G, musing upon his herd of cattle as he watches over them at night, focuses in on one of them as ‘with a phrasing as simple as a perfect aphorism’ it performs a spin in the air and then rejoins the rest: Slotting itself into the undulation of the others as firmly as temptation into I can resist anything but. He slips from thought to thought. Wilde Wild Wildness does surely attract him although what he knows about it is not much.23 Here the associative movement of G’s mind combines elements of experience distinctive to G himself (why is temptation ‘firm’ for G?) with a well-known aphorism, with wordplay that spirals outwards and takes us in another direction altogether, to another Irish playwright with a predilection for kicking over the traces. This pattern of openness to and immersion in the memories, words and feelings that constitute a life and that press upon consciousness in the space of a multi-sensory, transitory moment demonstrates something of Carson’s creative practice. Some traces are personal to the author, although they may spark a response in her readers; others, including myth, carry with them heavier cultural baggage. The imperfectability of language, a long-standing source of fascination, democratizes them all, but this is not an obstacle for Carson, who uses her longer perspective to challenge the presumed knowledge of her readers and upset the equilibrium of the learned status quo.

Notes 1. Streckfus (2015: 220). 2. Brantley (2019). 3. Wollen (2020). 4. Segal (1971: 555). 5. Swift (2009). 6. Tomkinson (2018: 354).

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Anne Carson/ Antiquity 7. Carson (2019: 10–11). 8. Carson (2019: 10). 9. Clarke (2006: 331). 10. Carson (2019: 40–2). 11. Carson (2019: 41). 12. Carson (2019: 40–1). 13. Carson (2019: 41–2). 14. Scott (2018: 2). 15. Segal (1971: 561). 16. Carson (2019: 13). 17. Carson (1998: 147). 18. Rae (2000: 19–20). 19. Rae (2000: 36). 20. Martin (2013). 21. Pilling (1976: 15). 22. Rabinovitz (1977: 43). 23. Carson (2013: 24).

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CHAPTER 14 DEADLY EROTIC TANGOS AND ANIMAL AFFINITY 1 Hannah Silverblank

Despite her claim that she ‘doesn’t like romance and [has] no talent for lyrical outpourings’,2 Anne Carson’s oeuvre is filled with lyric meditations on eros, shame and abjection voiced by a fragmentary yet connected poetic persona. This chapter explores these themes, which are taken up by the lyric ‘I’ in texts such as The Beauty of the Husband, ‘The Glass Essay’ and ‘The Anthropology of Water’. All of these texts situate Carson’s poetic persona in a lyrical exploration of her own erotic woundedness at the violent hands of a brashly seductive heartbreaker. The masculine heartbreaker archetype recurs like an enthralling yet traumatic episode, appearing in different generic guises across Carson’s oeuvre. In The Beauty of the Husband, this heartbreaker is identified only as the unnamed ‘husband’ in the ‘29 tangos’ dedicated to his beauty and the damage he enacts upon the lyric persona. In ‘The Glass Essay’, he is named ‘Law’; in ‘The Anthropology of Water’, he is called ‘the emperor’.3 In Autobiography of Red, the heartbreaker is the monster-slayer and colonizer par excellence, the Greek hero Herakles. Although the ancient Herakles kills Geryon one head at a time and seizes his cattle, Carson figures Herakles’ destruction of Geryon as an erotic one. After Herakles leaves him, Geryon’s identity is filtered through this loss, as evidenced in his self-diagnosis as a ‘brokenheart’.4 Across all of these works, Carson situates these heartbreaking and broken-hearted erotic partners as dyadic archetypes. Concerning The Beauty of the Husband, Andrea Rexilius has described the dyad of the ‘husband’ and the lyric ‘I’ as ‘unhealthy’: ‘Carson’s text does not seem to provide a solution, a way out of the tango toward a healthy version of desire.’5 In this chapter, I build on Rexilius’ claim by illustrating the fragmentation of Carson’s erotic ‘self ’ across a range of works. My primary emphasis lies with Geryon, whose role in the ‘tango’ with Herakles is to be made vulnerable, killed and transformed into ‘meat’. I discuss Carson’s dispersal of the self across texts, with a special focus on the relationship between Carson’s lyric persona and Geryon. In dispersing the fragments of a lyric self across multiple texts, genres and pronouns, Carson leans into an affinity with the multi-bodied, many-wounded Geryon. Carson also establishes an affinity between her lyric personae and Stesichoros’ ‘Geryoneis’, the text whose importance she takes up as a theme in the first chapter of Autobiography of Red. Considering the affinities that emerge between Carson’s lyric personae, Geryon, and the ‘Geryoneis’ enables an awareness of the material ravaging experienced as a result of eros, which, in Carson’s poetics, disperses the lyric personae into morbid fragments. Geryon, the ‘Geryoneis’, and the lyric ‘I’ are all subject to excessive wounding, dispersal 193

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and, eventually, reconfiguration into new forms of meaning that can be resuscitated from the scattered remains. Why does Geryon offer a suitable receptacle for some of Carson’s poetics of self? What is it about the masculine, monstrous Geryon figure that makes him ideal for intertextual merging with Carson’s lyric persona? The first part of this chapter provides close-readings of passages in which Carson reads varied forms of shame, abjection and fragmentation into Geryon. The second part expands the way dispersed abjection carries over from the sexual body of Carson/Geryon to the way their characters relate to language and its vulnerabilities. The chapter concludes with a third section, which considers the ways that Autobiography of Red and later Red Doc> posit a kind of affinity between Geryon and animals. I argue that Geryon’s kinship with animals is premised on the shared experience of erotic or literal death as a necessary consequence of feeding the heartbreaker’s insatiable appetite, whether for sex, for ‘red meat’, or both. In contrast to the violence Herakles enacts, Geryon’s choral counterparts provide gentle modalities of recognition and release from the deathly impact of eros.

Abject eros and Carson’s poetics of shame In describing Nox as ‘a study of shame’, Jocelyn Parr provides a reading that pays ‘attention to the way that Nox articulates the various shames of personality, subjectivity, and identification’.6 Parr claims that Carson ‘writes of the self without relying on the construct of the coherent, core self ’.7 This chapter extends Parr’s observation about Carson’s incoherent self in Nox to Carson’s lyrical personae and Geryon across her works, where fragments of selfhood are dispersed across multiple textual bodies. This fragmentation applies to Carson’s lyrical expressions of grief and mourning (as in Nox) but also extends to her erotic writings, with the effect of cross-wiring eros and death in her poetics. In Plainwater, eros is expressed with an awareness of the unoriginal nature of love’s clichés. The narrator draws repeated attention to the ways in which the singers of soul standards on the radio, from Billie Holiday to Ray Charles, replay and re-tell eros. These textualized radio waves cut through Carson’s text, as if to remind her of the unoriginal yet still compelling nature of her own erotic subjectivity. In a chapter whose title references a Ray Charles song (‘Very Narrow: Introduction to Just for the Thrill’), she writes: What happened to me after that takes the form of a love story, not so different from other love stories, except better documented. Love is, as you know, a harrowing event [. . .] Even now it is hard to admit how love knocked me over.8 Carson makes surprising novelty out of the hackneyed nature of love by allowing Geryon to serve as the self who is referenced by ‘auto-’ in Autobiography of Red. Geryon can readily ‘admit how’ the experience of falling in love with a brash colonizer like Herakles ‘knocked [him] over’. 194

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Both ‘The Anthropology of Water’ and the ‘romance’ in Autobiography of Red feature a nexus of travel, pilgrimage, erotic love, temporal disorientation and red flowers, all of which draw Carson’s lyric persona deeper into affinity with Geryon. The narrator of ‘The Anthropology of Water’ recalls a slice of erotic memory in a passage that enacts a disjointed temporality in the memory as well as its narrative reflection:9 Dahlias, now. A raw yardful of dahlias – we are making our way through them toward the street. A morning. After the first night I slept at his house, which, as you know and he does not, is the first night I slept at any man’s house. Through the wet grass, walking behind him. All of a sudden he stops and bends aside. Snaps off a single dark red dahlia, my eyes going out of me like a cry. Lover, I thought. Now he keeps going and reaches his car and jumps in, placing the dahlia on the seat beside him, drives off. With a wave. My car is parked further down the street.10 This passage locates the astonishing feeling of falling in love within a moment of present – yet somehow belated – beholding. Carson’s lyric persona trails behind ‘the emperor’ as she conveys a past recollection located vividly in the present (‘Dahlias, now [. . .] we are making our way’) that recedes out of the moment itself into a generalized morning. The phrase ‘Through the wet grass, walking behind him’11 positions the ‘I’ as if trailing behind her ‘lover’ in time as well as space. This trailing, then generalizing, then again trailing, is followed by a sudden onrush of an important moment for her soul (‘All of a sudden he stops and bends aside. Snaps off a single dark red dahlia’). In these lines, readers are invited to engage in a verbal voyeurism into a past where the reader has more intimate access to the moment’s significance than the ‘emperor’ himself does (‘as you know and he does not’). The ‘sudden snap’ of the dahlia provokes the lyric persona to lose her eyes – again, an intimacy of description afforded to the reader, not necessarily understood by the ‘emperor’. This description, ‘my eyes going out of me like a cry’, evokes the vulnerable abjection of Sappho’s speaker in fr. 31.12 Like the singer of Sappho 31, who gazes upon the beloved in conversation with a man, Carson’s reader becomes a triangulating witness and participant in the gaze of desire. This passage also reaches back to a discussion of erotic shame and the gaze in Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, in which she writes, ‘The proverbial residence of aidōs upon sensitive eyelids is a way of saying that aidōs exploits the power of the glance by withholding it [. . .] In erotic contexts, aidōs can demarcate like a third presence.’13 Just like the reader of Plainwater, or the voyeuristic singer of Sappho 31, shame itself can triangulate the encounter between the dyad of lovers. In describing the relationship between shame and the gaze, Carson quotes a fragment of Sappho, which she translates as ‘I want to say something to you, but aidos prevents me . . . / (LP, fr. 137.1–2).’14 I want to read this line in the context of a prose passage in Eros the Bittersweet, where Carson writes, ‘Paradox is what takes shape on the sensitized plate of the poem, a negative image from which positive pictures can be created.’15 The poem itself becomes like a camera – an important tool for Geryon in Autobiography – which allows for the possibility of positing paradox that renders the body of the erotic subject riddled with negative space. 195

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The dahlia in Plainwater serves as a fragmentary red trophy of the narrator’s erotic vulnerability, a plucked piece of beauty that is stolen away. Its red florality also evokes some of the dynamics and imagery from Autobiography of Red and, by extension, the poppy simile from Stesichoros’ sixth-century lyric poem, the ‘Geryoneis’. This Stesichorean simile describes Geryon’s moment of death at the hands of Herakles, where Geryon’s head leans over like a poppy ‘shaming’ itself.16 In Autobiography of Red, the seeds of that sixth-century poppy are spread through the wind and planted throughout the text, appearing at different moments and in different words. The most obvious translation of the Stesichorean image comes in the section called ‘Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros’: XIII: HERAKLES’ ARROW Arrow means kill It parted Geryon’s skull like a comb Made The boy neck lean At an odd slow angle sideways as when a Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze17 Geryon’s moment of death, evoked via the pathos of a flower unable to withstand the rush of wind, is translated into a slow-motion (‘odd slow angle’) process, as well as a sudden and overpowering attack (‘It parted Geryon’s skull like a comb’; ‘whip of Nude breeze’). This imagery and temporality evoke how the narrator of Plainwater describes falling in love with the ‘emperor’ in a patch of red dahlias. The red poppy and dahlias evoke the shedding of blood, and the shaming of these petals reflect the abject dissociation and fragmentation of Carson’s erotic self. Within the ‘novel in verse’ portion of Autobiography of Red, Geryon experiences another variant of the Stesichorean poppy simile – his death, eroticized – while travelling on an aeroplane. At this point in the narrative, Geryon has recently reconnected with Herakles after years of separation, in a surprise encounter in Buenos Aires. Geryon is swept off into a strange temporality as he meets his old lover in the midst of a new relationship with Ancash, who welcomes Geryon as an odd third companion in the happy couple’s travels. This triangular configuration evokes Geryon’s own physicality, in its alignment of three men into a three-seat aeroplane row, as well as the erotic triangulation that intrigues Carson in her work on Sappho’s fragment 31.18 Sitting between Herakles and Ancash, Geryon finds himself aroused by the book he purchased at the airport. Geryon was not expecting to meet Herakles again, nor to find himself travelling on a plane between Herakles and Ancash, nor to find the novel he purchased to be pornographic. As the erotic scenes from Geryon’s aeroplane reading spill out from the pages, Geryon experiences an ashamed helplessness in the face of desire’s crushing, limb-softening power: The smell of the leather jacket near his face and the hard pressure of Herakles’ arm under the leather sent a wave of longing as strong as a color through Geryon. It exploded at the bottom of his belly. 196

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Then the blanket shifted. He felt Herakles’ hand move on his thigh and Geryon’s head went back like a poppy in a breeze as Herakles’ mouth came down on his and blackness sank through him. Herakles’ hand was on his zipper. Geryon gave himself up to pleasure as the aeroplane moved at 978 kilometers per hour through clouds registering -57 degrees centigrade.19 The poppy simile in this passage evokes the signification of the dahlia in Plainwater: across both texts and poetic personae, these red-hued acts of ‘defloration’20 are charged with erotic intensity and deathly ‘harrowing’. A temporal parallel emerges in the suddenness with which both of Carson’s powerful lovers cause red flowers (metonymic of the ‘brokenhearts’) to undergo a morbid change of state. The ‘emperor’ suddenly picks the red dahlia and quickly drives off with it in his car; Herakles’ sexual advance on Geryon creeps up on the protagonist while they travel side by side in an ‘aeroplane mov[ing] at 978 kilometers per second’. Carson’s poems provide the ‘sensitive plate[s]’ on which the paradoxes of time and eros can ‘converge’21 in a red blush. Carson’s recurring image of defloration as pleasure, theft and death blends the morbid with the erotic, itself a recurring dynamic in Carson’s love poetry.22

Words and wounds: linguistic vulnerability What do words and wounds have in common within Carson’s oeuvre? Here, I focus on the way that Carson’s fascination with fragmentary dissembling and reconfiguration of language – songs, words and even letters – relates to her refractions of vulnerable erotic subjects. Autobiography of Red opens with an epigraph that clarifies how poetry ripped to shreds can be reanimated by the autonomy of floating words. The epigraph, which quotes Gertrude Stein, reads, ‘I like the feeling of words doing what they want to do and what they have to do.’23 The significance of this epigraph can be felt in many aspects of the text; my emphasis here will be on the way that Carson’s lyric personae and favourite literary avatars engage in the disjoining of language from conventional ‘traps’ of association. As Carson praises Stesichoros for ‘releas[ing] being’ by breaking from Homeric epithets and joining new adjectives to nouns, she also praises Emily Brontë for the semantic possibilities she engenders from her strange orthography, which likewise engenders new and multiple meanings to proliferate in language. Both Brontë and Geryon are agents of orthographical confusion. Carson creates a link across these figures, through whom words seem to ‘do what they want to do and what they have to do’, independently of the will of their wielder, in a way that emphasizes the non-human agency of words themselves. The generative spelling irregularities Carson attaches to Brontë and Geryon reveal Carson’s own poetic preoccupation with linguistic dissemblage and the meanings that emerge from novel reassemblage. In the section of ‘The Glass Essay’ called ‘Whacher’, the text reads: 197

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Whacher, Emily’s habitual spelling of this word, Has caused confusion.24 Carson goes on to make punning use of this ‘confusion’: she points out that the word is printed as ‘whether’ in certain editions (‘Tell me, whether, is it winter?’), but asserts that ‘whacher is what she wrote. / Whacher is what she was.’25 The production of speculative semantic possibility from misspellings, variant spellings and typos appears frequently in Carson’s work.26 Here, it provides an opportunity for Carson to use Brontë’s orthography as an argument about her mode of existence – ‘Whacher is what she was’ – all the while undermining the argument’s stability with the question of whether (pun intended) we might read this sentence as ‘Whether is what she was’ and/or ‘Watcher is what she was.’ This semantic possibility seems to be echoed in any attempt of Carson’s to ‘clear up’ a question of factuality, for example, in Autobiography of Red, ‘Appendix C: Clearing up the question of the blinding of Stesichoros by Helen’. This ‘Appendix’, which comes before the body text, transfers the question out of meaning and into proliferating non-meaning. Carson’s ironical ‘clearing up’ could be more wordily described as a Stesichorean unlatching of language, or an attempt to release figures from the weightiness of mythicality itself. In an argumentative move inspired by Carson’s dislocational poetics, we might extract the central ‘ache’ in ‘whacher’, rearrange the letters and arrive at the word ‘each’, whose meaning and spelling pose great difficulty for Carson’s Geryon in Autobiography of Red. ‘Each’ is the name of Chapter II of Autobiography of Red’s section titled ‘A Romance’. The word generates a struggle for meaning that is achieved only to be unwound for the young Geryon: The word each blew towards him and came apart on the wind. Geryon had always had this trouble: a word like each, when he stared at it, would disassemble itself into separate letters and go.27 My echoic co-reading of ‘whacher’ and ‘each’ is made possible by young Geryon’s disassemblage of its letters and the way he feels the concept of ‘each’ come into focus and then recede again into disorientation, through the disruptive trauma of sexual violence. Despite the word’s initial instability, Geryon garners a stable understanding of the meaning of ‘each’ from his mother’s explanation, ‘Each means like you and your brother each have your own room.’28 Emboldened by this new understanding, Geryon learns to spell the word correctly and proudly; but he soon finds that the meaning of ‘each’ is pulled out from under him when Geryon and his brother are forced to sleep in the same room where Geryon’s older brother rapes him.29 The sentence that provided the meaning of ‘each’ dissolves when the discrete separation promised by ‘each’ dissolves along with the boundaries of Geryon’s own embodiment; the borders between self and other, inside and outside, are disturbed in the childhood bedroom. 198

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He lay very straight in the fantastic temperatures of the red pulse as it sank away and he thought about the difference between outside and inside. Inside is mine, he thought . . . That was also the day he began his autobiography. In this work Geryon set down all inside things particularly his own heroism and early death much to the despair of the community. He coolly omitted all outside things.30 As an attempt to re-establish the borders between outside and inside, Geryon turns to forming his autobiography. Despite the writerly implication of the ‘graphy’ in autobiography, and despite the textual material of Autobiography of Red itself, Geryon’s ‘autobiography’ begins in a preverbal form. The work is conceptualized as an assemblage of multimedia self-refractions, in which the abject violation Geryon experiences is gradually realigned into and expressed as meaning. It is through this ‘autobiography’ that Geryon reforges something like a self from the dissolution that abuses of sexual and social power hold over him. Geryon’s ‘autobiography’ again calls to mind Carson’s observation that ‘Paradox is what takes shape on the sensitized plate of the poem, a negative image from which positive pictures can be created.’31 As Geryon moves from sculpture to language to photography, he is able to work with the ‘sensitized plate’ of his camera to create a poem that allows paradoxes of the self to take on a positive meaning. Geryon does not revise his death, but proudly and paradoxically states his vulnerability, articulates the early nature of his death and the way it elicits ‘despair’ from ‘the community’. Brian Teare has discussed the relationship between vulnerability and writing in Carson’s work as follows: ‘Anne Carson’s body of work insists upon reading as formative of selfhood and thus fundamental to being human, integral to everything from erotic love to mourning. Indeed, reading overtly or implicitly plots many of Carson’s most compelling texts, those in which her protagonists pursue reading as alternative to heroic actions.’32 Teare then goes on to situate Herakles as the ‘extroverted epic hero’ in contrast to ‘Geryon’s introverted lyric hero’ as an example of the ways in which Carson’s protagonists and personae ‘tend to attempt to organize their overwhelming interior lives through reading, interpreting, or translating texts’.33 Recourse to the written word, whether through reading and/or writing, provides an opportunity to rebuild the ‘walls’ of self that are so gruesomely deconstructed. In drawing his readers’ attention to a passage of Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, Teare sets up an ideal way for us to see the link between Geryon’s autobiographical agenda in Carson’s work and the Greek lyric poets’ amazement at the vulnerability engendered in the lyric self when overcome by eros. Carson writes: As an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of his senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, so as to train energy 199

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and thought upon the written words. He resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him.34 Let us stay with this vulnerability and its implications for the abjection of the body permeable by eros. Bodily response to erotic sensory input is configured as an act that can be transfigured from abject shame via the mechanism of writing.

From ‘TENDERLOIN’35 to ‘tender care’ I could really go for a hamburger right now, Herakles announced.36 The absences in papyri provoke both yearning and excited possibility, evident in If Not, Winter and Autobiography of Red. In the first chapter of Autobiography, Carson invites the reader of Stesichoros into a game of ‘shak[ing] the box’, one which sounds charmingly childlike – until the reader notices (or even smells?) that the box contains not only ‘song lyrics’ and ‘lecture notes’ but also ‘scraps of meat’.37 The title of the chapter is ‘Red Meat’, and thus evokes the gradual death of Geryon himself, as well as the theft and eventual death of Geryon’s cattle.38 ‘Red Meat’ is constituted as a body or collection of bodies whose death and consumption are premised as existentially ordained. This may be a crucial aspect of the affinity between the lyric persona in Carson’s ‘personal poetry’ and Geryon: within Carson’s ancient Greek source material, the body of Geryon is marked by its permeability and its excess of wounds. Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses both reference Geryon specifically in this context. In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra remarks that if the reports of Agamemnon’s injuries were all true, then he would need to be ‘a Geryon’ to accommodate so much woundedness (Aesch. Ag. 866–73). In the Metamorphoses, Lucius (the novel’s protagonist) claims he has stabbed and mutilated the bodies of three men with an excess of wounds (vastis et crebris perforati vulneribus, ‘perforated with enormous and abundant wounds’, Ap. Met. 2.32) befitting of Geryon himself. In these disparate literary contexts, Geryon serves as a mythical hyperbole for vulnerability and bodily perforation. In ancient iconographical and literary sources on Geryon, he is represented as a strong king and a challenge for Herakles to defeat (e.g., Hesiod’s Theogony 979–83, Stesichoros’ ‘Geryoneis’, Apollodorus’ Biblioteca 2.5.9–10). His transformation from red monster to red meat serves as an accessory to Herakles’ fame. Chris Jennings has said that ‘Carson’s poems, essays, and even interviews [. . . inform] one another as though they were fragments of a single masterwork.’39 Through her engagement with the aesthetics and opportunities provided by the ‘fragment’, Carson’s work simultaneously invites both disaggregated and connective readings, as Ian Rae has argued, in a way that evokes the myth of Isis and Osiris within the ‘reconstituted “body in fragments” ’.40 We might read the Geryoneis as a fragmentary text in concert with Geryon’s body within the text: both corpora are holey, wounded and erotically killed within Carson’s widespread, multi-textual poetics. Carson has elsewhere written on the 200

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abjection of the female body due to its multitude of mouths: ‘It is confusing and embarrassing to have two mouths. Genuine kakophony is the sound produced by them.’41 Within Carson’s logic, Geryon’s body surpasses the feminine body in abjection, for Geryon possesses three heads – and therefore three mouths. In Apollodorus’ Biblioteca, Herakles’ encounter with Geryon is framed within the context of a task of theft: Herakles must capture the cattle of Geryon from Erytheia and bring them to King Erystheius in Greece. Despite the seeming simplicity of the order to capture the cattle, the labour is filled with a slow, multi-bodied dispersal of bloodshed and death. Herakles’ thieving mission requires him to spread violence across the multiple bodies of Geryon himself as well as a network of non-human kin and neighbours. On his way to Erytheia, Herakles kills Libyan beasts; upon arrival in the Red Place, he kills Geryon’s two-headed canine companion Orthos. Herakles kills Eurytion, Geryon’s herdsman, before he kills Geryon. Stesichoros represents Geryon’s death as a gradual process in which each head is attacked with different weapons in succession, thus evoking the various petals of the poppy.42 Trailing the bloody footprints of Geryon and his kin, Herakles gathers up Geryon’s cattle, but struggles to keep them together, as they continually slip out of his grasp and disperse. One bull runs and swims away from Herakles, causing the hero to chase it down; once he finds it in the possession of King Eryx, he must wrestle the king in order to reclaim the ox while Hephaistos keeps an eye on the rest of the herd. Geryon’s metaphorical ‘blood’ seems to continue to spatter after Herakles, through the dispersal of the crimson cattle. After Herakles relocates and regains the bull from Eryx, the goddess Hera further complicates Herakles’ mission by sending a gadfly, which scatters the cattle yet again. In one of the ‘fragments of Stesichoros’ that emphasizes the imperfective, ongoing nature of Geryon’s death, Carson offers a glimpse of Geryon’s decision to fight Herakles as one justified by and linked to the fate of the cattle: IV. GERYON’S DEATH BEGINS Geryon walked the red length of his mind and answered No It was murder And torn to see the cattle lay All these darlings said Geryon And now me43 Geryon’s death is gradual; he paces through its possibility like a corridor. Carson’s fragment visualizes an interior realm (‘the red length of his mind’) in which Geryon sees the consequences of his death spilling over into the non-human community of his cattle. Meat also presents a source of sympathetic discomfort for Geryon within his own ‘autobiography’, as exemplified in ‘Chapter XLIII. Photographs: I am a Beast’, a ‘photograph’ which depicts a morbid moment of cross-species sympathy between Geryon and a guinea pig who sits on his plate: It is a photograph of a guinea pig lying on her right side on a plate. She is surrounded by cabbage salad and large round slices of yam. 201

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[. . .] Her flesh still sizzling from the oven gives off a hot glow and her left eye Is looking straight up at Geryon. He taps the flank twice shyly with his fork then sets the utensil down and waits for the meal to be over. Meanwhile Herakles and Ancash and the mother and the four soldiers (who invited them all for lunch) are chopping and chewing with gusto. This guinea pig, along with other dead or trophy animals (e.g., the Tiger that Herakles steals from Harrods’ department store),44 are drawn into autobiographical affinity with Geryon. Geryon’s isolation from Herakles and Ancash is marked by his loss of appetite; in this moment, neither Herakles, Ancash, the matriarch nor the soldiers pause over the death of this creature. Only Geryon notes the affinity between his vulnerable self and the meat on his plate. Despite the grim ways in which Geryon’s ‘gradual death’ is accompanied by the deaths of several sympathetic animals, the animal world nevertheless seems to provide a way for Geryon to get away with his life and his community at the close of Autobiography of Red and through the pages of its ‘sequel’, Red Doc>. The last chapter of Autobiography of Red features an ‘Interview’ which ‘S’45 concludes with the remark, ‘So glad you didn’t ask about the little red dog’, as if to imply that ‘S’ (Stesichoros? Stein? Self? Someone?) has gotten away with something. Geryon’s sense of extralinguistic sympathy with the dog is emphasized in most of the dog’s few appearances in Autobiography of Red. He speaks to his unnamed dog, who does not answer Geryon’s question about monstrosity, but instead ‘regarded him / Joyfully’.46 This dog happily resists the cages of language, despite his jumping through the verbal poem: One small Red dog jumping across the beach miles below Like a freed shadow47 Without linguistic access to the structuring effects of autobiography, the dog is an unprepared sufferer of the violence of Herakles nonetheless: ‘Little red dog did not see it he felt it All / Events carry but one.’48 The cattle, the dog, the roses, the petals of the poppy: all of these ‘darlings’ sit in sympathy with Geryon’s death as his ‘corresponding red breezes’ or blood-hued extensions of Geryon’s own red suffering. If we read the dog as a ‘shadow’ of Geryon in flight, then perhaps the dog, the cattle and other endangered creatures all coalesce in mutual metonymy for Geryon’s wings, which are confined for most of Autobiography of Red: ‘His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders / like the little mindless red animals they were.’49 But if Geryon releases his wings from their cage, as he seems to do at the end of Autobiography of Red,50 he also releases his animal compatriots – perhaps in recognition that they are not ‘mindless’ at all. In Red Doc>, some members of the herd gain names and identities (especially Io and M’hek), whereas Geryon’s name is simplified to ‘G’. 202

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Autobiography of Red features a ‘photographic’ chapter in which Geryon films himself in flight over the eye of volcano as he gazes into it; the eye contact between Geryon and the guinea pig is reconfigured between Geryon and the volcano, another non-human metonym for Geryon. The flight of Geryon’s herd in Red Doc> also occurs near an animalistic volcano: M’hek stands transfixed watching a black cloudform advance from the horizon toward the car its molten edge snarling its fiery paws eating steadily at the world ahead. Moving about 40 mph. The herd now breathing like a bellows has formed into a circle facing outward. Io stands apart . . . she does not hesitate to believe that a masterpiece like herself can fly. Should fly. Does fly. Without a sound and by the time M’hek turns around she is aloft.51 Just as Geryon’s flight at the end of Autobiography signals a casting off of monstrosity’s limitations and leaning into its liberation, here we see the cattle’s suffering transfigured into a mysterious geological storm, perhaps getting whirled into the ‘eye’ of the Geryonic hurricane. The cattle who provide non-human sympathetic extensions of Geryon’s own death are here represented as sources of an extralinguistic space of aerial possibility in Red Doc>. Carson writes, ‘BETWEEN US AND / animals is a namelessness.’ This animal rejection of human naming seems to provide a kind of release from the abjection of the wounded erotic subject in Autobiography of Red, where Geryon gazes in sympathetic morbidity at a dying fly in a bucket of water and a dead guinea pig on his plate. Red Doc> depicts an extralinguistic affinity between G and his cows in mid-flight, alive: PROPER NAMES PROBABLY not do they even have pronouns? Do 203

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they experience the entire cold sorrow acre of human history as one undifferentiated lunatic jabberwocking back and forth from belligerence to tender care? G has thought all this before. Io’s gold eyes shine at him through the blackness. G’s herd liberates him from language, allows him to disentangle himself from Herakles’ murderous erotic dominion and resituate himself as a heroic companion to Herakles, as well as his cows. In Red Doc>, G finds bats and cattle as companions in flight that, not only float up into ‘marvellous’ linguistic namelessness, but also require him to ‘recognize [. . .] all at once how / much he loves’ them. Geryon expands his formerly bound ‘wings to / their fullest expanse’ in order to catch his floating herd, in a gesture of heroic salvation of his animal kin. The animal figures that accompany Geryon provide a form of silence that is a refuge rather than the shameful chasm between heartbreaker and ‘brokenheart’. Where the failures of language between lovers haunts Carson’s narrators, the silence in which Geryon feels a vulnerable affinity with his animal kin provides a liberation from the bounds of linguistic cages that make Geryon a ‘monster’. Animal affiliates therefore fly alongside Geryon, Stesichoros, Brontë, Stein and Carson: all of these figures have added more freedom and new ways of seeing the limitations of the language that makes itself readily available.

Notes 1. The ideas in this essay have been enriched through lush dialogue with my colleagues, friends and students. I want to express particular thanks to Mathura Umachandran, Ella Haselswerdt, Marchella Ward, Marcus Bell, Eleonora Colli, Lena Barsky, Laura Jansen, Aarushi Mohan, Rowan Norlander-McCarty and the anonymous readers of the manuscript. I am particularly grateful for the generative conversations that have nourished this piece and my engagement with Carson’s work more broadly. 2. Carson (1995: 190). 3. Carson (1995: 193): ‘Love made him so happy I began calling him the emperor of China.’ 4. Carson (1998: 70). 5. Rexilius (2015: 108). 6. Parr (2014: 347). 7. Parr (2014: 342). 8. Carson (1995: 189).

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Deadly Erotic Tangos and Animal Affinity 9. See Silverblank (forthcoming) on Carson’s ideas of Greek lyric temporality in the work of Sappho and Stesichoros. 10. Carson (1995: 222). 11. Italics my own. 12. Carson (1986: 12–17). 13. Carson (1986: 21). 14. Carson (1986: 21). 15. Carson (1986: 9). 16. Stesichoros, Geryoneis fr. 19 (using the numeration provided in Davies and Finglass 2014). 17. Carson (1998: 13). 18. Carson (1986: 12–17). 19. Carson (1998: 118–19). 20. For another link between defloration and theft see Carson (2001: 10–11). 21. Carson (1986: 9). 22. On Eros and lack in Carson’s poetics, see Martin (2015) and Melillo (2015). 23. Carson (1998: 3). 24. Carson (1995: 4). 25. Carson (1995: 4). 26. In Decreation, Carson’s essay ‘Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)’ references Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, ‘The Man-Moth’ (20–2); the subsequent poem (‘Ode to Sleep’) concludes with the lines: ‘ “As a matter of fact,” she confides in a footnote, “it was / a misprint for mammoth.” / It hurts me to know this. / Exit wound, as they say’ (41). 27. Carson (1998: 26). 28. Carson (1998: 26). 29. Carson (1998: 27–9). 30. Carson (1998: 28–9). 31. Carson (1986: 9). 32. Teare (2015: 30). 33. Teare (2015: 30). 34. Carson (1986: 44); quoted in Teare (2015: 30). 35. Carson (1998: 68). 36. Carson (1998: 10). 37. Carson (1998: 6–7). On eros and lack in Carson’s poetics, see Martin (2015) and Melillo (2015). 38. The chapter also repeatedly references Gertrude Stein, not only for the playful dislocation of language that she and Stesichoros render possible in their poetics, but also for her association with cattle, meat and abjection. See also Carson (1995a: 121). 39. Jennings (2001: 924). 40. Rae (2000: 26). 41. Carson (1994: 135). 42. For a discussion of the plot of the ‘Geryoneis’, see Davies and Finglass (2014: 240–43).

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Anne Carson/ Antiquity 43. Carson (1998: 10). 44. Carson (1998: 114–17). 45. The ‘S’ may represent a truncation of ‘Stesichoros’ or even (Gertrude) Stein. The truncation of ‘Interviewer’ to ‘I’ also makes it possible that the interviewing party is Carson’s lyric ‘I’, or even the ‘eye’ of the camera. 46. Carson (1998: 12). 47. Carson (1998: 13). 48. Carson (1998: 13). 49. Carson (1998: 53). 50. Carson (1998: 145). 51. Carson (2013: 133).

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CHAPTER 15 POETRY AND PROFIT Ella Haselswerdt and Mathura Umachandran

‘Reading can be freefall’ declares one of the two subtitles to Float (2016). A collection of twenty-two chapbooks, Float is akin to Carson’s work in the last decade that plays with the orthodox form of the book, such as Nox (2010), a single long folded poem that lexically describes Catullus 101 as a meditation on grief, or Antigonick (2012), her translation of Sophocles’ Antigone containing illustrations and semi-transparent pages. Float advertises non-categorization as the name of the game – the collection’s order is ‘unfixed’, its topics ‘various’. Despite supplying an alphabetically listed contents page, Carson appears to challenge her reader: take a dive, see what happens. This implicit injunction is reminiscent of Autobiography of Red’s command, ‘You can of course keep shaking the box . . . Here. Shake.’1 One could literally shake Float, throw the pieces into the air or out of the window, and see how they land or get lost under the couch. It might not make sense, then, to discern continuities between the chapbooks of Float. Nevertheless, we start from the idea that Float is no unordentliche Collecteana but rather an idiosyncratic form itself, one that generates ambitious and resistant-to-fixing network(s) of meaning. We find the abundance of possible reading combinations and sequences, the possibility of not having parsed every reference, encouraging rather than/ as well as overwhelming. Moreover, observing a hermeneutic through-line need not be a permanent statement of understanding, nor an exclusionary one. By grappling with classical reception in Float, we acknowledge that this is only one path to take amongst the riotous assembly of its pieces. If reading can be freefall, there are many ways to the ground. Float engages with antiquity variously. ‘Cassandra Float Can’ might have provided a more obvious starting point, not only because its odd title syntax promises a clue into the programmatic valence of ‘float’ but also because it does what reception ‘should’ do: engage carefully with an ancient text, preferably a hypercanonical one, from which a virtuosic new reading is fashioned. Other chapbooks could have been the focus of our investigation here: ‘Pinplay: A Version of Euripides’ Bacchae’ forms part of Carson’s ongoing entanglement with the tragedian, as well as the afterlives of the genre. Carson burlesques philological scholarship (Agave carries her son’s head offstage on a lacuna), queer modes of reading tragedy (‘PENTHEUS AND DIONYSUS: We’re tragic! We’re lavender! Touché!’) and the historical awkwardness of understanding Greek drama on a modern stage (‘CHORUS: Choral interlude followed by Act IV’). In noting alternative entry points, we submit that there is no master interpretation under which we might subordinate all of Float’s various readings and translations of ancient individual texts, its supple reworking of ancient genres, interventions in classical mythology (‘Zeusbits’), the 207

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idea of the pre-classical (‘By Chance, the Cycladic People’) and the more ephemeral poses it takes up in response to antiquity. If antiquity appears everywhere and throughout, what is Carson’s precise hermeneutic challenge to her classicist reader? Even those familiar with her idiosyncrasies can give way to a kind of reception-pessimism because the desire to read synthetically is a desire inherited from traditional models of reading. The tools that we might apply to an ancient text in order to reconstruct a stable object fall short here – it would make little sense to construct a lemma, or to collect the fragments. To do anything more than throw up our hands in despair requires us to position ourselves between the text’s resistance to fixing and the philologist’s desire to interpret synthetically. A hermeneutics of provisionality is not only what Float calls for then, but also a way of desiring without certain disappointment. The provisional path we trace here moves between two of the collection’s chapbooks, namely ‘Pronoun Envy’ and ‘Contempts’, and is guided by what we identify as their respective key terms: ‘exaptation’ and ‘exorbitance’. Borrowing the former word from evolutionary biology, Carson offers a philologist’s gloss: ‘to exapt is to adapt in an outward direction’. As enacted in the poem, exaptation provides a dazzling means of escape and transformation, modelled by the flight of the archaeopteryx, a formerly earth-bound feathered dinosaur, who instrumentalizes obsolete epidermal growths to find a shortcut through the glacial mechanics of evolution, tracing a path of experimental new meanings. Carson sees a similar trajectory in the feminist project of two Harvard Divinity School students who, in the 1970s, rebelled against the stifling gendered pronomial system that rendered god male by default – a project that, as presented by Carson at least, ultimately offers a rather circumscribed form of liberation. We argue that for all the novelty of Carson’s own work, her response to canonicity is best described as ‘exaptation’. She delights in putting old forms to new use; for instance, Nox might be considered the exaptation of both Latin elegy and the lexicon; Float explodes the book form while still sitting neatly on the shelf, unfixed but ultimately fixable, ordered by a table of contents. But beyond describing Carson’s refractive forms, we take exaptation as key for understanding Carson’s relationship to antiquity more broadly. Not only her relationship to the stuff of the ancient world, but also to the disciplinary formation of Classics, the constraints and opportunities that its inherently conservative epistemic structures allow. This relationship emerges more clearly by pairing exaptation with the exorbitance of ‘Contempts: A Study of Profit and Nonprofit in Homer, Moravia, and Godard’, and by following that chapbook’s lead to consider both terms in the context of Carson’s sustained interest in economics. If exaptation offers a feminist escape from the constraints of a patriarchal language system that sidelines women, exorbitance offers an escape from an economic system within which they are, in archaic Greece as in Hollywood, always for sale. In both pieces, we encounter Carson performing in a field where the state of play is circumscribed by a previously established set of rules. The game, then, is to simultaneously demonstrate mastery of these rules and transcend them by exploiting their loopholes for all their worth. In ‘Contempts’, Carson identifies the paired inscrutability of Penelope’s 208

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performance for Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey and of Brigitte Bardot’s performance for Jean-Luc Godard in the film Mépris (1963) as its own sort of dazzling means of escape, this time achieved by toeing the line between selling and selling out. Though ‘Pronoun Envy’ only hints at pecuniary matters, the liberatory strategies described in the two pieces offer similar opportunities and limitations, and therefore a way of thinking through how economy shapes Carson’s philological enterprises, and the extent to which economics both describes and limits Carson’s feminism. Both chapbooks describe women trapped either by language or by capital (discursive phenomena that, we shall find, are not entirely distinguishable in Carson’s poetics), who transcend the systems that render them passive objects by, to some extent, buying in.

Exaptation ‘Pronoun Envy’ frames a feminist response to scholarly theories of evolution and the comparative study of linguistics. Underlying both theories is a paradigm of historical development that organizes power in binary forms that are readily hierarchized. They might be construed as ‘man’ over and above nature, where nature is a capacious enough category to include ‘woman’, ‘animal’ and ‘environment’. ‘Pronoun Envy’ therefore turns to the notion of ‘exaptation’, a sort of trapdoor in the theory of evolution that disrupts the historical model of development by adducing a non-instrumental, nonteleological pathway of development. Utilizing the associative freedom of lyric poetry, the piece simultaneously enacts an escape from these structures and turns them in on themselves. The chapbook dramatizes a real incident at Harvard Divinity School in the early 1970s, where female students saw their classrooms as a site of action for a growing understanding that gendered inequality was encoded into language, as much as it structured their institutions and frameworks of knowledge. Linda Barufaldi and Emily Culpepper-Hough staged a classroom coup,2 in which, among other curricular demands, they asked that all the members of their ‘Politics and Eschatology’ class be equipped with party noisemakers (kazoos, in Carson’s version) that they would buzz whenever casual allusions to god as Him or people as mankind were made.3 While they found a surprising level of buy-in from their male professor and classmates, they faced a culture-wars backlash from others both on and off campus. In a letter to the Harvard Crimson, protoIndo-European linguist Calvert Watkins condescendingly waved away their concerns with the crude eponymous pun: ‘There is really no cause for anxiety or pronoun-envy on the part of those seeking such changes.’4 Carson ventriloquizes the students’ concerns as a critique of phallogocentric language, couched in the diction of young women at the beginning of a process of raising their consciousness as explicitly feminist: In a world where God is ‘He’ 209

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and everyone else ‘mankind,’ what chance do we have for a bit of attention? At the end of the second stanza, it is unclear who the speaker/s is/are, since the critique of patriarchal structures is reduced to seeking ‘attention’. The next italicized speech contains Watkins’ apophatic response (‘how patient a man – did not say you carry-tale mumble-/news mar-plot find-fault spoil/sports!’) that would cast the students as ‘feminist killjoys’ had it been uttered. The extrusion of the forceful iambic pentameter line gives way to Watkins’ actual response – wielding both ‘patience’ and scholarly mastery, the stanza continues, ‘It’s the Indo-/European system of markedness.’ Carson wryly undercuts Watkin’s dismissal: ‘As if all / the creatures in the world / were either zippers / or olives, / except / way back in the Indus Valley / in 5000 BC we decided / to call them zippers / and non-zippers.’ Far from being a real answer to the concerns of the feminist students, a true consideration of the system of markedness reveals it to be a coercive apparatus that forestalls the possibility of a fully realized female subjectivity. The female students’ answer to Watkin’s condescending assertion is not to replace the universal or divine He with ‘reanalysis’ or ‘neologisms’. The former, presumably, would entail a backwards-looking posture, a historical consideration of perspectives and identities erased by the unrelenting default to the male; the latter would mean fashioning new language. Instead, the students choose ‘exaptation’, a concept enacted by Carson even as she defines it. As noted above, she glosses the term literally, ‘to adapt in an outward direction’, as dedicated an etymologist as any classicist. The term originally comes from evolutionary biology, describing the shift of the function of a trait in a given species.5 Carson gives the example of the archaeopteryx, a dinosaur (itself aptly named) who evolved to grow feathers not to fly, but to stay warm; but ‘meanwhile everywhere / ice was melting. Feathers for warmth became redundant.’ Rather than simply discarding the feathers as obsolete, the archaeopteryx uses them to take flight. Exaptation challenges the perfective power of natural selection – in the interstices of this unrelenting march forward, serendipity and creativity find a way with unexpected results. Exaptation has been a disciplinary bugbear for evolutionary biology, querying ‘adaptation’ as its shibboleth. For our purposes, it is enough to note that exaptation does not threaten to burn Darwinism to the ground.6 As Gould and Vrba observe, it implies a capacity to resist the determined paths of natural selection since ‘exaptive possibilities define the “internal” contribution that organisms make to their own evolutionary future’.7 Exaptation simply suggests that its all-encompassing determinism also has a sense of humour.

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But how far, really, does exaptation get our divinity students? In describing the maiden flight of the archaeopteryx, Carson switches subjects abruptly in the middle of a sentence: One night the archaeopteryx exapted its feathers – as wings – and over the yards of Harvard rose divinity students in violent flight, changing everything, changing nothing, soaring and banking under the moon, intending (no doubt) to never come back but of course that proved impossible. They did come back, they finished their degrees, they used their wings to shoot pronouns around on a big hockey rink . . . The dream of escape from Harvard’s coercive structures is quickly quashed; the students soon return to the ground, and the swift curtailment of their revolutionary flight is emphasized by the lack of punctuation (‘to never come back / but of course that proved impossible’). Within the confines of the institution they continue to use their wings, but now the project of these appendages is described in terms of play. They score their games in poetry, ‘in scandal and sadness, in tungsten and long twisting / streets, in bride-habited, maiden-hearted, thief-stolen, wind-led, marble-constant // wonder-wounded, to-and-fro- // conflicting, world-without-end / marks / of our own invention.’ In addition to following the form of Watkin’s imagined impatient retort with its hyphenated doublets, the phrases evoke nineteenth-century translations of Homer; not neologism, then, but exaptation, an attempt to make new meaning out of old forms. In the world of the poem, at least, the students ‘chang[ed] nothing’, but still today,

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you may see a slight residue of those marks. Here’s what to look for: a pony standing quiet with one ear bent. She seems to have a bit of capture caught in it. The pony, a domesticated and diminutive double of the dinosaur, is what is left of the freedom the students found by repurposing the forms of patriarchy.8 And in her limited way, she distorts the syntax that surrounds her, subverting the conventions of the protoIndo-European system of gendered pronouns that Watkins defends as immutable. The pronoun ‘she’ gives way to the pronoun ‘it’, making it impossible to trace the grammatical subject through the entire line. Nor is it possible to parse the verbal force of the sentence, a sort of internal accusative that folds in on itself. How free is this quiet pony? Whose capture is caught in what? Carson has left Harvard, and the reader, with an example of a certain kind of inscrutable female subjectivity that surfaces throughout her work; curious and curiously out of place – an olive, if you will. But ultimately the pony’s liberatory potential is circumscribed. To even find her, you need to know what to look for. And just as she is presented as a symbol of liberation, the possibility of freedom is called into doubt by the language of restraint.

Economics The poem’s final stanzas (in which the pony ‘shakes her head and all around / you, soaking / the night / and the yards / and whatever is / alienable or inalienable there, // comes / a smell like / a new tuxedo’) hint at Carson’s enduring interest in what one might call ‘economy’; throughout Float itself, ideas about excess, surplus, thrift and balance proliferate. In the chapbook ‘Zeusbits’, the deity works out the cost of the Trojan War using the language of the tax code: [ZEUS DECIDES TO DO HIS OWN TAXES THIS YEAR] Deduct the corpse of Helen from the corpse of war (net). ‘Victory’ (adjusted gross). ‘Virtue’ (attach schedule E). Carson consistently ruminates on what can and cannot be reduced to commodity form and what happens when different systems of valuation collide. In ‘Stacks’, she considers the poetics of accumulation, with a special interest in the commercial pursuits of the Phoenicians. Under the heading ‘Cheapjack Stack’, she calls them ‘a commercial people’: 212

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They traded metals, weapons, ostrich eggs, shoelaces, whistles, nuts, panthers, letters of the alphabet. They invented the alphabet. They invented alphabetical order. [. . .] From the Phoenicians the Greeks stole the alphabet, added a few letters, and sat down to write the classics of Western civilization. She compares their accrual and ordering of goods for trade with their accrual and ordering of letters of the alphabet, situating both as modular ways of making meaning, both as a form of wealth (and the Greek adoption of the Phoenician alphabet is cast as theft). Each of the poems in this miniature collection plays with the formation of words and blank space on the page, creating surprising and arresting shapes, suggestive of various kinds of structures. By labelling each poem a different kind of ‘stack’, she draws attention to the fact that poems are simply piles of language, bringing their materiality to the forefront. While, for example, her arrangement of Sappho’s fragments in If Not, Winter serves to emphasize the scantiness and fragility of the papyrus scrap, here the arrangement of stacks of words points to their fungibility, their likeness to other commodities. If language is simultaneously a medium for thought and a commodity, the sudden and unexplained invocation of alienable and inalienable goods at the end of ‘Pronoun Envy’ – an essay about linguistics – may be less surprising than it initially appears. The words point also to Carson’s 1999 Economy of the Unlost, a comparative reading of the archaic Greek lyric poet Simonides and the Romanian poet Paul Celan. Carson most explicitly defines the economic terms that dance through much of her work in its chapter on ‘Alienation’, where she describes the poet Simonides of Chios as standing on a historical precipice between two economic systems. He lived in the twilight of the era of archaic aristocratic gift-exchange, in which keimēlia were proffered in the service of xenia. By exchanging inalienable objects, aristocrats nourished multi-generational relationships that were constituted by cycles of reciprocal unpayable deficits. A true gift can never really be repaid; ‘putting oneself in debt is the point’. Among the upper crust, the stuff of exchange is constitutive of interpersonal connection. As she puts it, ‘a gift is [. . .] an extension of the interior of the giver, both in space and in time, into the interior of the receiver’.9 213

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But at the same time, the use of coined currency was on the rise, and according to testimonia, Simonides was the first poet to command a fee (rather than simply a favour and supper) for his work. Carson follows Marx in arguing that this turn changes not only how objects are exchanged, and how humans relate to objects, but also how humans relate to one another. Commodity-form not only renders objects alienable but also alienates us from one another. Carson describes Simonides as savvy about both economic systems but fully committed to neither; he plays them against each other, becoming rich in both charis and drachma. Carson’s reading of Simonides is congruous with her reading of the HDS students. Both point to her interest in figures working in the margins of hegemonic systems. These are not wild-eyed revolutionaries blowing oppressive structures to smithereens. After all, when the pony at the end of ‘Pronoun Envy’ shakes her head (an equine tic or a human ‘No’?), the observer suffers a rather deflationary olfactory experience, one that reinstantiates in Harvard Yard the dominance of masculine, patrician wealth: ‘a smell like / a new tuxedo’. The actors that interest Carson work playfully to make systems function in a way that they were never intended to – exaptation.

Exorbitance If exaptation is adapting (apt-) outwards (ex-), exorbitance – one of the watchwords of ‘Contempts: A Study of Profit and Non-profit in Homer, Moravia, and Godard’ – is another route off (ex-) the beaten track (orbita). This piece (styled as an essay on classical reception but really more of a prose poem) introduces another set of canny actors, two couples who playfully bend coercive systems to their advantage: Odysseus and Penelope; Godard and Bardot. In ‘Contempts’, the gendered economic problems and provisional solutions alluded to in ‘Pronoun Envy’ are played out more thoroughly. Exorbitance, however, does not rely on the outward transformation of form but relies on participating in the rules of the commodity marketplace and turning oneself into a shiny/sexy product as a means of distraction. Exorbitance therefore emphasizes a shift in attitude on the part of the woman-who-would-be-object – no internalized self-loathing for participating in the game, but rather a lush understanding of how she might circumvent its principles of fungibility. ‘Contempts’ works in an established seam of interpreting the Odyssey through an economic lens. Such readings are commonly launched by the observation that Odysseus is unusual in his concern for material acquisition. Historically speaking, he should adhere to archaic gift-exchange. Yet Odysseus has mastered the rules of accumulation so well that he becomes legible as a proto-capitalist.10 Read through the lens of profit motive, the poem narrates how Odysseus cheats his way home by exploiting the loopholes and turning the economic rules of reciprocity inside out. ‘Contempts’ proceeds by working through how Godard’s film engages the cultural resources from which its imaginary and narrative are derived. Between Homer’s Odyssey and Jean-Luc Godard’s film lies Il Disprezzo, a novel by Alberto Moravia.11 The book is 214

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narrated by a writer, Riccardo, who is contracted to produce a screenplay of the Odyssey. Riccardo has total contempt for the project but desperately needs the cash. He is acutely aware that by accepting the contract he is selling out. But he is, as Carson puts it, ‘100 percent humorless’ (which, coming from Carson, may be as withering an insult as a person can suffer). Riccardo has no means of transcending his economic circumstances. And while he grinds away on his ‘massacre’ of Homer’s masterpiece, his relationship with his wife disintegrates. As her contempt for him grows, she becomes increasingly alien and impenetrable to him; he has zero access to her interiority (and persistently suggests that no such interiority exists). His lack of imagination renders him a victim of his circumstances, bereft of co-conspirators who might help him fashion an escape – a way out (ex-). Godard’s Mépris adheres to the book’s frustrated writer plot: life coincides uncomfortably with art as Godard finds himself having to work to keep the lights on: Godard needed a box-office success. His last two films had failed and no one could see where French New Wave was headed. He didn’t like to see it headed for Hollywood and Hollywood’s production values. But in Carson’s view, Godard’s film is far from a mise-en-abyme of male artistic frustration. While Riccardo remains a self-loathing hack, a significant shift happens in the character of the director’s wife. This becomes possible specifically because Bridget Bardot’s performance transforms the relationships between creative man and object woman, and, more radically, subversively transforms the scheme of economic value. Tapping into the film’s desire for examining the relationship between cinema and commodity-making, Carson beckons us toward reading ‘Godard/Bardot’ as working in parallel, as well as by analogy, with ‘Odysseus/Penelope’. We might start to grasp this set of relations by understanding how Godard shares with Odysseus a delight in craftiness. There is little sense of the director despising filmmaking as an art form simply because it was born out of necessity. Mépris is a gorgeous meta-cinematic feast where some of the pleasures of self-reflexivity are gained in watching a ‘spectacle of compromise’ unfold:12 [. . .] the movie [. . .] celebrates its own selling out in a spirit of self-delighted cunning that would make Odysseus proud. He [Godard] is an artist who can make, out of the theme of profit, an epic imaginary. Godard’s revelling in his capacity to make film (that will make money) is analogous to Odysseus’ lack of contempt for his own acquisitiveness. For Godard’s epic imaginary to work in these pleasurably self-reflexive and profitable ways, a lot hangs on Bardot’s masterful performance. Problems of agency, objectification and work are shifted over on/to Bardot, the star who could be banked on. Carson’s claim is that Bardot’s performance transforms the film into a game between knowing and compromising subjects. ‘Contempts’ contends then that Bardot is canny about her role in the economy of filmmaking and the possibilities of eluding woman as 215

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a commodity form, just as Penelope is understood as a guileful operator with respect to the Ithacan elites and her returning husband. Carson considers Bardot’s canniness in the film’s opening scene that the American producer, she tells us, insisted on: ‘When Joe Levine saw the first cut of Contempt he flew into a rage. He felt he’d been cheated, he demanded nudity. He was determined to get his five million francs out of that body.’ The opening scene accordingly shows a naked Bardot, lying in bed next to an unnamed male character, while she ‘itemizes’ the parts of her body and asks if he likes each one. Without Bardot, Carson argues, this opening scene would be a crude stock take of the star’s assets. It is Bardot’s ‘majestic ambiguity’ that gives the scene its ‘wink’: The man answers each of her questions solemnly and finally says, ‘I love you, totally, tenderly, tragically’. To which Bardot [. . .] replies, ‘Moi aussi’ and the scene ends. As we saw in ‘Pronoun Envy’, Carson’s attention falls on exaptation as a strategy of resistance (the female students’ hilarious-aggressive kazoo-playing rather than the walkout or strike, for example) precisely because it does not tackle the structures of power head-on. Where exaptation works on language as an unmarked system of power, exorbitance directs our attention to how capital reduces women to fungible objects. Between exaptation and exorbitance, Carson demonstrates an understanding for how forcefully systems of power can extinguish resistance when confronted outright, and how insidious their operations are. There is value then in simply naming the operations of power as such, particularly when they rely on their unmarkedness, their apparently objective description of the workings of the world. Grasping and naming these operations as ideological constitutes the first steps towards creatively, playfully and even pleasurably finding means of escape from patriarchy/hetero-capitalism. So for Carson, selling out is not the same as buying in. Both Bardot and Penelope seek to elude total objectification by being hard to pin down. Penelope ‘dangles herself [. . .] before [Odysseus] in a series of tantalizing interactions – [. . .] without ever letting on if she has recognized him or not.’ In noting the ongoing scholarly debate about when Penelope sees through her husband’s disguise, Carson insists that by withholding access to her interior life, as much as to her body, Penelope wields power. Odysseus’ lack of contempt for his own acquisitiveness allows him to recognize Penelope’s obfuscations for what they are; game recognizes game. Carson notes, however, that the Odyssey gives no objective description of Penelope. Out on full display, Bardot plays the game of selfobjectification with greater risk. In the logic of this chapbook, then, Bardot rather than Odysseus, Godard or even Penelope emerges ultimately as the hero, because she subverts the economic rules in which her agency is circumscribed with the most success, that is, both with panache and with her sense of self intact. We may not be able to afford Bardot, but she does have a price: the five million francs that Godard paid to have her in his film. In the final count, Bardot’s strategy for not compromising herself is an exorbitant attitude towards commodification. Carson thrills 216

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at a particular repeated gesture of Bardot’s, in which she wraps herself up in a bathrobe and exiting the shot. ‘It’s stupendous. [. . .] She wins. Every time she does this, she wins the movie.’ We can understand Bardot’s performance as doing something different from exaptation in terms of form. Exorbitance does not resurrect and transform an obsolete form of woman. In Bardot’s hands (as well as all over her body), the woman-form is amplified excessively. And while the sellers, the buyers and the lookers-on in the marketplace cannot take their eyes off the product, she undertakes her own dazzling flight inwards. As far as ruses go, Carson insists, this one is the most cunning.

Apting and orbiting: exit strategies What does the exorbitant Bardot obscure when we turn back to the Odyssey? Exorbitance and exaptation attend to the interior life of one heroic figure. Therefore, ‘Contempts’ does not address collective strategies for liberation, for escape or for pleasure. This is a serious issue for how Carson sets up ‘Contempts’ as a study of the Odyssey. It purports to address the economics of gender relations in the poem but omits any reference to, for example, Telemachus’ unjustified summary execution of the female slaves. Indeed, Carson’s assertion that the Odyssey ‘doesn’t end tragically’ (for whom?) is one that should raise an eyebrow. Bardot’s subversion, like Penelope’s, is dependent on the material parts of individual subjects, subjects who retain features valued by the system of men and objects – a noble birth, a beautiful body, knowledge of profit. Where the female slaves in Odysseus’ estate are treated collectively, they are expendable. Melantho presents a possible exception, whose own posture of resistance consists of breaking, rather than bending, the rules and is therefore duly crushed upon the return of the patriarch (Od. 18.321–39). As household slaves, they have no knowledge of profit. Their place in the palace economy admits no wiggle room or flight into interiority. We might think of the cleaners on Godard’s film set, moving into view long after the actors have gone home. Carson’s focus on individual subjects circumscribes what kinds of resistance she can conjure. Consider the Harvard Divinity students, historical women whom Carson casts as playful miscreants rather than as activists. In fact, their feminist takeover of the classroom in 1971, and the subsequent attention it commanded, arguably led to the establishment of the first Women’s Studies programme at Harvard. The results of their activism were a far cry from being a mere ‘residue’ of their ‘games’. In eliding the real changes these young women effected at their conservative institution, we lose sight of how they were working alongside other demands for and actualization of structural change at that particular institution.13 The single pony standing in the yard, the hybrid bird-o-saur, the Homeric wife with the unknown face, the bombshell who knows profit – they all find ways to at least temporarily elude systems of dominance, be it teleological history or gendered capital. And yet, even exaptation and exorbitance come at too high a price for many to pay. 217

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Classical interest, classical debt Carson uses the same concise author’s biography in the preface of Float that she has throughout her career: ‘Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches Ancient Greek for a living.’ Carson’s work as an acclaimed poet and author is left implicit here. She reminds us that at the end of the (work) day, she’s still a regular academic. Furthermore, her claim that this work is what she does for a living situates her as a sort of Simonides figure, singing for her supper. Teaching antiquity pays the bills, keeps her belly full and a roof over her head. Her creative departures from traditional modes of philology, then, are something more exorbitant, something that transcends the mundanity of subsistence just as they transcend the formal expectations of established disciplinary structures. It is not surprising that Carson makes room for an economic reference in the heart of this moment of epigrammatic self-fashioning. The parsimony with which she doles out personal details, the wry remove in her authorial voice and her exaptation of traditional modes of engaging with the canon all align her to varying degrees with her favourite sell-outs in ‘Contempts’. And her playful resistance to the norms of institutional academia aligns her with the Harvard Divinity School students in ‘Pronoun Envy’. Indeed, a close reading of that poem reveals constant slippage between the narrative voice and the voices of the protagonists. The two pieces reveal Carson’s authorial and professorial personae in economic terms, and the way these interrelated personae are reflected in her more formally adventurous work. At the beginning of ‘Contempts’, Carson ponders, ‘is there a difference between selling and selling out? It is a very thin border.’ As has become clear from the provisional web of connections we have located between these two poems, to our author questions of selling out and buying in are not always strictly about capital, but they do always entail a precarious balancing act between multiple competing systems of value. Certainly, in Carson’s work aesthetics and economics are locked in a tight metaphorical relationship; but regarding the question of which is the vehicle and which the tenor, she seems to find it more profitable not to tip her hand.

Notes 1. Carson (1998: 7). 2. Dionne (1971). 3. Oldham (2018). 4. Watkins (1971). 5. The definitive intervention here is Gould and Vrba (1982: 4–15). 6. Recent work points to the flexibility within Darwinist theories, and how challenges to them do not necessarily have to bog down evolutionary biology in a quagmire of terminology and in-fighting. See Piavani (2002: 63–81). 7. Gould and Vrba (1982: 13).

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Poetry and Profit 8. Ponies often make surprising appearances in Carson’s work. In particular, cf. ‘Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony’, a 2007 piece in LRB that previews a mysterious pony’s association with alienable and inalienable goods; see below. 9. Carson (1999: 18). 10. A brilliant exposition of Odysseus as Ur-capitalist is the first chapter of Adorno and Horkheimer (2002). They read Odysseus’ attempts to dominate other humans, nature and his own creaturely self as a distillation of capitalist social economy. See, for example, in comparing Odysseus to Robinson Crusoe (trans. Jephcott, 2002: 48): Both these prototypical shipwrecked sailors make their weakness – that of the individual who break away from the collective – their social strength. Abandoned to the vagaries of the waves, helplessly cut off, they are forced by their isolation into a ruthless pursuit of their atomized interest. They embody the principle of the capitalist economy before they make use of any worker. 11. Both film and novel are translated into English as ‘Contempt’. 12. Fritz Lang’s brief cameo as an exaggerated version of himself as an enigmatic European art house director is the cherry on the top of a story about the costs and compromises of making film. 13. Bikales and Chen (2020) note, ‘African and African American Studies was founded in 1969 following student demands for such a department. Activism for the creation of the department surged in April 1968 in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.’ See further, Kilson (2006: 59–75) and Hailu (2018).

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CHAPTER 16 MORE SPECTRES OF DYING EMPIRE Kay Gabriel

We want to transfer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the poem – and yet the immediate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, shortlived and tenacious as barnacles. [. . .] The words around the immediate shrivel and decay like flesh around the body. No mummy-sheet of tradition can be used to stop the process. Objects, words must be led across time, not preserved against it. Jack Spicer, After Lorca Heidegger One can no more translate thought than one can translate a poem. At best, one can paraphrase it. As soon as one attempts a literal translation, everything is transformed. Spiegel A disturbing thought. Martin Heidegger, ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, Der Spiegel, 31 May 1976 What motivates Anne Carson’s practice of translation?1 Carson’s published translations include editions of plays by all three canonical Attic tragedians (Electra, 2001; Grief Lessons: Four Plays By Euripides, 2007; An Oresteia, 2009; Bakkhai, 2017), as well as translations, adaptations and essays on Stesichorus (Autobiography of Red, 1998), Simonides (Economy of the Unlost, 1999) and Sappho (If Not, Winter, 2002). But for Carson translation consistently takes the enigmatic form of an apparent impossibility she works on with Sisyphean repetition. In a 2008 performance piece, Cassandra Float Can, she offers that ‘sometimes I feel I spend my whole life writing the same page’, one ‘with Essay on Translation written at the top’ and which, by its end, has ‘decayed’ into ‘an art of pure shape’.2 As a theorist of translation, Carson produces, by her own description, mostly silence. But even silence can disclose content despite itself. However enigmatic, Carson’s translations demonstrate two simultaneous and oppositional aesthetic tendencies. On the one hand, she foregrounds the cultural and conceptual distance of Greek literature. Where she can, she refuses Latinate transliterations of Greek, preferring, for instance, to render Aeschylus as Aiskhylos; she aestheticizes textual loss, emphasizing the difficulty of recovering fragmented Greek rather than the ease of rendering it into English; and she often refuses to translate the interjections common to Greek tragedy, choosing instead to render them in transliterated capitals. On the other hand, Carson’s translations deploy a series of formal strategies and tones derived from twentieth-century modernism and mediated by explicit discussion of canonical European and Anglo-American modernists. 221

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A significant philosophy of translation and language, and a significant history of literary technique, underlies this specific combination present in Carson’s translation practice. This philosophical and literary history in turn bears on the conceptual content of Carson’s literary works – what they argue, or imply, about history, language, culture and literary form. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that Carson’s translation practice remediates the sublime registers of twentieth-century modernism in order to reproduce a philosophical primitivism. By ‘remediate’, I mean that Carson’s literary techniques derive ultimately from a canon of modernism, which she adapts together with its philosophical and conceptual content into her own particular context. By a philosophical primitivism, I mean that the philosophy of language that underlies Carson’s translation practice reproduces a reverence for ancient Greek as a language and body of literature that ‘dwells’ in uniquely close proximity to an imagined originary order of being. I also invoke ‘dwelling’ advisedly: the language is Heidegger’s,3 and, as I intend to disclose, so too are the particular philhellenism and the concept of translation, or untranslatability, that animate Carson’s poetics. This philosophical ground in turn generates the particular understanding, in evidence throughout Carson’s prolific work, of a modern world in sharp and irreparable decline. Carson’s philhellenism takes the form of a romance that insists on the tantalizing distance between ancient Greek and contemporary European and Anglo-American thought. She conducts this romance in the terms of the untranslatable sign, which can only be repeated without ever being fully understood. At the same time, her poetics consistently link ancient Greek literature together with the canons and literary strategies of twentieth-century modernism, suggesting that this incomprehensibly and untranslatably distant corpus of signs and texts has in fact plenty to say to contemporary forms of thought, language and social relations. Carson therefore approaches Greek language and literature as both an uninterpretable object and an unavoidable conceptual horizon for the present. What is at stake in this opposition, and how do her poetics link both together at once?

The ‘black cloth’ of interjection Untranslatability is the signature mode of Carson’s published translations. In a relatively rare discussion of her translation practice, Carson addresses her process of translating, or failing to translate, Electra. She addresses in particular the problem of screaming: ‘[T] he presence in Greek drama of bursts of sound expressing strong emotion (like OIMOI or O TALAINA or PHEU PHEU) furnishes the translator with a very simple and intractable problem. These sounds are not words, yet neither are they meaningless.’4 In the screams of the Greek tragic stage, Carson fixates on the untranslatable: neither ‘words’ nor ‘meaningless’, the screams of Greek tragedy must be reproduced but cannot be understood – at least not in the terms of a ‘formulaic body of ejaculatory utterance best rendered into English by some dead phrase like Alas!’, she writes.5 222

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Carson’s essay links Electra’s screams specifically to her personal use of the verb lupein, to cause someone grief or harm. The untranslatability of screaming gives way to the untranslatability of pain, damage or sabotage: During the days and weeks when I was working on this play I used to dream about translating. One night I dreamed that the text of the play was a big solid glass house. I floated above the house trying to zero in on v. 363. I was carrying in my hands wrapped in a piece of black cloth the perfect English equivalent for lupein and I kept trying to force myself down through the glass atmosphere of the house to position this word in its right place. But there was an upward pressure as heavy as water. I couldn’t move down, I swam helplessly back and forth on the surface of the transparency, waving my black object and staring down through fathoms of glass. And I was just about to take the black cloth off and look at the word so as to memorize it for later when I awoke, when I awoke.6 The dream in Carson’s essay elaborates a contingent challenge into an allegory of translation and its failures. This allegory insists on the necessary failure of a particular project of translation: ‘I never did discover, asleep or awake, what was under that black cloth.’7 Electra’s verb of damage, like her screams, becomes an object that must be held, just as the text of the play must be stared at, but whose truth can never be disclosed, determined or unveiled. The failure of translation, that is to say, evacuates the determinacy of meaning in favour of the sublimity of presence, constellated around a Greek experience of pain, harm and grief. Carson’s provisional theses on untranslatability both overlap with and depart from the philosophy of untranslatables advanced by translation scholar Barbara Cassin. In her introduction to The Dictionary of Untranslatables, Cassin offers that she ‘neither can, nor wish[es] to speak of the “untranslatable” in the singular because, to my ear this would refer to [. . .] the untranslatable “body” or “materiality” of languages: in essence what literary translators are confronted with [. . .] the signifier itself [. . .] languages as they exist’.8 Rather, she insists that the Dictionary ‘clarifies the contradictions’ of any given untranslatable philosophical term, and ‘places them face-to-face and in reflection’.9 Carson’s observations on screaming in Electra similarly begin in a confrontation with the particular, but indicate a much more generalized perspective on untranslatability: the screams of Greek tragedy are ‘neither words nor meaningless’, the perfect translation for lupein can only be held, never unveiled. If Carson’s rhetoric in her 1996 essay suggests the fatalism that Cassin identifies as ‘destinal and Heideggerian’,10 her formalized practice of translating Greek tragedy over the next two decades confirms this tendency. The 1996 essay isolates a characterological problem – how to translate Electra’s particular experience of pain, her especially intricate screaming that might be distinguished from, say, Orestes’ or Clytemnestra’s exclamations of pain and grief. ‘Inarticulate or nearly inarticulate cries of grief, pain, sorrow, surprise, etc., are common in this play,’ she writes in her notes to Electra line 107.11 223

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Carson’s 2007 Grief Lessons: Four Plays By Euripides by contrast generalizes the problem of the ‘neither word, nor meaningless’ utterance. No longer restricted to one play or one character, Carson instead regularly if inconsistently refuses to translate stage interjections, which she instead splashes across the page in transliterated capitals. Amphitryon in the Heracles cries in capitals, ‘IO MOI MELEOS! [from within, a cry]’; so does the chorus: ‘OTOTOTOI! [cry]’. Carson occasionally does offer a translation of the screams, as in Amphitryon’s aiai kakôn of line 900, which she renders as ‘O evils!’ But even in this case she plants the transliterated Greek utterance beside it, a visual remainder of untranslatable difference. And so too in each of the other three plays collected in the same volume. Hecuba: ‘OIMOI AIAI! [cry]’; Phaedra: ‘PHEU PHEU TLEMON [cry]’; Admetus: ‘PHEU [cry of pain]’. Her 2009 volume An Oresteia continues the trend, with slight variations: Carson replaces a handful of utterances with the stage direction ‘[scream]’, while transliterating several others – the Orestes chorus’ ‘AIAI’, a different Electra’s ‘OIMOI’, Cassandra’s notorious ‘OTOTOTOI POPOI DA’.12 It is as if English did not have even a small lexicon of nonce words – ‘oh’, ‘no’, ‘god’, ‘fuck’ – to represent pain, loss, distress or fear.

Primitivism, modernism, philhellenism What’s at stake in the shift from the specific characterological problem of screaming in Sophocles’ Electra to the assertion of a general untranslatability of the utterance? Carson asserts an experience of irreducible particularity, a worldview or experience that cannot be communicated or assimilated – an object behind a veil. In her performance piece Cassandra Float Can, Carson takes up Cassandra’s ‘OTOTOTOI POPOI DA’: ‘she is translating some pure gash of Trojan emotion into metrically perfect Greek speech’.13 Cassandra ‘splits open our idea of what it means to know Greek’, returning us to ‘something earlier, rougher [. . .] something that, compared to a sentence is still wild’.14 Carson places Greek tragedy at a threshold of comprehension, mediating the consumption of a dimly comprehensible past. Screaming in tragedy, on this model, represents an untranslatable remainder. In this capacity Carson recalls the mid-century classicist Wolfgang Schadewaldt, for whom screaming in tragedy signalled an archaic and irrecuperable experience of the world. In notably racialized terms, Schadewaldt asserted that: The ancient human being, who acts tragically and suffers tragically, is no modern European, he is no Nordic human being. Nor is he a human being who is so formed by a certain manner of our childrearing that he doesn’t even scream – he screams. The tremendous fact of the event places within him such a forceful emotion that this mighty thing then breaks out of him.15 Carson’s untranslatable interjections similarly hold the conceptual space of a primitivism, according to which an ancient Greek experience of the world as mediated by tragedy 224

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opens up onto a mythical primal scene. In this capacity, Carson carries forward the Nietzschean tradition that sees in tragedy a mediated, cultural access to an originary human experience of ‘nature’ in terms of terror, ecstasy, excess and violence – as Nietzsche writes in the Birth of Tragedy, ‘nothing but primal pain and its primal echo [Urschmerz und Urwiederklang desselben]’.16 In the Nietzschean tradition, tragedy mediates a ‘primal’ or originary experience of the world, signalled by Nietzsche’s prefix Ur-. Carson establishes this connection in her translations in the terms of the colonial science of anthropology. ‘Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage,’ she writes in her introduction to Grief Lessons. ‘Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He’ll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief.’17 Carson’s footnote for this passage cites an essay by Renato Rosaldo, ‘Grief and the Headhunter’s Rage’, an anthropological text distributed by the American Ethnographic Society.18 In the terms of the colonial epistemology of ethnography, Rosaldo ‘studies’ practices of headhunting among Ilongots indigenous to Luzon, Philippines. Carson generalizes Rosaldo’s conclusion into a theory of tragedy; this conceptual leap is made possible only through a corresponding philosophical primitivism. Here, too, she draws on a long tradition of relating Greek tragedy to the colonial science of anthropology. Richard Schechner, a trained anthropologist and the director of the Performance Group’s 1968 Bacchae adaptation Dionysus in 69, explicitly related Greek tragedy to indigenous social practices of the global colonial periphery. Having described a ritual practice of the Orokolo that Schechner appropriated for the stage in Dionysus in 69, he argues: Closer than the Orokolo to our traditional theatre are the Greeks. I fear we have lost forever the Greek chorus which Nietzsche, of all moderns, seems to have understood best. [. . .] Dionysus, Eros, tribalism [. . .] underneath whatever repressive machinery civilization constructs to keep itself intact, a counterforce of great unifying, celebratory, sexual and life-giving power continues to exert its overwhelming and joyful influence.19 Riding high in late 1960s on the ‘politics of ecstasy’ – the title of his essay – Schechner asserts an originary ‘joy’ repressed by ‘machinery civilization’. Maybe he thought he saw it from his perch in NYU faculty housing over Washington Square Park.20 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Carson diverges from Schechner’s optimistic primitivism into a more fatalistic version of the same, but the intellectual trajectory is clear: tragedy indicates, for Carson, an originary social logic, in the anthropological terms of the colonial epistemology she cites. In that regard, the non-translation of tragic interjections functions as a placeholder for the ‘primal’ order of violence that, in Carson’s terms, tragedy scarcely contains. So, on the one hand, Greek tragedy hovers at the limit of conceptual possibility for a modern onlooker. On the other hand, Carson regularly attempts to place this ancient and unassimilable experience on a continuum with strategies and figures of artistic representation derived from a canon of twentieth-century literature and culture, centred 225

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on high and late modernism. She routinely advances this comparison between ancient Greek literature and twentieth-century modernism through the form of an analogy, first by introducing an enigma of ancient Greek literature, and second by offering an implicit explanation for this enigma in the form of an early-to-mid-century figure of European or Anglo-American cultural production. To expose Stesichorus, Carson turns to Gertrude Stein; for Simonides, Paul Celan; for Sappho, Simone Weil. Her 1998 Autobiography of Red rather famously opens, ‘He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.’21 This ‘interval’ names the two sides of Carson’s recurring analogies: Greek literature on the one side, modernism on the other, each speaking enigmatically past the other. Her use of the late modernist Beckett to illuminate Euripides is exemplary. Writing on the ‘unpleasantness of Euripides’,22 Carson asserts a comparison between Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Hecuba, concluding that the latter ironizes the former: The only tragic katharsis Euripides can imagine for Hekabe is to cleanse her of her very human skin – by turning her into a dog. And it seems to me that the eroded surface of this play is a comment not just on Hekabe and her sad fate, not just on the values of war at the end of a civilization, but on what Euripides thinks he’s doing when he writes a play. Again, he reminds me of Beckett, a playwright who felt he was living after the end of his own art form, indeed after the end of language[.]23 Carson then cites a 1937 letter that Beckett sent to Axel Kaun: It is becoming more difficult, even senseless, for me to write a standard English. More and more my own language seems to me as a veil, to be torn apart to approach the things (or the nothings) behind it [. . .] Since we can’t eliminate [language] all at once let’s not neglect anything that might contribute to its corruption. To bore hole after hole in it, until what cowers behind it begins to seep through – I can imagine no higher goal for a contemporary writer.24 Faced with the paradox of Euripides’ art that, in Carson’s account, positions itself against the possibility of artistic representation, Carson attempts to illuminate Euripides by way of Beckett. But the shared term by which one end of the analogy might explain the other is not a transparency, but an opaqueness. For Beckett, as for Carson’s Euripides, language takes the form of a ‘veil’ – and here recall the black cloth that covered Carson’s perfect translation of lupein in her allegory of untranslatability. The mutual ground of Beckett’s and Euripides’ dramatic and poetic practice, in Carson’s comparison, is not a creation but a destruction, placed in ‘a sort of exhausted end-game’.25 Carson stages a meeting between Euripides and Beckett not in service of a mutual interpretation but to highlight the lack or indeed failure of communication and artistic representation, a failure that assumes the cast of historical finality. Placing Euripides at the end of a ‘world war’,26 and meanwhile implicitly predicating war as modernism’s defining event, Carson unites ancient and 226

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modern literary production at the point of linguistic and artistic futility against a historical backdrop of mass social destruction. Just as in the case of the ‘primal’ scream of the stage interjection, this point of futile representation collapses into a mode of the aesthetic sublime, staging the nonrepresentation of that which, in Beckett’s terms, ‘cowers behind’ language. Elsewhere, Carson writes of the sublime in the specific terms of the failure of argument and explanation: ‘It has no argument, no organization, no paraphrasable conclusion,’ she writes of pseudo-Longinus’ On the Sublime.27 ‘Sublime quotes are their own reason for being,’ she continues.28 Carson mobilizes in practice this priority of violently pleasurable juxtaposition over critical explanation that she theorizes as the sublime’s particular mode. The sublime therefore provides the terms on which to read Carson’s primitivism and modernism together. The non-translation of what Nietzsche called ‘primal pain and its primal echo’ [Urschmerz und Urwiederklang desselben] is itself a sublime nonrepresentation, in Carson’s hands rendered as a visual shock through the transliteration into capital letters, set apart from the rest of her text. According to a philosophical primitivism, the screams of the tragic stage are unassimilable to a modern experience, and therefore untranslatable, because they derive from an originary experience of the world, that is, because in this historical schema they are somehow especially early. Euripides’ and Beckett’s attacks on language, on the other hand, collapse into a sublime non-representation because their authors are, respectively, historically late, appearing in a period of civilizational decline and artistic decadence, after their words can no longer signify in a straightforward way. Carson stages a collision between that which, in her account, appears as historically archaic and that which appears as historically late. Or, more specifically, she adapts a canon of modernism specifically in order to represent a canon of Greek literature in the mode of sublime non-interpretation. The romance of Greek language pins these historical points together: holding both the archaisms and decadence of Greek literature continually at a conceptual horizon for modernity, and continually refusing this body of literature the status of an object of study that could, properly speaking, be understood. ‘Longinus,’ she writes, ‘skates away.’29 Carson displaces interpretation – including the interpretation concretized in translating across languages – in favour of the sublimity of presence. If Carson advances a homology between civilizational decadence and some assumed originary experience of the world, and if her particular philhellenism makes this equivocation possible, this alignment proposes, however implicitly, a theory of language, literature, culture and history. A primitivist philhellenism that nonetheless insists on Greek culture as the conceptual horizon of modernity: this philosophical mode, together with Carson’s insistence on Greek untranslatability, bears the imprimatur of Martin Heidegger’s own philhellenism, and its hefty conceptual baggage. That is to say, by approaching Greek language and literature in the terms of a philosophical primitivism, but simultaneously setting these terms as a conceptual horizon for modern thought, Carson recodes her own primitivism out of the Nietzschean metaphysics of the Birth of Tragedy and into a Heideggerian reverence for a linguistic community. 227

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Dwelling in Greek What is a linguistic community, and why does it matter for Heidegger? Heidegger’s conception of language and its speakers is not a sociological or empirical one: ‘In our manner of speaking, “Greek” does not designate a particular people or nation, nor a cultural or anthropological group,’ he writes in his essay on the Anaximander fragment.30 Adam Knowles points towards the opening of Heidegger’s Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, where Heidegger writes, ‘Is language then real, if only this one or that one speaks, or is it real, when all members of a linguistic community speak at the same time?’31 Knowles argues: What does it mean for the members of a linguistic community to speak at the same time? It does not mean speaking in unison, nor speaking over one another, but instead speaking from the same space of attunement. This fundamental attunement arises for Heidegger from a place, from a landscape, and from a historical meditation on the ‘Greek-German’ essence. Heidegger turns to the public realm qua the Volk because it is the space of the essential saying of language for those who are rooted in that space.32 For Heidegger, thought depends on ‘dwelling’ (wohnen), a particular relationship to place and landscape that enables certain forms of language.33 For Heidegger, ‘language first comes to language, i.e. into its essence, in thinking. Thinking says what the truth of Being dictates.’34 The project of approaching Greek language for Heidegger is never simply one of translation, but instead one of inhabiting Greek thoughts, for the precise reason that the Greeks for Heidegger dwell in a uniquely proximate relationship to the ontic order of the world. (‘Our thinking must first, before translating, be translated to what is said in Greek.’)35 They are, for Heidegger, uniquely a linguistic community that ‘speaks at the same time’, with particular philosophical import. Heidegger’s philhellenism orients around two philosophical positions: first, an insistence on the ‘primordial’ [Ur-, ursprünglich] nature of Greek philosophy, and second the unique relationship that Greek language has towards ontology, to the discourse of being. For Heidegger, Greek philosophy is not just chronologically earlier than contemporary European philosophy, but rather conceptually prior to it. In his essay on the Anaximander fragment, which he calls the earliest fragment of Greek philosophy, Heidegger asserts, ‘The antiquity pervading the Anaximander fragment belongs to the dawn of early times in the land of evening [Land des Abends, Heidegger’s pun on Abendland or ‘the West’]. But what if that which is early outdistanced everything late; if the very earliest surpassed the very latest? [. . .] As something fateful, Being itself is inherently eschatological.’36 The primacy of Greek philosophy stands, for Heidegger, at the dawn of thinking, precisely insofar as it has a unique grasp on the discourse of being. In the same essay, Heidegger asks, ‘But what if ta onta, on and einai [Greek for ‘beings’, ‘being’, ‘to be’] come to speak in language as the fundamental words of thinking, and not simply a particular kind of thinking but rather as the key words for all Western thinking? [. . .] What is Greek is the 228

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dawn of that destiny in which Being illuminates itself in beings and so propounds a certain essence of man.’37 But if Heidegger’s primitivist philhellenism extends itself to modernity by promising, as he saw it, the only possible renewal of ‘the land of evening’, it withdraws itself precisely through its reticence in the face of translation. Heidegger insists that translating the critical terms of Greek language – its lexicon of being – is not a matter of philological accuracy but rather of translating the thought contained within them. Translation itself for Heidegger is ruinous to thought. In his post-war interview with Der Spiegel, Heidegger asserts: One can no more translate a thought than one can translate a poem. At best, one can paraphrase it. As soon as one attempts a literal translation, everything is transformed. Spiegel A disturbing thought. Heidegger It would be good if this disturbance were taken seriously in good measure, and people finally gave some thought to what a portentous transformation Greek thought underwent by translation into the Latin of Rome, an event that even today prevents an adequate reflection upon the fundamental words of Greek thought.38 The Spiegel interview accounts for what Barbara Cassin refers to as the ‘destinal and Heideggerian’ fatalism of the untranslatable, from which Cassin distinguishes her own philosophical practice. For Heidegger, translation appears as a philosophical travesty rather than a philological problem. He renders translation conceptually impossible, and his fatalism only makes sense in light of his two related claims – that translation is a matter of intuiting thought, and that thought itself is an activity that a linguistic community assumes in relation to its ‘dwelling’, which is to say, to place and landscape. In the annals of European history, this trifold relationship between thought and language and autochthonous place collapses into a fascistic imagination of ethnonationalist belonging and philosophical-linguistic destiny. Without reproducing Heidegger’s fascistic excesses, Carson aligns with a Heideggerian philosophical legacy at several critical points. Her philhellenism orients her continually towards Greek language and literature, which she nonetheless insists, explicitly and implicitly, cannot be philologically rendered so much as presented or held at a distance. Greek hovers at the numinous edge of understanding. At the same time, she insists on Greek language and literature as a conceptual horizon for a degraded and violent modernity, which she approaches with a ruthless, uncompromising irony: ‘With her new shopping cart Hekabe, queen of Troy, will be prowling the aisle for dog biscuits.’39 Presenting Greek in the terms of an aesthetic sublime derived from and dependent upon a melancholic modernism, she continually refuses the texts she translates the possibility of actually being taken as the object of thought. Joining with Heidegger on the untranslatability of Greek thought amid the degraded present, Carson arguably departs 229

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from his philhellenism on the question of the possibility of ‘renewal’ that this thought presents to that chaotically modern world. ‘Only a god can save us,’ Heidegger asserted in his Spiegel interview; for Carson, not even that.

Autobiography of White Carson’s theses of antiquity and modernity, her primitivism and philhellenism, come to a kind of philosophical climax in her 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red, which combines a creative translation of Stesichorus’ Geryoneis with a gay Bildungsroman. In its central and longest section, Carson transforms Stesichorus’ poem into a coming-ofage narrative, its protagonist an adolescent Geryon decked in red wings and heartbroken by a fly-by-night Herakles. These alternations between translating an archaic past scarcely in evidence – Carson’s proem notes the ‘dozen or so titles and several collections of fragments’ surviving of Stesichorus’ work – and narrating an experience of the immediate present put Carson’s philhellenism into practice: a dimly perceptible and badly damaged ancient poem illuminates contemporary subjectivity. Edith Hall reads Carson’s novel as primarily a meditation on ‘the boundaries of selfhood and the unknowability of other’s inner selves’.40 And certainly the concern of Carson’s verse novel is something like the subject of modernity, who can experience and narrate a rich inner life as a result of social devastation: ‘Inside is mine,’ Geryon thinks, after being sexually assaulted by his older brother.41 Who is the beneficiary of this romance between ancient Greek literature and modern interiority, and who is instrumentalized to make the ‘catastrophes’ of these particular personalities seem ‘beautiful, and interesting, and modern’?42 It’s not an idle question. On the one hand, Stesichorus plays the same role in Autobiography of Red as Euripides in Grief Lessons: an almost avant-garde innovator of poetic language whose unique contribution – ‘the difference he makes’43 – becomes perceptible through the intervention of a canonical modernist, in this case Stein rather than Beckett. Riffing on Stein, Carson writes, ‘Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.’44 In her introductory essay, Stesichorus frees the use of adjectives – the ‘latches of being’: ‘all the substances in the world went floating up’.45 This release of description from place dovetails with a Heideggerian account of the loss of Greek knowledge as a departure from a rootedness in landscape. Stesichorus’ ‘release of being’ places his work in sudden proximity to a rootless modernity, a suggestion Carson reinforces by playing on, and intentionally confusing, Stesichorus and Stein, in the novel’s final section, an interview with a writer ‘S’ ‘about 1907’.46 In this effusion of polysemy, the freed adjective above all that Carson returns to is her titular ‘red’. Like an ostinato tone, continuous throughout the poem, ‘red’ unites Carson’s translation of Stesichorus (‘How stiff the red landscape where his cattle scraped against / their hobbles in the red wind’) with her ‘interview’ with Stein (‘exactly it is red that I like’) and binds together the bloody violence of Heracles’ murder of Geryon in the Geryoneis and the eroticism of the two modern adolescents’ sex in the novel. Carson transforms ‘red’ into 230

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the hinge the novel swings on, capable of a polysemy that can translate between archaic poetry and modernism and transform violence into sexuality and back again. On the other, Carson only achieves this romance through a kind of colonial fantasy. Edith Hall suggests that the ‘red’ of Carson’s 1998 Autobiography of Red refers to indigeneity: ‘the implicit ethnic associations of “red” skin in North American and Canadian culture lurk just beneath the poem’s surface’.47 The final third of the novel takes place on a tourist trip Geryon takes from North America to Argentina, and then to the Peruvian Andes. In Buenos Aires, Geryon re-encounters Herakles with a new, indigenous lover, Ancash. Carson’s love triangle provides a narrative resolution to the feelings of youthful melancholia and abandonment that pervade the novel, offering, in Hall’s terms, ‘the discovery of at least a kind of self-understanding’.48 Carson achieves this ‘selfunderstanding’ of the ‘Western subject’49 specifically through a mythological equivocation between ancient Greek poetry and Quechua oral storytelling and ritual practice. An ethnographic attention to indigenous language and society pervades the back half of Carson’s book. On the plane ride to Buenos Aires, Geryon reads Fodor’s Guide to South America, complete with unsubstantiated anecdotes about horseback riding and different Yamana words for kin.50 This attention peaks at the novel’s climax, in which Ancash offers an explanation for Geryon’s red-winged body, and then at Ancash’s suggestion Geryon uses his wings to fly above a volcano in the Peruvian Andes. Listen to me Geryon, Ancash was saying, there’s a village in the mountains north of Huaraz called Jucu and in Jucu they believe some strange things. It’s a volcanic region. Not active now. In ancient times they worshipped the volcano as a god and even threw people into it. [. . .] They were looking for people from the inside [. . .]. The word in Quechua is Yazcol Yazcamac it means the Ones Who Went and Saw and Came Back – I think the anthropologists say eyewitnesses. [. . .] Eyewitnesses, said Geryon. Yes. People who saw the inside of the volcano. And came back. Yes. How do they come back? Wings. Wings? Yes that’s what they say the Yazcamac return as red people with wings, all their weaknesses burned away – and their mortality. Carson introduces an indigenous narrative of the colonial periphery to make sense of a Greek literary enigma – Geryon’s body, whose destruction Stesichorus vividly and sensuously compares to a poppy ‘which spoiling its tender beauty suddenly shed its 231

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petals’.51 In an essay on Carson’s translation of Euripides’ Bacchae,52 I noted the overlapping strategies between this mode of exposition and the anthropology of René Girard, which attempted to use the colonial science of ethnography to render legible the social significance of Greek literature. The signature practice of European primitivism, that is, asserts an equivalence between Greek literature and the social practices of the colonized. According to this colonial fantasy, the latter glimmers at the far edge of archaism, both infused with a primordial aura and asserting a commanding presence over contemporary thought. In Girard’s terms, the conflicts of Greek tragedy harken back to an earlier, ‘primitive’ society and its practices of sacrifice; Girard then explains the sacrificial elements of Greek tragedy by reference to social practices of the Chukchi in contemporary Russia and the Kaingang in Brazil. Quoting the anthropologist Jules Henry, Girard writes, ‘ “Kaingang murderers are like characters of a Greek tragedy in the grip of a natural law whose processes once started can never be stayed” [. . .] tragedy opens a royal way to the great dilemmas of religious ethnology.’53 Girard’s ‘denial of coevalness’54 is typical of anthropology. Girard rejects the time shared between colonizer and colonized, relegating indigeneity to a ‘primitive’ temporality somehow dimly captured in the early texts of the classical European canon. Carson’s primitivism operates on a similar but inverted principle: where Girard uses Greek literature to attempt to explain ‘religious ethnology’, Carson mines indigenous oral culture to explain the enigmas of Greek literature. The explanation of one phenomenon in terms of the other demonstrates the extent of Carson’s debt to an ethnographic tradition – all the more so insofar as indigenous knowledge in Carson’s narrative answers the demand of the Bildungsroman for its protagonist to arrive at a mature and adult selfconsciousness. Geryon achieves a stable self-image by seeing his reflection in Ancash’s sacrificial myth. This dynamic restages the encounter, familiar to readers of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, whereby the colonizer achieves self-understanding through the encounter with and projection onto the colonized.55 In Denise Ferreira da Silva’s terms, this encounter produces and racializes the colonizer as the subject of history through relegating the indigenous colonized to an archaic and vanishing temporality, ‘modern subjects that gaze but at the horizon of death’.56 Autobiography of Red uses indigeneity as its instrument to fashion the white subject out of the seductive remains of sixth-century bce Greek poetry. The payoff of Carson’s philhellenic primitivism is therefore twofold, bisected at the dividing line between indigenous and settler-colonial subject: Greek literature, from its shroud of mystery, speaks in a half-indecipherable language to a modern world in steep and irreversible decline; while colonized forms of culture and speech provide the interpretive key by which to achieve a partial cipher for Greek knowledge. In turn, Carson produces two fatalisms: one for the modernity of the colonizer – in decline, but the more capable of self-consciousness about it the more it harkens back to a classical canon; and the other for the objects of European ethnography, who can submit knowledge – about ‘headhunting’, say, or sacrifice – to explain the majestic violence of Greek literature, but to whom Carson refuses a future except as an instrument of settler self-knowledge. The other side of colonial modernism is indigenous genocide; a truth that Carson’s 232

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translations, produced in modernism’s shadow and committed to an especially melancholic understanding of its purpose, enact again and again and again.

Conclusion At stake in these considerations is something like the epistemic force of a particular instance of classicism, a narrative mode that bears on the present through a specific form of writing the past into history. As the Postclassicisms collective writes,‘An understanding of the present [. . .] is normatively structured by a look, often a longing look backward to the distant world of classical antiquity, where ideal forms, exemplary paradigms, and other ancestors of excellence may be found. In classicism’s perspective, antiquity has the power to model the here and now.’57 Carson’s particular classicism does not long, but it does look, and it cannot look away. Riffing on Fredric Jameson,58 I opened my 2018 essay with the question, ‘What’s at stake in the desire called Anne Carson?’59 The question stands. The point of the foregoing exploration is then both to disclose the implicit conceptual content of Carson’s translation practice and to identify the operations that have made it a cultural force. Carson’s romance of untranslatability is not a private one. Instead, what I’m trying to say is that to indulge the Heideggerian fantasy that Greek language and literature maintain a unique but scarcely translatable relationship to thought and experience requires a corresponding commitment to its narrative modes of antiquity and modernity, and to its implicit modes of racial subject-making. Any cultural narrative that both gifts Greek literature the status of a necessary conceptual horizon for modernity and refuses it the status of something that can actually be thought will similarly reproduce this primitivism and its corresponding epistemic violences. Meanwhile, any narrative about the present that collapses into commonplaces about decline will reproduce nothing other than nostalgia for even recently eclipsed periods of imperial control, murderously exercised by very few over very many at a global scale. The more pressing question for classicists, then, is are we willing to unmoor ourselves from these narratives about past and present, and to accept the total, unqualified transformation to our methods and objects of study that such a release would require?

Notes 1. Heartfelt thanks to Cam Scott and Tom Foxall for their thorough engagement with this chapter in draft form. 2. Carson (2008). 3. See, for instance, Heidegger (2001: 145): ‘The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling.’ In the same essay, Heidegger argues that thought derives from dwelling, i.e., is produced out of a relationship to place and landscape (2001: 158).

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Anne Carson/ Antiquity 4. Carson (1996: 5). 5. Carson (1996: 5). 6. Carson (1996: 5). 7. Carson (1996: 5). 8. Cassin (2010: 17–18). 9. Cassin (2010: 18). 10. Cassin (2010: 18). 11. Carson (2001: 114). 12. In Carson (2008), Carson refers to this scream specifically as ‘untranslatable but not meaningless’. 13. Carson (2008). 14. Carson (2008). 15. Schadewaldt (1963: 38). I am grateful to Dr Nina Mindt for providing this reference and introducing me to Schadewaldt. 16. Nietzsche (1999: 30). 17. Carson (2007: 7). 18. See Rosaldo (1983). 19. Schechner (1969: 217). 20. Schechner (1969: 210–11). 21. Carson (1998: 3). 22. Carson (2007: 89). 23. Carson (2007: 93). 24. Carson (2007: 93–4). 25. Carson (2007: 94). 26. Carson (2007: 8, 95). 27. Carson (2005: 96). 28. Carson (2005: 97). 29. Carson (2005: 101). 30. Heidegger (1984: 25). 31. Heidegger (2009: 29). 32. Knowles (2019: 18). 33. Heidegger (2001: 158). Knowles (2019: 18, 36–57) firmly establishes the fascistic antiSemitism inherent in this conceptual mode, which renders ‘world Jewry’ (Heidegger’s own phrase, from the Black Notebooks – see Heidegger, 2017: 191) as a rootless, nomadic phantasm in opposition to the rooted thought of Greek antiquity and the possibility of German ‘renewal’. 34. Heidegger (1984: 19). 35. Heidegger (1984: 25). 36. Heidegger (1984: 18). 37. Heidegger (1984: 24–5). 38. Heidegger (1981). 234

More Spectres of Dying Empire 39. Carson (2007: 97). 40. Carson (2007: 230). 41. Carson (1998: 29). 42. O’Hara (1995: 202). 43. Carson (1998: 4). 44. Carson (1998: 3). 45. Carson (1998: 4–5). 46. Carson (1998: 147). 47. Hall (2009: 221). 48. Hall (2009: 234). 49. Hall (2009: 237). 50. Carson (1998: 80–1). 51. Translation from Campbell (1991). 52. Gabriel (2018: 326–7). 53. Girard (1961: 55). 54. Fabian (2002: 25). 55. ‘Let us have the courage to say it outright: it is the racist who creates his inferior.’ Fanon (1988: 69). 56. da Silva (2007: 207). 57. Postclassicisms (2020: 20). 58. See Jameson (2005). 59. Gabriel (2018: 319).

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CHAPTER 17 TRANSLATION, TRANSCREATION, TRANSGRESSION Susan Bassnett

Rethinking translation In a book that has since become one of the foundational texts of Translation Studies, Gideon Toury made a bold statement, declaring that ‘Translations are facts of target cultures; on occasion facts of a special status, sometimes even constituting identifiable (sub)systems of their own, but of the target culture in any event.’1 Today such a statement may not seem as radical as it did back in the 1980s, but that was the decade when the new field calling itself Translation Studies was starting to make its debut on the international stage. The small group who brought the field into being in the 1970s was challenging preconceptions in both literary studies and linguistics which, in different ways, viewed translation as an activity of marginal academic status. Linguistics tended to decontextualize the study of translation, while in literary studies translation was seen as a second-class activity. Academics in both fields were encouraged to leave out reference to any of their translation work in their bids for tenure or promotion since translation was not seen as a serious scholarly activity. By asserting that translations belong to the target culture, Toury shifted the emphasis away from the old evaluative approach, whereby a translation was compared with its original, usually to the detriment of the translation. The way was open for a new dimension of thinking about translations, one that moved away from ideas of ‘faithfulness’ and ‘accuracy’ and focused on the reception of translations in the target culture. The objective of Translation Studies in its early years was to raise the status of translation in general and to challenge the marginalization of translation in literary and cultural studies. In this respect, the field shared similar objectives to other contestatory fields that were developing at the same time, notably women and gender studies and postcolonial studies, all of which were challenging the canons of the academic establishment. Toury’s book was important because it focused on finding a methodology for translation studies, seeking to move away from an evaluative approach to translation. Indeed, translation studies as a whole rejected the discourse of unfaithfulness, loss and betrayal that had characterized so much discussion of translation for so long. The object of study now, it was proposed, should be on the receiving culture, on how a translation is received and what role it plays in its new context. This shift in emphasis has made it possible to talk about translation in a much more productive way. The old arguments about degrees of faithfulness to a source and the nature of equivalence are no longer central to the discussion of translation. Toury’s 237

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proposition that we should see translations as facts of target cultures has been widely acknowledged and as Translation Studies has developed there has also been a shift in attitudes towards translators. In his book Translation and Rewriting in the Age of PostTranslation Studies, the American translation theorist Edwin Gentzler declares that translation should be seen as central not only to the humanities but to human interaction in general. As he succinctly puts it: Instead of thinking in terms of the self and other, in which the ‘other’ is translated into the ‘same’, instead of thinking in terms of the source and the receiver, instead of thinking in terms of the native and the immigrant being labelled ‘different’ or ‘foreign’, I suggest we rethink translation by getting rid of the many dichotomies and reimagining the cultural foundation in terms of all people being rewriters.2 Gentzler proposes a move beyond thinking in terms of binary oppositions, something that has been a problem with talking about translation for centuries. Here he argues that translation understood in its broadest sense should become a metaphor for transformative thinking about socio-cultural organization. Underpinning this statement are two basic ideas: that translation is a means to bring something into the receiving culture and that this process rewrites, that is transforms the source text into something else that belongs to the receiver. Translation is an active agent of change and the translator is the individual who creates that transformation. Some years earlier, in 1995, Lawrence Venuti’s book The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation had provided a passionate account of the marginalization of translation in literary history, making the case for translators to become more visible, to be seen as creators not as reproducers or copiers. Venuti highlighted the traditional invisibility of the translator, arguing that this has served to accentuate the low status accorded to translation. When people say they have read Tolstoy or Homer or Wei Wang, what they probably mean is that they have read a translation, though rarely is the name of the translator remembered. Moreover, there is a general view that the invisible translator serves merely as a conduit through which a text passes from one language into another, rather than as the recreation of that text in another literary system. A collection of essays edited by Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush in 2006 entitled The Translator as Writer invited translators to reflect on their own creative process, asking whether translators felt that they were acquiring more visibility in the twenty-first century. We set out the problem of the downgrading of translation in our introduction, pointing out that ‘the credit convention which holds most strongly in the English-speaking world – but elsewhere as well – is that the spectator or reader is best spared knowledge of the translators who have taken hundreds and thousands of decisions in regard to every particle of the reading or theatrical experience’.3 How do translators feel about being viewed as second;class citizens, do they see themselves as creators in their own right and how do they see their relationship with the author whose work they are translating were some of the questions posed. The responses 238

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were, as anticipated, varied, but all the contributors stressed the creativity of translating. Clive Scott, who translates from French describes translation as ‘metissage, interbreeding, hybridization, grafting, creolization’, as a process that is constantly drawing maps and ‘redisposing the territories of language and cultures’.4 This is a helpful way of seeing translation and stresses the complex creativity that translators of poetry bring to their task. Scott uses the figurative images of interbreeding and grafting, which recall the famous statement by Percy Bysse Shelley who declared that every translation is an act of transplantation, whereby a seed is planted in new soil so that a new version of a plant can grow. Today, a growing number of published translations now provide notes or prefaces written by translators about their individual creative process, which is surely a sign of an increased respect for translators. Translators are becoming more visible, not only via academic publications and conferences, but with the advent of more international prizes where translations are given equal status with other forms of writing, also with more translations being published. Finally, the anglophone world seems to be more willing to engage with translation and to acknowledge the skills and commitment of translators. It is long overdue.

Revoicing the dead One of Anne Carson’s ‘Short Talks’ is entitled ‘On Walking Backwards’. It opens with a personal reminiscence: My mother forbade us from walking backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.5 In these few lines Carson makes a connection between translation and engaging with the dead. A bad translation is not forward-looking, it walks backwards, as her mother imagined the dead might do, whereas what the dead desire is to be seen, to become visible again. Walking behind the living they hope that someone will turn around and give them a renewed voice. Carson points out that it is a mistake to think that the dead walk backwards; they too walk forwards but behind the living. They no longer breathe but they have stories to tell, stories that can only be told by those among the living who are prepared to look back at them, to ‘translate’ them into the realm of the living. The word ‘love’ occurs twice in these few lines: the dead would ‘love’ for the living to turn and see them, for many of them are ‘victims of love’. The idea of translation giving new life to texts and enabling them to survive the vicissitudes of time is a powerful one and has become more widespread since the 1968 English translation of Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’, which first appeared in 1923. That essay is often quoted by translators and translation scholars, and Carson includes a quote from it in her introduction to If Not, Winter: Fragments of 239

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Sappho. The passage she chooses is significant; she refers to Benjamin’s statement that the task of the translator is to find the intended effect upon language which should contain an echo of the original. Benjamin offers an image of translation as being somewhere ‘outside the language forest’, so that the translator can only call into the trees, trying to find a spot where the echo will rebound.6 Asking herself whether her translations of Sappho are an echo of Sappho’s voice, Carson says that she is never quite sure about this, but that every so often ‘there is a tingle’.7 In an interview with Andrew David King, published in the Kenyon Review in 2012, Carson briefly explains her working method. She distinguishes between a commissioned translation, where a translator may be given certain parameters within which to work and something she terms ‘a free adventure of creativity’. As an expert in classical languages, that is where she starts: I generally try to work first and most attentively out of the grammar, syntax, allusions of the original while keeping the language alive in a way that interests me, then later crazy it up if that seems appropriate.8 As an example of her ‘crazying up’, she mentions the references to Hegel, Brecht and Beckett that she included in her version of Sophocles’ Antigone. Later in that same interview she declares that this translation was undertaken on a whim; she had wanted to try translating Sophocles because she had done too much Euripides. All translation involves bringing something across both time and space. A text created in one cultural moment is then transformed into something offered to a new audience in a different cultural moment. In the case of classical literature, those texts may have been translated countless times, so that readers often have a choice of versions to compare, regardless of whether they are acquainted with the original language. Indeed, the very idea of ‘original’ is called into question, for texts from the ancient world have been endlessly reshaped through transcriptions, copies, editions, commentaries and translations, they have been reconfigured through generations of different aesthetic and ideological criteria to the point where it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine what an original might be. Moreover, every translation is the product of one individual translator’s interpretation, and that interpretation will have been shaped by the prevalent aesthetic and cultural norms of the time. Lawrence Venuti in his book Contra Instrumentalism (2019) reminds us that no translation can ever be assumed to be providing direct or unmediated access to a source text, for any text only ever becomes available through some sort of mediation. That mediation is a series of interpretations and every interpretation: [. . .] potentially releases an endless semiosis that is delimited by an interpretative occasion, an institutional site, a conjuncture of cultural forms and practices, and a historical moment – in other words, changing, interrelated, and mutually determining contexts of interpretation that can each lead to a different translation of the same source text, a condition of language use that Derrida terms iterability.9 240

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In her Introduction to If Not, Winter, Carson explains which text she has used (an edition by Eva-Maria Voigt from 1971) and she provides copious notes to her translations, some of which give more information on a particular poem or fragment of a poem, while others refer to her own translation process. At one point, referring to her translation of fragment 38, which she renders as ‘you burn me’, she provides details on the problem of pronouns in Sappho, then follows this with a comment on erotic fire in ancient Greek poetry. She also admits quite bluntly, ‘I may be reading this sentence all wrong.’10 Carson is a classical scholar, but acknowledges that she is also an individual reader, whose interpretation can be challenged by other, different readers. Given the fragmentary nature of those poems by Sappho that have come down to us, some translators have chosen to indicate points where the source is either incomplete or open to question. Josephine Balmer, for example, in her translations of Sappho and other classical women poets uses paratextual signs – brackets, a row of dots, an asterisk – to indicate a conjectural meaning, a break in the papyrus and the end of a fragment.11 Carson also uses brackets, but only to highlight something that is missing. However, she points out that she has not indicated every gap or illegibility because this would inhibit the reading experience since every page would then become a ’blizzard of marks’.12 Then, unexpectedly, she also tells us that brackets can create a sense of excitement for readers: Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp – brackets may imply a free space of imaginal adventure.13 This sentence throws more light on Carson’s translation strategy: she wants to involve the reader in the excitement she feels when working with ancient texts; to offer, albeit vicariously, a sense of the thrill of discovery. In her introduction she is dismissive of ‘ancient scholiasts, grammarians, metricians etc’ who, as she puts it ‘want a dab of poetry to decorate some proposition of their own’.14 In contrast to this pedantic way of reading, Carson seeks to bring Sappho’s writing back to life; she looks back at a long-dead poet and listens. In an essay on Anne Carson as poet and translator, the Canadian translation expert Sherry Simon points out that the terminology for talking about translation in English is inadequate. She says that there is nothing in English to account for a range of translational activity across what she sees as a translation spectrum, from a word-forword strategy to something much more diverse, more creative. Simon positions Carson’s translations at the creative end of the spectrum, suggesting that she gives the fullest meaning to translation as an act of joining, drawing attention to the edge ‘between shadow and non shadow, seeking a point of insight that is to be found nowhere else’.15 Later in that same essay Simon quotes Susan Sontag’s reminder that translation was originally about the difference between being alive and being dead and adds that ‘Anne Carson’s translative writing reminds us of this farthest border. There is in her 241

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work a persistent consciousness of intruding realities. We are directed to the place where the shadow’s edge joins the black of night, reminded always that surfaces have seams, an underlife.’16

Re-engaging with the ancients In the introduction to a collection of essays entitled Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English, Stephen Harrison refers to what he terms the contemporary democratization of classical literature. This has come about because of an increased interest in classical material by writers who might have previously been put off by the canonical and establishment status of classical languages. Harrison suggests that contemporary poets ‘now turn to ancient material not so much in a spirit of homage as in a spirit of appropriation’.17 By this he means that the cultural centrality of those writings seen as the foundational texts of Western culture has shifted, so that they are no longer perceived as canonical and hence immutable. If, as reception theory suggests, texts acquire meaning at the point of reception, then this applies also to translations. This means that translators have a greater degree of freedom than ever, no longer constrained by the need to pay homage to works deemed to be immutable due to their canonical status. So Alice Oswald, another classical scholar and poet, can describe her translation practice in Memorial in the following way: I work closely with the Greek, but instead of carrying the words over into English, I use them as openings through which to see what Homer was looking at. I write through the Greek, not from it – aiming for translucence rather than translation.18 She acknowledges that she was working with the Iliad, but explains that she uses the source text as a point of departure, not as a fixed object that she is meant to reproduce. Josephine Balmer similarly points out that the challenge is always to bring the past into the present and to find a way of recreating it for new audiences. For her, ‘classical literature is such a vast creative resource for writers that its ideas and images have become universal; the challenge for us all is to make them new’.19 Balmer also points out that it is our very lack of certainty about the ancient world that demands a more creative approach. We often only have minimal biographical information about a poet’s life, while the cultural context in which ancient writers flourished vanished long ago and the language in which they spoke and composed has disappeared completely. The task of each new translator is therefore one of reconstruction from whatever is left of a vanished past. As Balmer puts it in the preface to her version of Ovid’s Tristia, The Word for Sorrow: Not only are classical authors silent but their texts come from a silenced, long-dead world, a world that must be reconstructed in tatters from the rubble. And each generation’s reconstruction can be torn down and rebuilt to a completely different model by the next [. . .]20 242

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The editors of two collections of essays on comics and the ancient world, George Kovacs and C. W. Marshall, also stress the importance of rethinking the past creatively. In their introduction to Classics and Comics (2011) they stress the fact that our interpretations of ancient sources are inevitably mediated by the long history of receptions and interpretations that have accumulated over time. They point out that since every reading is an interpretation, it follows that some of those readings will be poorly or mistakenly informed, but stress that this does not make them illegitimate since ‘what matters is the decision to use the past to make sense of the present’. Importantly, they add that new readings can sometimes ‘point to something that lies dormant in the text that has not yet been isolated’.21 Anne Carson’s version of Sophocles’ Antigone does just that. Antigo Nick was first published in 2012. In the first edition the translation was printed in handwriting, and there were illustrations by Bianca Stone on transparent vellum overlaying the words, so that the overall impression was of a hybrid, three-dimensional text. A review in the Guardian described it as one of Carson’s strangest works, a translation that ‘dramatises its own eccentricity, evoking a portrait of the author in a state of distraction’.22 My copy of the text is the 2015 New Directions edition, the cover of which separates the name into two words: Antigo Nick and which starts with a letter-poem addressing Antigone, entitled ‘the task of the translator of Antigone’. I also watched Performing Antigonick on YouTube, recorded at the Louisiana Literature Festival in Denmark in August 2012, with Scandinavian actors and Anne Carson reading the role of the Chorus. This production brought into relief that figure of Nick, listed in the cast as someone who is always onstage, never speaks but who measures things. As the story of Antigone’s defiance of Kreon’s edict, her acceptance of death, Kreon’s disintegration on learning of the death of his wife and his son unfolds, Nick continues to move around the stage with a tape measure, a defamiliarization strategy that serves to remind the audience of the great gulf between the secretive emotional world and the materialistic. This gulf is, I suggest, the aspect of Antigone that has lain dormant and has been brought to light in the twenty-first century by a woman translator. In her address to Antigone, Carson refers to other productions of the play, to Brecht and Anouilh’s versions, and to scholars such as Lacan, Judith Butler and Zizek who have all commented on the story of Antigone that has been seen so many times as a story of resistance to tyranny. She refers ironically to Anouilh’s famous French version in 1944: speaking of the ’40s, you made a good impression on the Nazi high command and simultaneously on the leaders of the French Resistance when they all sat in the audience of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone opening night Paris: 1944: I don’t know what colour your eyes were but I can imagine you rolling them now23 Interestingly, Seamus Heaney’s 2004 version of Sophocles was entitled The Burial At Thebes, a deliberate choice to try to move beyond the twentieth-century vision of Antigone as a heroine and to bring the focus onto the act of burial – a collective, social 243

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act – rather than on one individual. Carson also looks beyond the individual, but sees Antigone in a different way, as someone carrying something hidden: someone keeping faith with a deeply other organisation that lies just beneath what we see or what we say Carson declares that the task facing her as a translator is: to get you and your problem across into English from ancient Greek all that lies hidden in these people, your people, crimes and horror and years together a family, what we call a family . . . Further on, Carson poses the difficulty from another angle. Rather than being a heroine who asserts her right to freedom from Kreon’s tyranny, she sees Antigone differently: but you aren’t interested in freedom your plan is to sew yourself into your own shroud using the tiniest of stitches how to translate this? The letter to Antigone, with which the performance starts, concludes with a statement: dear Antigone, I take it as the task of the translator to forbid that you should ever lose your screams Antigo Nick is both very bleak and grotesquely comic. Carson’s Antigone carries the dread weight of her family curse, describing herself as ‘a strange new kind of in-between thing’, not at home with the dead or the living. Not only is she not a heroine, she rejects those who depict her as such, but her action in burying her brother and her death foreground the craziness of Kreon’s worldview. When he first enters, his speech is a list of words: ‘Here are Kreon’s verbs for today: Adjudicate, Legislate, Scandalize, Capitalize’, followed by his choice of nouns: ‘Men Reason Treason Death Ship of State’. The last word in this list is ‘Mine’, which is promptly challenged by the Chorus: ‘ “mine” isn’t a noun’, to which Kreon snaps back ‘it is if you capitalise it’. This is a dystopian vision of society that recalls that of a fellow Canadian, Margaret Atwood, in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. The final words of Sophocles’ play spoken by the Chorus call for wisdom and remind us that the over-powerful will come to grief. Carson’s take on the ending is very different: Chorus: last word exeunt omnes except Nick who continues measuring wisdom: better get some even too late

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There is no catharsis here: Antigone is dead, Kreon babbles about himself in the third person, grief-stricken certainly, but still unaware that beyond his personal anguish he is the representative of a flawed patriarchal system that defends itself by claiming to be the law. And the men who reduce the world to measurements carry on regardless.

Translation and transgression Tony Harrison, the poet and translator of classical theatre, sees translations as moments in the life of a text. No text can be fixed in time, because it will always be open to new interpretations and each translation is a new version in what is a long line of earlier versions: The original is fluid, the translation is a static moment in that fluidity. Translations are not built to survive though their original survives through translation’s many flowerings and decays. The illusion of pedantry is that a text is fixed. It cannot be fixed once and for all. The translation is fixed but it reinvigorates its original by its decay.24 Translations become part of the history of text. They ensure its survival, they give readers unacquainted with the original language an opportunity to engage with other literatures; but as Harrison points out, they are products of a particular moment. Translations, he says, flower and decay, but that process of decay ensures the reinvigoration of a text. Those works which have come down to us from ancient Greece owe their existence to translations, both in terms of their linguistic framework and, in the case of plays, their performance, but each version is a product of one individual translator in one moment of time and is destined to be replaced by others in due course. In her letter to Antigone, Carson promises that as a translator she will ensure that Antigone’s screams continue to be heard. She uses ‘forbid’, a word that Kreon might well have used; as her translator, Carson will ‘forbid’ the silencing of Antigone’s screaming. Similarly, in her translation of Sophocles’ Elektra, Carson focuses on the sounds the character makes. In her introduction, she points out that Elektra is onstage almost every minute and has one of the longest speaking parts of any character in Greek tragedy: Elektra talks, wails, argues, denounces, sings, chants and screams from one end of the play to the other. Sounds of every kind emerge from her, articulate and inarticulate. Her power of language is fantastic. She can outtalk any character in the play. Her vocabulary of screams is so rich that I chose to transliterate her cries letter for letter – OIMOI! instead of the conventional Alas! or Woe is me! This is 245

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not a person who would say Woe is me! She is a torrent of self. Actionless, yet she causes things to happen and people to change.25 As Translation Studies developed, a notable body of work focusing on translation and gender arose in bilingual Canada, which has come to be termed the Canadian School. In her book Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission, Sherry Simon traces the origins of the Canadian School, showing how Canadian feminist translation experts such as Suzanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood and Luise von Flotow incorporated some of the ideas about language articulated by French feminist theorists into their thinking about translation. One of the most significant women in the group was Barbara Godard, who advocated a new, woman-centred form of translation. In her essay ‘Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation’, Godard declares that whereas ‘difference’ was once seen as a negative topos in translation, in feminist translation it becomes positive, asserting that difference is what distinguishes the feminist translator who unashamedly flaunts the signs of her manipulation of the text. As Godard puts it, playing on the term ‘man-handling’ with its negative connotations of aggression, Womanhandling the text in translation would involve the replacement of the modest, self-effacing translator. Taking her place would be an active participant in the creation of meaning, giving self-reflective attention to practices. The feminist translator immodestly flaunts her signature in italics, in footnotes – even in a preface.26 Carson’s translation of Elektra was first published in 2001, then was published in 2009 together with Aeschylus’ Agammemnon and Euripides’ Orestes in a volume entitled An Oresteia. The indefinite article of the title is a reminder that this is not a translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, it is Anne Carson’s version of three plays by different playwrights about the tragic sequence of events concerning the cursed house of Atreus. Carson woman-handles all three plays, and her focus in all three is on language. Like her Antigone, Elektra is a woman demanding to be heard in a patriarchal world, but so too is Carson’s Klytemnestra. For example, in the speech where Klytemnestra tells the Chorus how she received news of the fall of Troy from a system of lighted beacons, she sneers at the men who refused to believe her: There were of course those who rebuked me saying ‘You’ve convinced yourself that Troy is sacked because of a beacon! How like a woman!’ They called me insane. 426–8 In her preface, Carson describes Klytemnestra’s language as brilliant and aggressive: ‘she is like a conqueror naming parts of the world she now owns’. If we compare this to Richmond Lattimore’s 1953 version, what emerges there is a very different Klytemnestra: 246

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But there was one who laughed at me and who said ‘You trust in beacons so, and you believe Troy has fallen? How like a woman, for the heart to lift so light’. Men spoke like that; they thought I wandered in my wits. Lattimore, 1953: 53, 590–2 Carson plays with language registers, so Klytemnestra speaks with the tone of an upper-class woman who demands obedience from her family and her servants. Carson’s language moves around between a more exalted rhetoric and the colloquial, often in such a way as to produce a comic effect. Ordering the silent Kassandra to go into the house, Klytemnestra tells her: lucky you, – your masters here are solid old money. New money people are rough on servants. Now you know what to expect. 709–11 The linguistic shifts of register add immediacy to the text and keep the darkly comic element flowing. Reading Carson’s trilogy, I was reminded of the award-winning black comedy TV series Succession, which also offers a portrait of a wealthy, powerful family at war with itself and where shifts of register make the comedy all the more shocking. This same technique is even more apparent in the third play, Orestes, which Carson admits in her introduction presented problems. She points out that Euripides was constrained by both the form of Greek theatre and the framework of the storyline, and one cannot help but feel an autobiographical undertone to this sentence: Yet we sense in of all of Euripides’ playwriting a mind out of patience with this straitjacket of fixed truths and predictable procedures. He has revolutionary instincts. He wants to shatter and shock. He goes about it subversively.27 Carson’s translation reinforces that sense of subversion. Apollo in her version of the final scene is a ludicrous figure and in just six lines he dismisses all the pain and horror that has gone before: And Argos – Menelaus – let Orestes rule it. You go rule Sparta. Enjoy your wife’s dowry. She’s finished philandering now. I’ll fix up Orestes’ relationship with Argos – it was me made him murder his mother after all. 1291–6

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Carson’s Apollo sounds like an American businessman in a meeting, brushing over any tensions and unpleasantness, though as she puts it in her introduction, he makes nonsense of everything that has gone before. She reflects on what Euripides was doing in the play and asks how we should read moments like this, ‘where exasperation verges on farce’.28 Left without answers, she points out that this play was Euripides’ last statement to the Athenians – ‘and a wild, heartless, unconstruable statement it is’.29

Pushing the boundaries of translation In 2015 the Northern Irish poet and translator Cieran Carson (no relation) published From Elsewhere, a collection of translations from the French poet Jean Fallen. The structure of the book pairs each translation with, as Carson puts it in the preface, ‘ “original” poems inspired by those translations: spins and takes on them, in other words. Translations of translations as it were.’ He explains how he came upon Follain by chance, while he was working on translating some of the prose poems of Francis Ponge, and tells us that for some unknown reason the verb ‘fetch’ was strongly in his mind as he put the book together, seeming somehow relevant: A fetch is the act of fetching, bringing from a distance or reading after: it is something brought from elsewhere, an act of translation in other words. To fetch is to draw or ‘borrow’ from a source. It is to derive etymologically. It is to go in quest of.30 Anne Carson’s Nox, published in 2010, is an act of fetching, an elegy for a lost brother, a drawing upon a source, a looking backwards to try to hear the silenced voice of the dead, a quest in search of. It is a text that defies easy categorization; the edition I have is a facsimile of the original, made up of a long accordion-folded sheet of paper in a box. On the right-hand side are all kinds of fragments – drawings, photographs, handwritten pieces, comments, quotations, scribbles and a yellowing reproduction of Catullus’ Poem 101, multis per gentes et multa per aequora vector, which, at one point, Carson renders as ‘Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed’. For Nox is a work of translation – there is the Latin original and Carson’s close rendering of it included quite separately in the box – but in addition it is a vast work that raises fundamental questions about loss, mourning and family relationships while exploring the limits of language and translation. On the left-hand pages there is a dissection of the linguistic components of the poem, where we are given multiple meanings and uses of individual words which sometimes evolve into a stream of consciousness riff on a word. Halfway through the box there are a few lines about the impossibility of translation: Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, 248

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barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.31 On the page opposite this passage is a single word, ‘frater’, below a vague and unclear little photograph of what looks like the shadow of a figure’s head and shoulders, and a note stating ‘see above, frater fratris’, which refers to an earlier comment on the word. The starting point for Nox is frater, brother. Carson’s brother, Michael, whose death she mourns, died in 2000 in Copenhagen where Carson eventually met his widow. He had left home many years earlier, in 1978, and was estranged from the family. As Nox unfolds, traces of his life emerge, traces from fragments that Carson has to construct since she knows nothing for certain about the life he lived. The grief for her brother’s death is also grief for her brother’s unknown life. On the page before her prowling paragraph, she explains her personal relationship with the Catullus poem. She says she had loved the poem since her schooldays and tried many times to translate it but found it untranslatable: Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver in the wind. This passage is highlighted, and Carson goes on to say that after years of working on this one poem she came to think about translating as a room, ‘not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for a light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.’ Nox is a magnificent piece of work. It includes a straightforward interlingual translation of a Catullus poem and at the same time it is a transgressive work that pushes translation to its limits, compelling the reader to think about the processes of translation itself. Even while Carson prowls around, searching for traces of her lost brother somewhere, exploring her own and other people’s memories of her brother, she is groping for a light switch in the translation room. Suzanne Jill Levine, the well-known translator of Latin American fiction and translation theorist, urges us in her book, The Subversive Scribe, to recognize what she terms the borderlessness between translations and originals, so as to begin to acknowledge the creativity of the translator. Translation, as Levine puts it, straddles the scholarly and the creative, and ‘can be a route through which a writer/translator may seek to reconcile fragments: fragments of texts, of language, of oneself. From a readerly perspective, translation is an act of interpretation.’32 Anne Carson’s work is both scholarly and creative, erudite and intensely personal. Levine’s statement that translation can be simultaneously an act of interpretation and of reconciliation is applicable to Carson, who also acknowledges that translation is an act that involves both reading and rewriting. In ‘On Walking Backwards’, Carson refers to the dead as ‘victims of love’. As we read through the box containing Nox, towards the end is a handwritten fragment of a letter – ‘Love you Love – Michael’. On the preceding right-hand page is a sentence we presume is from 249

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Herodotus, ‘I have to say what is said I don’t have to believe it myself,’ and these fragments are connected by a passage on the left-hand page on the conjunction atque. There is always an atque in memory and in translating, something left behind. The last legible sentence of Nox is ‘He refuses, he is in the stairwell, he disappears.’ Translation is always unfinished, but it takes a great, creative translator like Anne Carson to help us to understand this.

Notes 1. Toury (1985: 29). 2. Gentzler (2017: 8). 3. Bassnett and Bush (2006:1). 4. Scott (2006: 116). 5. Carson (1995:36). 6. Benjamin (1992: 77). 7. Carson (2003: xii). 8. Carson (2012). 9. Venuti (2019: 3). 10. Carson (2002: 366). 11. Balmer (1996). 12. Carson (2002: xi). 13. Carson (2002: xi). 14. Carson (2002: xi). 15. ‘Chez L’Oxymoron’ Simon (2002: 169). 16. Simon (2002). 17. Harrison (2009: 15). 18. Oswald (2011: 2). 19. Balmer (2006: 194). 20. Balmer (2009: 45). 21. Kovacs and Marshall (2011: ix). 22. Stokes (2012: n.p.). 23. Carson (2015: 4). 24. Harrison (1991: 146). 25. Carson (2009: 79). 26. Godard (1990: 95). 27. Carson (2009: 176). 28. Carson (2009: 77). 29. Carson (2009: 178). 30. Carson (2014: 13). 31. Carson (2001: n.p.). 32. Levine (1991: 184). 250

CHAPTER 18 TRANSLATING THE CANON, FILLING THE ABSENCE Eugenia Nicolaci

Dicetur merita Nox quoque nenia: carmen est, quod in mortuos cantatur. Sed bene hoc carmen etiam nocti adcommodat propter tenebras et somnum, quae morti sunt proxima. Pomponius Porphyro From here, our fading echoes reach out in vain for Hades; but the dead know only silence: darkness corrodes the rest. Erinna, The Living and the Dead (transl. Josephine Balmer) This chapter begins with a reader contemplating the grey book Nox and the thin blackand-white picture of a boy in a bathing suit on its cover. I happened to be the reader, one day, while seated at my desk in the university library with a copy of Nox. An irresistible curiosity led me to open it, and I found out the cover proved to be exactly what it seemed: a box. Its solid and heavy structure is up to the task of containing and protecting its precious and fragile content, the facsimile of a long scroll patched with text and images. At this point, the desk revealed itself unable to support my impulse to unfold that mysterious accordion. I moved to a long wooden shelf where I put that long accordion and, with a bizarre kind of reverence, started to touch it carefully. The first page opens with a six-time holographic reproduction of the name ‘Michael’1 and the Latin words ‘NOX FRATER NOX’ (‘NIGHT BROTHER NIGHT’) overlaid on it. Catullus’ poem 101, the elegy dedicated to his beloved brother, occupies a rectangle of yellowed paper pasted on the second page. On the left-hand side of the scroll, the poem is dismantled in each single word and presented as an English dictionary entry. On the right-hand side is the reproduction of notes, black-and-white family photos, postcard stamps, fragments of poems and letters: their combination gives the whole artefact an aura of mystery. Like the counter of a flea market, their anonymity conveys the sense of mute loss of those old objects neglected by time. That air of mystery provoked in me a desire to decode their meaning, and to follow the author on the mysterious journey she was guiding me through. The first note besides the dictionary entry explains the reason for choosing poem 101: 1.0 I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he’s dead. Love cannot alter it. 251

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Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history. So I began to think about history. Then a black-and-white photo shows two children in an indoor space. Their blurred faces emerge from the darkness by the light of two windows. From this point the translation intertwines with a parallel process of remembering and disclosing memories, with photographs and images acting as a memorial to celebrate Michael Carson, Anne’s brother. The history mentioned refers to her long attempts to look into Michael’s life and put together her memories of him, after his unexpected death in 2005. Nox constitutes the replica of a collage of various, mostly fragmented, and incomplete materials.2 They report laconic correspondences, family snapshots, tragic events, which together symbolize Michael’s twenty-two-year absence from his family and Anne’s long struggle to understand his silence. Here the photographs play a central role in constructing a chronicle of the family before Michael ran away from home after some drugs problems. In their pretending to convey a feeling of unity and nostalgia, they actually reveal Michael’s progressive estrangement from his family and relationships.3 Each element in the scroll is linked to his enigmatic existence and asks to be read and analysed as a lyrical text from a dead language. Despite being collected, their presence does not create a unitary storytelling, but rather evokes it. Little by little the reader is introduced to Michael’s figure, but the details fail to connect to each other and never achieve a narrative unity. Instead, they stand on the white page as solitary fragments of an incomplete narration. While dark and blurred traces of Michael appear through the scroll, Anne admits that her brother has always been an enigma to her. Her gaze into his life assumes the tone of an investigation, which moves from their childhood and arrives at his death, along years of absence of communication. Carson compares her mourning of Michael to an autopsy, as it is an investigation into the unknown territory of the dead, who remain mute, regardless of any attempt to collect memories of them. Since the object of her investigation is absent, she, as a survivor, is the only voice to write the autopsy, while her inquiry is destined to remain unheard. By adding little details of Michael beside the dictionary entries, the reader is encouraged to move across the pages of the scroll. 7.1 Prowling the meaning of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate. The second enigma is Carson’s lifelong love for Catullus’ poem 101 and her struggle to find the right translation of it into English. The task of translating from Latin takes the reader into the impossible challenge of finding the meaning of a text. At the same time, Carson applies all her philological knowledge to the task of throwing light on Michael’s life. This mimetic process spans the physical make-up of the scroll, adding tiles to the 252

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mosaic of Michael’s image. Carson tries to grasp the meaning of the Latin words as well as Michael’s. He seems to escape any attempt to be understood – as Carson affirms that he ‘refuses to be cooked’.4 His absence represents his last attempt to remain elusive to her and to refuse any kind of interaction. Simultaneously, Catullus 101 is represented throughout the scroll in fragments and appears completely blurred at the end. 7.1 I want to explain about the Catullan poem (101) [. . .] I have loved this poem since the first time I read it in high school Latin class and I have tried to translate it a number of times. Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind. I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end. The history of the Catullan manuscripts and their transmission to the modern age is characterized by darkness and gaps. Between the second century AD and the early fourteenth century, most of Catullus’ poems were unknown. In the early 1300s, a manuscript with 116 poems turned up in Verona but soon got lost again. The text we now have is the result of the crossed comparison between three surviving hand copies.5 Since his canonization in the corpus of Greek and Roman literature, Catullus has been a timeless presence and a source of inspiration for translators and poets. As well as the poems, this author constitutes a fascinating figure, the biography of whom remains mostly unknown – his one and only legacy is his work. The tendency among scholars has long been to reconstruct his life and his cultural milieu through the biographical details that emerge in his poems.6 For this reason, Carson compares Catullus 101 to Michael’s long muteness, as she attempts to prowl the meaning of both of them. 8.1 Because our conversations were few (he phoned me maybe 5 times in 22 years) I study his sentences the ones I remember as if I’d been asked to translate them. This juxtaposition between her mourning and the translation process suggests the similarity between Michael and Catullus. When trying to reconstruct Michael’s life through the comparison of mute materials, Carson takes on a work similar to that of classical translators. In fact, in their struggle to make a lost culture live again, they only rely on textual testimonies, often damaged or obscure7. As Josephine Balmer explains, a classical translator has ‘no author to consult, no author to counsel’.8 In the same way, Carson cannot talk to Michael, since he is now – as poem 101 – a mutam cinerem (lit. ‘a mute ash’, 1.4). The only possibility of breaking this silence is to engage in ‘a creative relationship’9 with both Michael and Catullus 101. 253

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Poem 101 Catullus’ story talks about a journey, whose circumstances we know very little about. Between 57 and 56 bce, he joined the governor C. Memmius’s cohors in the Roman province of Bithynia in Asia Minor.10 At some point during this period, Catullus found himself in front of the grave where his brother had been buried. Apart from his death and the fact that Catullus performs the funeral ritual alone, far from home, in very precarious and unsatisfactory conditions,11 we know nothing about his beloved brother. This makes the matter within poem 101 even more complicated: its use of different stylistic elements, of elegy and epitaph, has always made scholars wonder about its nature. Whether the poem was part of a ritual Catullus was performing in front of the gravestone, or whether the funeral allusions were just ‘purely literary devices’12 which enhance the tone of the elegy with dignity and solemnity, the darkness continues to surround these verses. The poem simply captures the moment when Catullus expresses his sorrow and powerlessness in front of the muteness of the grave. Any lament or attempt at dialogue with his brother are fatally inhibited by the bitterness of silence. The poet expresses his own tension in an interior movement between past and present memories, where no sound but his own voices can express his unheard mourning. He reminds the reader of the physical (frater adempte mihi, 1.6) and spiritual distance (in perpetuum, 1.10) between the living and the dead.

Between literary translation and creative writing Carson’s engagement with Catullus 101, starting well before Nox, can be described as a long intellectual path, which eventually arrives at an unexpected destination, where literature and life dramatically overlap. In 2000, the poem ‘Multas per Gentes et Multa per Aequora Vectus (Through Peoples Through Oceans Have I Come)’ appeared as part of the collection Men in the Off Hours, seeming in many ways to prefigure Nox.13 The epitaph, which is included in a section dedicated to Catullus, takes inspiration from poem 101.14 The title constitutes the only direct quotation of the original text, since Carson immediately abandons the possibility of a literal translation and relies on her own poetic words to evoke Catullus’ lyrical images.15 Multas per Gentes et Multa per Aequora Vectus (Through Peoples Through Ocean Have I Come) Catullus buries his brother. Multitudes brushed past me oceans I don’t know Brother wine milk honey flowers Flowers milk honey brother wine How long does it take the sound to die away? I a brother. Cut out carefully the words for wine milk honey flowers. 254

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Drop them into a bag. Mix carefully. Pour onto your dirty skeleton. What sound? Men in the off hours, 45 On lines 3 of poem 101, Catullus mentions the offers destined for the dead during the Roman funeral ceremony (postremo munere mortis, ‘the last gift to the dead’, 1.3). The poem itself constitutes Catullus’ last gift to his brother, his attempt to contrast the eternal darkness of death with the light of a song. Carson refers to this particular motif while handling the offers designated to the gravestone both as words and as physical objects.16 The emphasis on the visual and material aspects is stressed again at the end of the poem. Here the ‘I’ – as presented in line 5 – seems to diverge from the melancholic contemplation of past travels to the action of pouring the words into the bones in order to hear the sound of the underworld. This tactile fascination with the image suggests an intersection between the ephemerality of poetry – the words – and the physicality of death – the skeleton – and opens to a new lyrical interpretation, where words, images and sounds are mixed together. The final question reflects Carson’s search for a sound, as the only medium that crosses the barrier of the written words and opens the space to an impossible communication between the living and the dead. This entails a transformation of the original form of the poem into something new. Her method of interrogation of the original text recalls Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘translatability’.17 In The Task of the Translator, Benjamin speaks of ‘the unfathomable, mysterious, the “poetic” ’, the essential that ‘lies beyond a literary work’. It transcends communication and cannot be translated, unless the translator is a poet. Therefore, translation manifests in a form revealing ‘a specific significance inherent in the original’ and reveals its afterlife.18 Carson’s manipulation of Catullus 101 clearly prefigures Nox’s creative and aesthetic experiment. As Rebecca Kosick argues, the Catullan poem presents an ideal background for the kind of work Carson undertakes with Nox.19 Here the book’s format and its materiality play with the very nature of poem 101, between elegy and epitaph, between song and written words. The lexical entries testify to Carson’s linguistic work on Catullus’ piece. They function as a red thread between a lost past and the present of the translation. Both words and objects lie mute on the pages and ask the reader to switch continuously from the past to the present, from Michael’s muteness to his fragmented traces. This dichotomy is reflected in the aesthetic of Nox, which alternates the white of the scroll and the grey of the entries and the black and white of the photographs. The lyric should symbolize the light and the celebrative power of the elegy, while the darkness of the old materials reminds us of the frustration of directing light on the lost past. Moreover, in Nox Carson succeeds in the action of cutting the words, which she only evoked in the previous poem. The translation process eventually gives a new form to the original poem, which gains visibility and materiality by being placed close to Michael’s history. In the end, Carson can symbolically evoke his presence while celebrating his absence. The dictionary entries allow the reader to look more closely into the poem and dismantle each single word’s meaning. 255

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6.1 When my brother died (unexpectedly) his widow couldn’t find a phone number for me among his papers until two weeks later. While I swept my porch and bought apples and sat by the window in the evening with the radio on, his death came wandering slowly towards me across the sea. The final sentence is an allusion to the first line of Catullus 101, whose words are exactly multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus – through many peoples and through many seas drawn20 – and a reminder of Carson’s first translation. It both testifies to her adherence to Catullus and her long personal search for a translation. The image of the sea acts both metaphorically and tangibly in both Catullus’ and Carson’s imagination, and shows how their journeys intertwine. In Catullus 101, the many seas crossed symbolize the Roman poet’s memory, split between the past and present dimension, during the grieving occasion.21 Two powerful images introduce the scene, describing a movement: multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus. This initial anaphora evokes something still impressed in the poet’s memory, although left to the imagination of the reader. An echo from the past pervades the present moment and talks of peoples and seas crossing the poet’s eyes during the taxing journey, which eventually took him to his brother’s burial site. The reference to the sea is a homage of Catullus to the Greek epic tradition and an allusion to the famous heroes who started their adventures by embarking on a sea voyage.22 Gian Biagio Conte first underlined here Catullus’ recalling of the beginning of the Odyssey.23 But his wanderings toward a miseras inferias (lit. ‘wretched grave’) makes Catullus’ journey much more pitiable than Odysseus’. Gilberto Biondi connected the allusion to the Odyssey to Ulysses’ journey into the underworld and again stresses Catullus’ frustration in his attempt to talk to a mute grave.24 The Roman poet remembers the taxing journey, which took him to the burial site, by using the verb vectus (‘drawn/carried over’, l. 1). The passive form conveys the image of his long drawn and uncertain path, which ends with his arrival at the brother’s gravestone. The present advenio (‘I come’, l. 2) thus introduces the reader to the performance of the lament. Then again, the past tense abstulit (‘has taken/took away’, l. 5) refers to the tragic loss of the sibling. This formal strategy reflects the poet’s tension between past memories and the present attempt to fill the void with the light of his elegy. I believe this reference contributes to magnifying the idea of the song of an elegy as a last attempt to communicate with the dead. Here, past and presence guide Catullus’ emotions and constitute an account of his physical and interior adventure.

Conclusion In a conversation with Rachel Wachtel, Anne Carson justified her claim that the ancients do not necessarily have much relevance to our world today: I didn’t mean it that way, I meant it upside down – that it’s more our task to be relevant to them, to go back and see what they were really doing, from their side. 256

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John Cage says, ‘No one can have an idea once he really starts listening,’ and I think that’s what’s important about studying the past, to listen to the ancients rather than replacing them with your own ideas of how they are relevant to you.25 In Nox, the reader sees how the twenty-two years distance between Anne and Michael is suddenly broken by the news of his death. The message across the sea finds Carson seated by the window during her everyday routine and brings her a close sound of Michael. It unexpectedly floods her and leads to giving him an afterlife through translation. While moving from one word to another of Catullus’ poem, Carson turns back with her mind to Michael’s mysterious life and long silence. The dictionary entry of the Latin word per (‘through’, 1. 1), which indicates a spatial and temporal movement, is accompanied by this note: 1.3 [. . .] In cigarette-smoke-soaked Copenhagen, under a wide thin sorrowful sky, as swans drift down the water, I am looking a long time into the muteness of my brother. It resists me. He refuses to be ‘cooked’ (a modern historian might say) in my transactional order. To put this another way, there is something that facts lack. ‘Overtakelessness’ is a word told me by a philosopher once: das Unumgängliche – that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided or seen to the back of. And about which one collects facts – it remains beyond them. Now Anne is in Copenhagen, where Michael lived with his wife. The passive form vectus (‘drawn/carried over’, 1. 1) takes Carson back into her past, three years earlier, when her mother died. On the death bed she gave her a box of old letters, but kept for hers the only one Michael wrote before disappearing. Like Catullus, Carson has travelled a long way to pay her brother the last tribute in the place where he died, and now wants to offer him bright words, which could celebrate his life. Like Catullus, she is standing in front of the muteness of death and feels the impossibility of contrasting the darkness of Michael’s absence with the bright presence of her poetry. Both Catullus and Carson end their journey by finding out that absence is the only possible sound in their poetry. Her last words to Michael emphasize this point, as she asks herself ‘what is a voice?’

Notes 1. Carson (2010). Nox has no page numbers. When quoting the notes, I use the numeration presented in the original text. I am grateful for the opportunity of attending the 2019 University of Bristol’s IGRCT Postgraduate and Early Career Scholars Anne Carson Reading Group, led by Laura Jansen. The vibrant conversations about Anne Carson and antiquity in that venue both inspired my ideas for this essay and, in many ways, changed the direction of my research and personal path. I would also like to express my gratitude to Alessandro Fo for introducing me to Nox some years ago at the Art Library of the University of Siena. 2. MacDonald (2015: 52).

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Anne Carson/ Antiquity 3. Sontag (2008 (1978): 5–6): ‘Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself – a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness [. . .] Photography becomes a rite of family life just when, in the industrializing countries of Europe and America, the very institution of the family starts undergoing radical surgery. As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of dispersed relatives. A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family – and, often, is all that remains of it.’ 4. See Carson (2010: 1. 3). 5. See Balmer (2014: 144). 6. Wiseman (2007: 343) talks of an ‘illusory Catullus’, referring to the nineteenth-century reconstruction of Catullus’ bibliography. 7. See Balmer (2009: 43): ‘Translators have long been subject to the assumption that their art constitutes “a task that does not occur in the realms of thought but between the pages of a dictionary.” ’ 8. Balmer (2009: 44). 9. Balmer (2009: 46). 10. See Cairns (2012: 100). Cairns considers Catullus’ visit to Bithynia as a ‘key event in his poetic life. No less than eight of his poems reflect it: 4, 10, 28, 31, 46, 47 (indirectly), 68 and 101.’ 11. See Quinn (1970: 440); Fitzgerald (1995: 187). 12. See Feldherr (2000: 210). 13. Carson (2001). 14. Carson (2001: 45). 15. See Theodorakopoulos (2012: 157). 16. See Kosick (2020: 180): ‘Catullus’s tears proceed from his living body to soak the burial gifts, literally constituting a fluid boundary between the poet and the objects described in the poem.’ 17. Benjamin (2002: 253–63). 18. Benjamin (2002: 253–4). 19. See Kosick (2020: 180): ‘Catullus 101, then, represents a certain middle zone for Catullus’s purported addressee, who is known to the poet, but is not living, and who has come to be, by way of death, an inanimate object. But, as the poem suggests, death here is [. . .] “another phase in a generative process” that enables the figure of the brother to occupy the role of, and relate to, both people and things.’ 20. Here and subsequently the translation of the Latin words is mine. 21. On this point I refer to Biondi (2007: 177–97). 22. See Harrison (2007: 10): ‘The image of the ocean for epic and the idea of the voyage of the poet through his work both begin in Hellenistic or earlier times, but are enthusiastically taken up by the Latin poets of the first century BC; though Callimachus is the perceived origin of the epic-ocean analogy, the metapoetic voyage seems to appear first in poetry in the work of Catullus, and is not found in Lucretius.’ 23. See Conte (2007: 167–76).

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Translating the Canon, Filling the Absence 24. See Biondi 2007: 188): ‘In Catullus, despite the laborious journey, the gates that divide the living from the dead remain not only materially closed but even deliberately ignored: the ritual taking place on this uncrossable threshold cannot break down the wall of silence that divides him from his brother – the very wall whose collapse Homer had brought about in the Odyssey in the myth concerning the evocation of the dead.’ 25. Wachtel and Carson (2012).

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CHAPTER 19 TRANSLATION CATASTROPHES: PINPLAY Grace Zanotti

Wood, sound board, inkjet print on Kitakata paper, pins, paper, plastic, magnifying lenses, metal, photographs, wire, found paintings, 99 x 289¼ x 19 inches, 6 panels The Lightning’s Bride, catalogue description, Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae Think of it this way: here is an exercise, not exactly an exercise in translating, nor even an exercise in untranslating, more like a catastrophizing of translation. Let’s take a small fragment of ancient Greek lyric poetry and translate it over and over again using the wrong words. A sort of stammering. Anne Carson, ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’

Translation and catastrophe In September 2011, Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts put on an exhibition of Elliott Hundley’s series of epically scaled, wall-hung collages and sculptures inspired by Euripides’ Bacchae. Hundley’s collages combine found materials, for the nonfigural elements, and staged photographs of his friends and acquaintances enacting moments from the Bacchae. In an essay for the exhibition catalogue, Christopher Bedford, one of the curators, describes Hundley’s process as ‘exclusively additive’ in a way that evokes the total absorption of reading and the proliferation of possible interpretations. For Hundley, Bedford writes, ‘interpretation is never finished; in fact, more breeds more’.1 It comes as no surprise, then, that Anne Carson, known for her attention to language, to reimagining, to punning, absence and fragments, wrote an entry for Hundley’s exhibition catalogue, titled Pinplay: A Version of Euripides’ Bacchae. As a poet, translator and classicist, Carson thinks across media, working through classical texts in a way that transforms what might be familiar – a myth, a line, a metre – into a list of further possibilities. A representative work from Hundley’s Bacchae series, The Lightning’s Bride, is a sixpanel collage depicting Semele at the moment of Zeus’s electric visitation. Lit in the cool purples and tender greens of Dionysian vines, portraits of Semele make the first layer of the collages: she is openmouthed in pain or pleasure, a hole punched through her chest, circled and riven by a coil of sparks. Swirling over and around her are photographs and found paintings of galaxies, dragonflies, bowls of fruit, water lilies, vases and goblets, pine branches, phases of the moon, fish, fiddlehead ferns, shells, shadows, snatches of sky, flashes of light – all secured by pins, Hundley’s fastener of choice. 261

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Figure 21 Elliott Hundley, the Lightning’s Bride, 2011. The effect is one of embeddedness: it is almost impossible to separate Semele from the images that surround her, or them from her. This effect is amplified by Hundley’s choice to scatter the first thirty-nine lines of Euripides’ Bacchae, in six different Greek-toEnglish translations spanning 1958–2008, across each of the six panels, each letter painstakingly cut and assembled from magazines or newsprint. In this way, Semele becomes embedded in the account of her life and death that her son Dionysus gives at the beginning of Euripides’ play, but these six translations are also embedded in Semele, her portraits depicting a moment that is ‘original’ both to Euripides’ inscription and translations into English. Of Hundley’s use of these six translations, Christopher Bedford writes in his catalogue essay, Just as translators are drawn again and again to the nuances of Euripides’ text, rephrasing and rephrasing it in an endless bid to seize the spirit and intent of an ancient Athenian source, so Hundley mimics and amplifies that impulse to create a diorama of interpretive excess that is even more than the aggregate of his sources.2 The mutual embeddedness of image and narrative in The Lightning’s Bride stages a central problem of translation, and especially translation of classical texts: the existence of an original to which it is possible to gain unmediated access. In disrupting the supposed relation of priority between original and translation, the collages in Hundley’s Bacchae, which all similarly embed translated lines from Euripides’ text, likewise problematize the desire to reach an original, free of the residue of time and transmission, or to pin down a single ‘correct’ interpretation. Instead, Hundley’s artistic practice of embedded translation insists that an ‘original’ is inseparable from its transmission or translation, and perhaps even that their relation exceeds original or translation alone. Anne Carson might call Hundley’s kind of translation ‘catastrophizing’, a categorization she develops in the essay ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’, included (with Pinplay) in her collection Float. Carson opposes catastrophizing to cliché as two approaches to conveying meaning in ‘the escapade of translation’: ‘We resort to cliché because it’s easier than trying to make up something new,’ she writes. ‘Implicit in [cliché] 262

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is the question, Don’t we already know what we think about this?’ Catastrophizing, by contrast, rejects such habitual forms, refusing to slide into the familiar in the face of an ‘untranslatable’ (whether word or sensation), on the grounds that doing so occludes rather than clarifies whatever is being encountered. Carson’s catastrophizers par excellence are Joan of Arc and the painter Francis Bacon, whose techniques of language and colour refuse a listener or viewer easy understanding. ‘Bacon extinguishes the usual relation of figure to ground, the usual passage of information at that place, as Joan extinguishes the usual relation of question to answer,’ she asserts. ‘They put a stop on the cliché.’ In doing so, catastrophizing translations attempt ‘to make us see something we don’t yet have eyes for, hear something that was never sounded’ – to render visible, if not knowable, the untranslatable-ness of something untranslatable. Hundley’s technique in The Lighting’s Bride and the other wall-hung collages of his Bacchae series is similarly confounding and enabling. In addition to problematizing the supposed temporal relationship of original to translation, Hundley’s mutual embedding of Euripides’ text with the figure(s) of Semele and seemingly infinite other images, on such a large scale, forces the viewer to move between two kinds of seeing without settling on either: between an almost microscopic level of attention to the details of his work (certainly, one needs a magnifying glass to see and follow the spiralled letters of the translations of Euripides’ text), getting as close to it as possible; and a more distanced attention, stepping back to take in its effect across six panels. Bedford describes Hundley’s technique as ‘[establishing] a less hierarchical field of like upon like, or figure on figure: an endlessly regressive order of relation that in turn announces the intricacy, unpredictability, and openness of the social thematics at play in Euripides’ source text and in Hundley’s various and sundry reimaginings’.3 Hundley’s de-hierarchizing of the visual field makes it impossible for a viewer to attend only to text or image, original or translation, instead keeping the viewer in shifting relation to his work: modulating closeness and distance, the viewer stammers, stutter steps, forward and back. Indeed, Hundley’s refusal to pin down a single story for his collages not only invites a multitude of possible interpretations, but the sheer number of possibilities all but ensures that some will escape the viewer, putting a stop on any desire for mastery. It is beyond the capabilities of any viewer to take in every possibility at once. Carson relishes these moments of escape in translation practice, moments of metaphysical silence when ‘a word stops itself ’ and confounds the translator’s desire for exact commensurability between languages. At different points in ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’, she describes encountering the metaphysical silence of an untranslatable word, like Homer’s moly, as a feeling of refreshment (as when Bacon’s catastrophizing splatter of white paint enables him to ‘[go] inside clarity to a place of deeper refreshment’) and a vector of flight: ‘In the presence of a word that stops itself,’ she writes, ‘in that silence, one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free.’ It makes sense, then, that Pinplay, Carson’s ‘version’ of Euripides’ Bacchae for Hundley’s exhibition catalogue, offers a catastrophizing translation both of Hundley’s work and the ancient text that inspired it. Like Hundley’s Bacchae series, Pinplay is replete with pins: 263

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battens, brass fasteners, buckles, buttons, clamps (or cramps), captive fasteners, Bocklebee clasps, clecos, clips and on and on – a ‘pinnacle’, according to the chorus. (‘And what is a pinnacle?’ Dionysus asks. The chorus responds, ‘A pinnacle is a lot of pins.’) And like the extant Greek text of the Bacchae, whose fragmented ending scholars have reconstructed from Christus Patiens, Pinplay prominently features a lacuna, albeit one wielded by Agave like a thyrsus rather than one containing the lost fifty lines of Agave and her father re-membering Pentheus’ torn body. Carson’s literalization of Hundley’s pins and Euripides’ lacuna not only highlights Pinplay’s own embeddedness in Hundley’s art (its context, and its occasion for existing) and in the translation and reception history of the Bacchae, but also renders the problem of commensurability that is central to translation likewise a problem for justice. Carson’s translation is not one that, in Derrida’s formulation, ‘counts and accounts for’ each word, and the disappearance of Agave at the end of Pinplay rejects an understanding of justice that synonymizes accountability with retribution, freeing the possibility that justice may take another form. Like Hundley, Carson catastrophizes against cliché: readers familiar with the Bacchae may desire or expect a certain ending for Agave, may ask, Don’t we already know what we think about this? But Pinplay refuses an answer. Instead, it yields only more questions: who is to be held accountable for Pentheus’ death, who must bear it, and what could a justice that forgoes the logic of commensurability look like?

Through the lacuna In Pinplay, the story of the Bacchae goes like this: Dionysus enters, then the chorus. In the first choral ode, the chorus gathers pins – the aforementioned battens, brass fasteners, buckles, buttons, clamps/cramps, et cetera. The chorus and six citizens head over the mountains to swap out their skins, Agave at their heels. Pentheus and Dionysus flirt and, proclaiming themselves tragic, lavender and touché, head to the mountains. Agave enters, bearing Pentheus’ head impaled on a lacuna. She and the chorus proceed to have a punning exchange that ends in horror, as Agave tosses the lacuna to the audience with Pentheus’ head attached. There is a final choral ode, which similarly reproduces the materials of Hundley’s collages in the guise of ‘what the gods had’: ‘sound board, wood, plastic, paper, photographs, paint, ink, glue, metal, glass, bamboo, found oil paintings on canvas, epoxy putty, BTV resin, safety wire, and soft pastel’. Thus ends Pinplay. Ripped from the context of Hundley’s exhibition, Pinplay’s exhaustive catalogues of materials can feel alienating, inviting assessments like that of Alexandra Winik, who in her review of Float for The Scores calls out Pinplay specifically for ‘over-reliance on glib diction and gimmicks’ that weakens its poetic effect, as ‘the reader encounters a series of litanies that cast a wide net of sonorous details without clarifying their broader associations (apart from their ability to “pin”), as in the lines: “clecko / clip / circlip / paper clip / [. . .] frog / grommet / masonry anchor” ’. But the strict materiality and literalness of the catalogue of materials (pins and otherwise) – in addition, perhaps, to being a sly reference to the catalogue Pinplay appears in itself – stages translation’s dilemma of commensurability, 264

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which is also the dilemma of representation writ large: can a thing really stand in for another thing? Naming the materials of an artwork is not the same as seeing it, and barely conveys an image or sense; a reader is confronted by matter without form or frame of reference. Carson’s catastrophizing translation of the lacuna in Euripides’ text simply as ‘lacuna’, and her choice to have that lacuna appear throughout Pinplay, has a similar effect, transforming what Carson terms (in ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’) a ‘physical silence’ into a ‘metaphysical’ one: translating a textual absence by the word that means ‘textual absence’ is one way to denote such a gap, but it does not lend itself to easy legibility, forcing the reader to redirect their attention elsewhere. As a ‘version’ of Euripides’ Bacchae, Pinplay’s diversions from it are significant. Pinplay proceeds without Cadmus, Tiresias and the messenger, and their many ruminations and explanations; and Pentheus and Dionysus disappear after a combined twelve lines. The triple accounts of Pentheus’ dismemberment that structure Euripides’ Bacchae and position Pentheus and Dionysus as the primary figures of concern for most critics are conspicuously absent, the most potent indication that Agave, not Pentheus, is the linchpin of this play. Carson’s literalization of the lacuna in Euripides’ text – the fifty missing lines, reconstructed from Christus Patiens – amplifies the absence of these accounts of Pentheus’ death. That Carson brings the lacuna forward, from the end of the play to the beginning, both foregrounds it as a feature of the original and reminds the audience of what Carson herself leaves out – the relationship between Pentheus and Dionysus – in order to redirect its attention to what she leaves in: the relationship between Agave and the chorus. In this sense, Pinplay stages a critical intervention in the Bacchae by engaging something already present in Euripides’ play – the intense, entwined relationship between Agave and the chorus – and presenting it as the primary action, causing us to re-evaluate our understanding of its role in Euripides. Through Pinplay’s redirection of our attention to Agave and the chorus, Carson reveals how Euripides’ depiction of their relationship calls the justice of Dionysus’ divine retribution into question and begins to probe the possibility of another way. In Carson’s hands (or her Agave’s), the lacuna acts not just as a gap, but as a lens, revealing both Euripides’ latent concern with justice and a means to understand it. And as Agave tosses the lacuna to the audience and disappears from the text, she short-circuits (like Francis Bacon splattering white paint) the audience’s desire for narrative, leaving another lacuna in answer. Creating that lacuna, of unfulfilled expectations and desires, is a move to reveal the audience’s investment in having those expectations and desires fulfilled – an investment in a notion of retributive justice, concerned with responsibility and consequences, that both Euripides and Carson interrogate. In Euripides’ Bacchae, Agave is embodied and embedded in the chorus of bacchants. I borrow the phrase ‘embodied and embedded’ from material feminist and posthumanist thinkers like Rosi Braidotti and Jane Bennett to refer to the ways that Agave and the chorus blur the boundaries of the subject to complicate notions of agency and responsibility, and to highlight the state of being embedded (as Pinplay too is embedded in Hundley’s work) as something that can materially shape one’s possibilities. Agave acts with, through and because of the chorus; they are continuous across space and time and 265

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share responsibility for the events on Mount Cithaeron. This continuity is clearest in the speech given by the chorus directly following Pentheus and Dionysus’ departure to Cithaeron. In William Arrowsmith’s translation, the chorus sings: CHORUS. Run, run to the mountain, fleet hounds of madness! Run, run to the revels of Cadmus’ daughters! Sting them against the man in women’s clothes, the madman who spies on the Maenads, who peers from behind the rocks, who spies from a vantage! His mother shall see him first. She will cry to the Maenads: ‘Who is this spy who has come to the mountains to peer at the mountain-revels of the women of Thebes? What bore him, Bacchae? This man was born of no woman. Some lioness gave him birth, some one of the Libyan gorgons!’ ll. 977–90 The chorus delivers this speech immediately after Dionysus and Pentheus depart for Mount Cithaeron, and these lines have a number of effects: they transport the audience, with Pentheus and Dionysus, to Mount Cithaeron, on the backs of the ‘fleet hounds of madness’; they function as a command and a prayer to Lyssa’s hounds for the effect they desire (Pentheus’ death at his mother’s hands); and they predict that very death. But the chorus’s words here are more than a prediction. Given that the fourth stasimon is immediately followed by the arrival of a messenger bearing news of Pentheus’ death, the chorus’s speech here functions as simultaneous narration of events that are occurring offstage; their descriptions of Pentheus’ position relative to the maenads (peering behind rocks, spying from a vantage – a treetop) are confirmed by the messenger’s description of how the events unfolded. Moreover, I want to suggest that the chorus is not imagining what Agave will say upon seeing Pentheus, but speaks as and for her, becoming (in Wasserman’s words) ‘really that other thiasos on the mountains; it is really Agave’s voice which we hear’.4 Some might argue that the chorus’s exchange with the messenger following the fourth stasimon (starting at l. 1041) is an instance of the chorus playing an expository role, as their questions about how Pentheus died provide an occasion for the messenger to recount Pentheus’ dismemberment in lurid detail, likely intended to shock the audience. While this explanation is plausible, it is equally plausible that the exchange functions in the reverse: the messenger’s account of what happened on Mount Cithaeron serves to confirm the multiplicity and even the agency of the chorus, of which Agave is a part. The chorus already knows how Pentheus has died, because they’ve prayed for it and because they are there, on the mountainside, as much as they are on the stage. In that sense, the chorus is responsible for Pentheus’ death on both a theatrical and a very real level, driving Agave mad, speaking as Agave before the audience, and taking part in the dismemberment on Mount Cithaeron. 266

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When Agave finally appears onstage herself, she offers an account of what happened on the mountainside that emphasizes both her pride in and responsibility for what she has done: she caught the ‘lion’s cub’ with only her hands, she was first among her sisters for the kill, she is confident her son and father will praise her skill. There is no doubt who has done the deed: it is Agave. And yet Agave is only able to accomplish these things because of her position among the maenads and under Dionysus’ power, nor does she dismember her son without help. Agave succeeds in slaughtering Pentheus only because she is maddened, only because she is made strong, only because she is among others who also tear the limbs from his body. Taken together, these moments convey the complex workings of agency and responsibility at play that complicate a simple notion of retributive justice. Agave is acting within larger structures – she is a Theban and doomed to be taught a lesson by her divine nephew; she is part of the chorus, debauching and dismembering on Mount Cithaeron – but those larger structures are also acting through her. It’s a moment when, to paraphrase Brooke Holmes (referring to Antigone), we see a subject ‘deeply embedded within a network of forces both within and beyond herself ’, living in a ‘both/and: [madness] and self-willed passion, actions that are [hers] and not [hers . . .] events [. . .] rebounding across populations and generations and the trajector[y] of [her] own [life]’.5 The question Euripides’ Bacchae poses, and perhaps fails to answer adequately, is what justice could look like if it were to take into account its subjects’ enmeshment in forces beyond themselves. As the ending stands, human justice can neither account for divine interference nor touch the gods, even if the gods (like Dionysus) appear to act in very human ways, rendering their freedom from consequences dissatisfying. Carson renders Agave’s embeddedness in the chorus in Euripides’ text obliquely, in the way that Agave and the chorus play on pins in the stichomythic exchange that makes up the bulk of Pinplay, and which takes the place of the accounts of Pentheus’ death in Euripides’ Bacchae. Upon Agave’s entrance, ‘covered in blood, carrying the head of Pentheus impaled on a lacuna’, the chorus exhorts her to speak, eliciting a oblique account of her role in Pentheus’ dismemberment without ever mentioning his name. Carson bites the familiar rhythms of stichomythia’s call-and-response in half, as again and again Agave begins a question (How many – How many – How many – , she starts to ask) and the chorus finishes it: Agave How many kings – Chorus did you rip the cheeks off? Agave How many cheeks – Chorus did you pin to the delicate mouth of the mother? Agave How many mouths did she need – Chorus to finish the meat? Since it is Agave who returns bearing Pentheus’ head on a lacuna, it would make more sense for the chorus to ask her how many kings she ripped the cheeks off, how many 267

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cheeks she pinned to her own delicate mouth, and how many mouths she needed to finish the meat. Instead, that order is reversed, with Agave even referring to herself in the third person. Like the choral lines from Euripides’ Bacchae, this shared questioning suggests shared knowledge, and perhaps even shared agency, between Agave and the chorus as Agave seems to ask (if we take the chorus’s responses as accurately finishing her questions) questions of the chorus that only she would know the answer to. Agave’s exchange with the chorus also demonstrates the effect of Carson’s catastrophizing literalization of Hundley’s pins, as those pins are brought into the text and into Agave’s hands. Immediately before the above lines, Agave and the chorus greet each other as follows, and the pins begin to change: Agave I’ve come with the pins. Chorus We welcome the pins. Agave I stained them as prizes. Chorus We prize them as kings. The pins are now prizes, then kings; the prize is a noun, then a verb; and the kings become, in the lines that follow, a quantity and further questions: how many kings, how many cheeks, how many mouths? And the number of mouths, too, changes, from ‘a clever number’ to ‘a frolic of a number’ to ‘a dismal little number’, until Agave finally settles on ‘a sob of a number’. The chorus replies, ‘O Agave! Your sob has a name.’ Agave asks, ‘How many names can I pry from the head of a pun?’ Chorus Just one. Agave O my son! The ‘number’ becomes a sob becomes a name becomes ‘just one’: ‘O my son!’ Through this punning and word association, Carson transforms Hundley’s pins such that their nature – pinning things down, making them fixed – becomes undone. (A pin has a point, but what is the point of a pun? To become undone.) With this transformation, Carson again calls into question the very premise of translation – the possibility of commensurability – and begins to unstick Agave from her Euripidean frame. At this point, Carson’s stage directions indicate that [Agave tosses lacuna to the audience with Pentheus’ head attached], after which she disappears from the text. Like Joan of Arc’s non-answers to her interrogators, this stage direction is a sentence that stops itself: in Carson’s words, ‘its components are simple yet it stays foreign, we cannot own it’; it is a splattering of white paint on the reader’s attempt to master it, to make Pinplay into a cliché and fit it into a familiar narrative. Here, Carson’s attention to the materiality and embeddedness of her own text simultaneously enacts a textual performance that reminds the reader that this version of the Bacchae occurs in a theatre of the mind; Agave carrying Pentheus’s head impaled on a lacuna and tossing it to the audience is a purely textual performance, one that cannot be replicated or represented in 268

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any other way. Because of this, Carson manages to compound an absence, making it double: the lacuna that Agave tosses to the audience not only manifests the lacuna in Euripides’ text – the scene of Agave re-membering her son’s body – but in doing so, creates that scene as a lacuna in Carson’s text, something a reader will expect, but find missing. Indeed, Agave herself vanishes into the lacuna. Rather than grieving and atoning, lovingly piecing together Pentheus’ body with her father before leaving Thebes in exile, she disappears from the text entirely. It’s possible to see this disappearance as another version of the exile that Agave faces in Euripides for the dual crimes of blaspheming the circumstances of Dionysus’ birth and slaughtering her son, but it may also be a way for Carson to reframe the question of justice: Agave has ‘passed us and kept going’; her fate is the possibility that has got free. The creation of that lacuna, in answer to the reader’s or audience’s expectations, is a move to reveal an investment in having those expectations fulfilled. The feeling that ‘something must happen to Agave’ is actually ‘something must (should) happen to Agave’, as a result of what she’s done. This is the kind of cause-andeffect, responsibility-and-retribution idea of justice that Euripides calls into question. His Bacchae asks, who is to face consequences for the crime of murdering Pentheus? Is it possible that Agave might not bear sole responsibility, and if so, how are the consequences to be distributed? By contrast, Carson takes Pentheus’ death as itself a consequence, one so horrifying that it cannot even appear in the text, so unbearable that Agave must cast it away from herself. In doing so, Carson redirects Euripides’ line of questioning from Who will face consequences and how will they be distributed? to What consequences could ever be enough? When Agave names the lacuna her son and tosses it to the audience, that textual absence is also a personal loss – her greatest grief, her pin, her pain, her sob that has a name. What retribution, what consequence, even her own life, could ever be equal to it? So Carson’s Agave disappears. Taking Agave out of the equation disrupts the economic logic of commensurability that underlies retributive justice, the idea that a life (like a word) has a value that can be put into circulation and exchanged with others, that a loss can be pinned down – a move that calls into question the adequacy of a retributive notion of justice altogether. In this sense, Agave tossing the lacuna to the audience with Pentheus’ head attached is the most generative moment of Pinplay, both its emotional climax and Carson’s core concern. The lacuna contains not just Euripides’ lacuna, but, arguably, Pentheus’ death and now Agave. The lacuna is a catastrophe of translation, a bundle of questions bearing Pentheus’ head that Carson leaves unanswered. What happens next? How do we live with Agave’s grief? Carson’s thesis seems to be that assigning blame and consequences for Pentheus’ death is less important than finding a way to live in its aftermath, but Pinplay doesn’t tell us how. Indeed, the final choral ode occurs directly after Agave tosses the lacuna and disappears, and after abundant enumeration, ends on a note of withholding: ‘That’s all you’ll get from this chorus, Doris. So ends the play.’ This is Carson’s final redirection, from Pentheus to Agave to the audience – a final splattering of white paint on the audience’s desire for answers that leaves it, one last time, 269

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unfulfilled, transforming a desire for closure (cliché, convention, retribution) into a desire for justice. The dissatisfaction and uncertainty of being left only with questions is productive: it alerts us to the possibility of something beyond what we know, and invites us to seek it out. Like Hundley and her other catastrophizers, Carson directs our attention away from what we know (we may want to read the first thirty-nine lines of the Bacchae in The Lightning’s Bride, but we can’t; we may want something to happen to Agave, but it doesn’t) and toward something for which we don’t yet have language, something that hasn’t yet been seen or sounded. If closure isn’t what’s necessary for Pentheus’ death (and Carson implies this by refusing to give it) and retribution isn’t what’s necessary for Pentheus’ death (since no one in Pinplay answers for it), what kind of justice is to be done? We don’t know, but we want to know. We know it’s something, but not this. Tossing the lacuna to the audience carries an expectation of its own: that someone will catch it. And so we reach.

Notes 1. Bedford (2012: 61). 2. Bedford (2012: 59). 3. Bedford (2012: 59). 4. Quoted in Podlecki (1974: 145). 5. Holmes (2015: 149, 150).

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CHAPTER 20 THERE IT LIES UNTRANSLATABLE Elena Theodorakopoulos

Anne Carson’s sequence of poems titled ‘Catullus: Carmina’ was first published in 1992 in American Poetry Review and then included in Men in the Off Hours (2000).1 It is almost entirely overshadowed by Nox (2010), which is Carson’s more spectacular entry in the canon of Catullan translations. But these earlier versions of Catullus do merit discussion, not least because they are exceptionally good examples of Carson’s highly idiosyncratic approach to translation, and because they go some way towards demonstrating a lot of the thinking behind and around that approach. The sequence also presents us with a first translation of poem 101, which looks ahead to the overall elegiac tone of Men in the Off Hours (referred to as Men henceforth).2 Readers of Nox, which Carson herself describes as a kind of cenotaph, to stand in for the absence of a grave of her brother, are familiar with the poet’s keen interest in elegy.3 Nox is the subject of a number of interviews and there has been much critical ink spilt over the ways in which translation, grief and memory come together in it. In Men, the elegiac note is struck more obliquely through the presence of Virginia Woolf at the beginning and end of the book. The effect of Woolf ’s penchant for elegy as a frame for Men in the Off Hours is heightened by the fact that Carson’s book opens and closes with Virginia Woolf. The opening essay (‘Ordinary time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on war’) discusses Woolf ’s early story ‘The Mark on the Wall’, printed in Publication No1, the very first book made at Hogarth House by the Woolfs in 1917,4 while the closing essay (‘Appendix to ordinary time’) cites the late diaries and includes the famous final diary entry (‘L. is doing the Rhododendrons’). Although the opening essay addresses loss and death and that ‘Mark on the Wall’ has definite elegiac notes itself, it is with the final essay that the themes of loss and mourning shift properly into focus. Here Carson writes about seeking comfort in Virginia Woolf ’s late diaries before concluding with a reflection on the power of the crossed-out lines to be found in Woolf ’s notebooks and manuscripts. Carson says that these lines are ‘like death: by a simple stroke- all is lost, yet still there’. The family photograph printed on the final page of Men also anticipates the collage elements of Nox, while gesturing towards the link between photography, memory and death familiar to readers of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. It is worth noting also that Economy of the Unlost, Carson’s treatment of the elegist Simonides, was published contemporaneously with Men, and demonstrates a keen interest in the physicality of Simonides’ epitaphs. It is clear then that elegy, and the elegiac, play an important part in Men in the Off Hours, where Carson’s Catullus sequence found its home in 2000. But not all the poems in the series are particularly concerned with elegiac themes, and nor do all of them come 271

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from Catullus’ elegy book. We should then begin by considering the 1992 version of the sequence, which predates the start of Carson’s elegiac phase. The key difference between the two editions of the sequence is that, in Men, the poems are preceded by an epigraph which is especially enigmatic, even by Carson’s standards, while in the journal publication the poems are preceded by an explanation of sorts regarding the translator’s method. The paratexts of the two versions intersect and diverge in interesting ways around the subject of materiality, memory, inscription and a gesture towards the ekphrastic, as I hope will emerge from what follows.

The epigraphs In 1992, the sequence was published under the title ‘Catullus: Carmina translated* by Anne Carson’. Underneath the title, the asterisk after the word ‘translated’ leads to the following programmatic epigraph: ‘The following bear about the same relation to translation as Francis Bacon’s paintings do to mug shots. He says they are very close.’ As is typical of Carson, there is quite a lot lurking behind the short (and somewhat misleading) sentence purporting to explain how the poems in the Catullus sequence qualify as translations. The word ‘mugshots’ alludes to the photographs of Bacon’s friends, which the painter would commission from the photographer John Deakin and which formed the basis of many of his most well-known portraits. A brief consideration of some of the things Bacon himself said about these photographs can help to illuminate further the relevance of Bacon’s technique to Carson’s approach to translation. I should make clear that I do not think Bacon ever said that his paintings were ‘very close’ to mugshots. Bacon explained in an interview that the photographs served as an ‘aidemémoire’, but also dismissed them almost entirely and rather emphatically, saying that working from photographs freed him from the presence of the sitter: [W]hen I say that photographs are merely records, I mean that I don’t use them at all as a model. A photograph, basically, is a means of illustrating something and illustration doesn’t interest me. Even in the case of friends who will come and pose, [. . .] I’ve had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from them. I think that, if I have the presence of the image there, I am not able to drift so freely as I am able to through the photographic image.5 This brings to mind a common approach to creative translation where the translator may work from a literal, word-for-word translation, but put to one side the original text, lest it exert too much influence over the final work.6 Bacon goes further than this though, making repeated references to the fact that the photographs he works from are damaged and scattered on the floor of his studio: ‘My photographs are very damaged by people walking over them and crumpling them and everything else, and this does add other implications to an image.’ An exhibition of Deakin’s damaged prints left from Bacon’s 272

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estate thus gives rise to the observation that the experience is one of ‘watching the figure deconstruct according to the state of destruction in which the print has settled, much as the figures in Bacon’s painting appear tortured, convoluted, and deconstructed’. All this, I think, provides a vivid and vital context for Carson’s Catullan versions. Josephine Balmer has described Carson’s approach to Catullus as ‘dismantling, almost demolishing’, as a ‘systematic breakdown of Catullus’ own verse form’.7 To my mind, Balmer’s language suggests at least the kind of ‘damage’ Bacon rejoiced in doing to Deakin’s photographs. Carson’s claim that the relationship between her translation and Catullus’ poems is similar to that between Bacon’s portraits and ‘mug shots’ must then point to some of the work of distancing and damaging, or, more positively, ‘freeing’ done by Bacon to Deakin’s photos. I find it interesting that Carson chooses not to attribute the mug shots to Deakin – just as Bacon himself appears to have done, despite Deakin’s own status as a photographer. This definitely belies a view of the photograph as mere anonymous documentation, rather than as, itself, an interpretation or work of art, and is perhaps not unrelated to Robert Lowell’s distinction between poetic translations and ‘modest photographic prose translations’.8 When the sequence is printed again in Men in the Off Hours, the reference to Francis Bacon is gone. I think this is because an explanation of Carson’s complicated and often challenging approach to translation is no longer needed in 2000. In 1992, when the Catullus poems first appeared, before the success of Autobiography of Red (1998), before her translations of Greek plays (starting with Sophocles in Electra in 2001) and before If Not, Winter (2002), some degree of authorial exegesis, however ironic or unreliable, was probably still required. In Men, the Carmina sequence is preceded, below the title, with this new epigraph: I LOVE YOU JOHNNY AND I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING big white letters chalked on a rock in the Mojave Desert Replacing the reference to Bacon’s portraits with this is a meaningful gesture, which signals a change in the way Carson sees the poems, as well as their place within the book and within her oeuvre. But what does the new epigraph mean? With reference to Catullus himself, the message on the rock could well be an allusion to the obscene graffiti he threatens to leave on the walls of the salax taberna in poem 37. The use of the capital letters and the colloquial sound suggested by the use of the contraction also suggest some of the performative aspects of Catullus’ epigrams and other short poems. The rock in the Mojave desert makes it clear that the Catullan Carmina announced in the title just above the epigraph has been transported to a different world, and that we are dealing here with what Simon refers to as Carson’s trademark: a ‘relentless confrontation of past and present’.9 The new epigraph has something to say about translation, but it is not attempting to explain the degree of equivalence between the ancient and the modern words. Instead, it presents the reader with an entirely new voice making its mark in an entirely new world, and in a new medium.10 But the mood, so to speak, of the epigraph could be described as Catullan: a 273

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vivid and direct first-person statement, a named addressee, a declaration of love, a sense of defiance or defensiveness and the bold gesture of writing in big letters on a stone – all this works as an interpretation of the Catullus of the polymetric and elegiac books. More obliquely, the epigraph has an ekphrastic quality, in that it sounds like a description of a visual image – perhaps a photograph.11 It also evokes inscription, or better, graffiti as a visual medium, and may thus allude to Carson’s observation on Simonides and carving on stone in Economy of the Unlost. In more recent times, and very definitely since the publication of If Not, Winter and Nox, Carson has been quite explicit about the attraction of the materiality of poetry. Remarks she made in a conversation with Peter Constantine in 2014 strike me as especially pertinent here. She was talking about an artist, Jenny Holzer, who was carving bits of Sappho onto rocks: [S]he is using my translation so has been asking me questions about choice and placement of texts on boulders and cliffs, which has given me new angles of thinking on the texts themselves and the reader’s experience of them. When I wrote a book about Simonides of Keos some years ago I tried to make the point that as a poet he had to think ahead to the constraints of the stone on which a poem would be carved [. . .].12 But the point about the epigraph is precisely that the letters are to be imagined not carved but written in chalk. Considered against the background that the Mojave Desert is known as the site of ancient rock art, much of it in the form of carvings, there is surely significance attached to the fact that the words of the epigraph are not carved, and thus neither ancient nor permanent. It makes sense to read the epigraph within the context of the precarious transmission of Catullus’ text, and in connection with the many statements Catullus himself makes about the permanence and impermanence of his own and other people’s writing.13 In this context, the epigraph takes on yet more significance as a reflection on the nature of Catullus’ text and what is involved in attempting to translate it. It is also possible to see the epigraph as standing in for the dedicatory poem 1, with the rock and chalk providing a new interpretation of the material qualities of the ‘new book’ and the pumice used to polish it in the original poem (lepidum nouum labellum / arida modo pumice expolitum, Cat. 1.1–2). This also chimes with how the theme of the materiality of writing is reworked in Nox, where there are three instances of what appears to be writing in chalk against a smudged black background: first, the words ‘WHO WERE YOU’ interspersed with text about the poet’s mother on her deathbed, revealing the existence of a box of old letters; second, the words ‘I HAD TO’, placed opposite the ‘lexicon’ passage headed parentum; and finally, the opening words of Romans 8, ‘AS IT IS WRITTEN’, with a passage recording how her brother’s widow handed the poet a translation of his funeral service. I would suggest that in all three instances, the capital letters in chalk convey a sense of urgency, of grasping at meaning, which is tantalizingly out of reach and in danger of erasure, and that this is also the case with the epigraph’s evocation of the chalk inscription in the desert.14 I have not said anything about the role of gender in Men – except insofar as the powerful presence of Virginia Woolf in the book asserts the difference made by writing, 274

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reading and translating as a woman. Does the epigraph to the Catullan sequence sound like a woman’s voice? I have suggested elsewhere that it does, and that it might be Lesbia’s voice.15 Looking at it again, I am starting to think that the book’s overarching theme of gender and time may be a better key to understanding the epigraph.16 It seems to me that it matters that the writing on the rock is in chalk rather than carved: chalk suggests a temporary mark, that could be subject to change, crossing out or erasure, and that this may suggest a feminine approach to time, as modelled by Woolf ’s story ‘The Mark on the Wall’ in the opening essay. There is also, I think, a very eloquent contrast between the rock’s permanence and antiquity and the ephemeral nature of writing in chalk – however big the letters. Added to this, there is a sense of the fragmentary that attaches to the text of the epigraph in that there is no context or sign of authorship, merely a physical trace – or rather the evocation on the printed page of a physical trace, perhaps of authorial presence. Seen in terms of the theme of time and gender, the epigraph also resonates with ‘The Mark on the Wall’, where Woolf ’s reflections on the eponymous mark revolve precisely around its transient character as a trace of something evocative, but ultimately unknowable. The mark leads the narrator into reflections on her past, on the ignorance of humanity, on death, on the ‘dust that covered Troy three times over’, on the masculine point of view and on ‘those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps’.17 On the final page of the story there is a ‘great upheaval of matter’, as with typical Woolfian humour the masculine point of view is made manifest and reveals that the mark on the wall is not a mark at all but a snail.18 The mark was unknowable only for as long as it was contemplated by a female observer, whose purpose was not to ‘know’ it at all but to think with or around it (‘our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it’; ‘to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, [. . .] to slip easily from one thing to another without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts’).19 It seems to me that Woolf ’s description of her experiment, with what she refers to in the story as the novel of the future, encapsulates quite neatly Carson’s approach to her translation work, and that this suggests that the chalk letters on the rock evoked in the epigraph can and should be read as a reflection of Woolf ’s mark on the wall. In all then, it makes sense to view the change of epigraph as tying the Catullus sequence into the overall themes of Men (elegy, time and gender), while also resonating with Carson’s interest in the materiality of ancient poetry and with the ekphrastic and mixed-media interests she demonstrates in poetry that mainly postdates Men.

The poems When we look at the formal presentation of Carson’s versions, it is striking that she goes to some lengths to document the process by which she dismantles Catullus’ poems, or frees herself from them. Each of Carson’s poems begins with the first few words of the original Latin poem, printed in italics, as a form of title. The Latin titles are always 275

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followed by an almost literal rendering into English, in parentheses, in the same line as the title.20 In their first appearance in the American Poetry Review, the poems also have their original numbers. After this, each poem has a short sentence, printed in italics, paraphrasing the words of the original poems. In Men, this kind of summary takes the exact same form, beginning with the name Catullus followed by a verb, for example ‘Catullus observes’, ‘Catullus compares’, ‘Catullus greets’, ‘Catullus buries’ and so on. The final poem in the series diverges a little from this pattern by replacing the name Catullus with ‘The poet’. (In the earlier version the form of the introductory summaries is not quite as uniform, for example, ‘In this poem Catullus observes’, or ‘Here Catullus compares’.) But in both instances of the series, Carson approaches each original poem by working step by step on creating more and more distance between the ‘photographic prose translation’, to use Lowell’s phrase, of the first line, and the body of the new poem itself. Once she launches into the body of the poem, any sense of equivalence between Carson’s poem and the Latin poem evoked in the title lines is almost entirely eroded. Carson’s ‘solution’ to the problem of translation in these poems is, as Balmer says, ‘the systematic breakdown of Catullus’s own verse form’. Carson does this precisely, and systematically, by demonstrating through the inadequacy of the prose equivalences offered to introduce each poem the impossibility of translation, just as the damaged and discarded photographs on the floor of Francis Bacon’s studio demonstrate the impossibility of turning a photograph into a portrait of a person.21 Indeed, it becomes clear from much of Carson’s practice, as well as her reflections on her own practice, that she does not believe that translation is really possible. It is a good thing to struggle with and think about – but it does not, ultimately, work. She put this very clearly in an interview in 2003: I like the space between languages because it’s a place of error or mistakenness, of saying things less well than you would like, or not being able to say them at all. And that’s useful I think for writing because it’s always good to put yourself off balance, to be dislodged from the complacency in which you normally go at perceiving the world and saying what you’ve perceived. And translation continually does that dislodging, so I respect the situation – although I don’t think I like it. It’s a useful edge to put yourself against.22 I will conclude by considering in some more detail the poems themselves, as they appear in Men. First, it makes sense to provide an overview of the selection and its order. We start with a set from the polymetrics, beginning with the sparrow poems and then jumping all the way to poem 43, an unkind poem about the unfortunate Amaeana, followed by poem 46, a poem in celebration of spring and friendship. Poem 50, the poem about writing poetry with and for Licinius Crassus, perhaps initiates a more solemn mood, followed as it is by 58, a bitter and famously obscene few lines on the degradation of Lesbia. We then move to the elegies: first 70 and 75, two poems about Lesbia’s lack of fidelity; then 76, a long poem about Catullus’ own pietas and his prayer to be released from the misery of loving Lesbia. This is followed by the famous poem 85 (Odi et Amo) 276

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and its immediate neighbour, poem 86, in which a Quintia is unfavourably compared to Lesbia’s total beauty (pulcerrima tota est, 86.5). There follows the lovely consolation for Calvus on the death of Quintilia, poem 96, and its horrible neighbour, the obscene poem 97 about Aemilius’ lack of personal hygiene. The sequence concludes with poem 101, the elegy for Catullus’ brother, followed by 109, the final, cautiously optimistic, Lesbia poem. To a certain extent, then, Carson’s sequence tells a story, which concentrates on the poet’s relationship with Lesbia (the majority of the poems are from the ‘Lesbia cycle’ and the sequence begins with the first Lesbia poem and ends with the final one). The sequence also contains some other key elements of his story, including male friendships (Caelius, Calvus and the comites of poem 46), obscene aggression (the Aemilius poem) and the death of his brother. Carson’s Catullus is ‘offensive and vicious’, to use Harold Nicholson’s words. Yet, it is also true that, as Josephine Balmer says, in Carson’s versions ‘Catullus’s male persona [. . .] dissolves in the withering gaze of his woman translator/versionist’.23 For instance, Carson’s version of the offensive poem 97 clearly pokes fun at the poet by delivering simply a list of words for ‘anus’ – an almost childlike list, from which the violence and misogyny of the original is entirely erased. It looks as if the female translator realizes, and asks the reader also to realize, that implicating women in this puerile performance of invective would be quite gratuitous. One of the most vicious of the Lesbia poems is in Carson’s version tender and enigmatic: Caeli Lesbia Nostra Lesbia Illa (Our Lesbia That Lesbia) Catullus finds his own love gone to others Nuns coated in silver were not so naked As our night interviews. Now what plum is your tongue In? To my mind, this retains the note of regret of the second and third line (illa Lesbia quam Catullus unam / plus quam se atque suos amauit omnes, ‘that Lesbia, whom alone Catullus loved more than himself and all his family’, 58.2–3) and the way in which the threefold repetition of Lesbia’s name in 58.1–2 sounds like an attempt to bring back an inaccessible past – maybe a ghost. But Carson’s version eschews the crassness and misogyny of the last two lines of the original (nunc in quadriuiis et angiportis / glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes, ‘now at the crossroads and in the back-alleys she peels the heirs of great-hearted Remus, 58.4–5.) The plum and the tongue do of course suggest sexual imagery, but the omission of the back alleys and the sons of Remus gives the poem’s conclusion a delicate and abstract quality that is lacking in the original. Elsewhere, Carson’s versions take a Steinian approach – for example in the repetition and visually expressive arrangement of the four words ‘hate’, ‘love’, ‘why’ and ‘I’ in her version of odi et amo.24 Here the shape of the two final lines, arranging the repeated ‘I’ around a central ‘why’, seems to convey the shape of arms stretched out on a cross, to 277

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suggest the poem’s final word: excrucior (I am crucified). In her version of the final two lines of poem 70 (mulier cupido quod dicit amanti / in uento et rapida scribere oportet aqua, ‘what a woman says to her ardent lover should be written on the wind and on flowing water’), the word ‘River’ set out on its own in eight consecutive lines, and then followed by a long final line, ‘River river river river river river river’, dismantles the romantic cliché of Catullus’ final lines yet preserves and visualizes the sense of it. In the context of Men in the Off Hours, it is hard not to be reminded of Virginia Woolf and the River Ouse when looking at this poem.25 In her versions of the sparrow poems, Carson appears to be using allusions to Martial’s poem about the pet dog Issa, who is said to be ‘more playful than the sparrow of Catullus’, to give a playful and irreverent spin to the originals. For instance, the ‘little black hooligan clods of earth / Across her white bedspread’ are clearly an allusion to Issa, who has never left so much as a drop on the coverlet (Martial 1.109.11). Again, the poems are freed from much of the history that accrues to them and manage to feel new and fresh, and not overly respectful to Catullus himself. But irony is not Carson’s only mode, as we already know. Let us conclude with the elegiac mode we established at the outset as so significant for Men as a whole. The tone changes swiftly after the Issa allusion in the second poem, much as the tone of Catullus 3 darkens in line 11 when the sparrow makes his way into the darkness (per iter tenebricosum, 3.11; malae Tenebrae / Orci, 3.13-14). Carson chooses this moment of change in the sparrow poem to introduce the motif of autumn (‘Death makes me think (I said) about soldiers and autumn’), to which she will return in her version of poem 75, the poem in which Catullus may be said to be at his lowest. Here is Carson’s version, clarifying how autumn stands for death but also the death of love: Huc Est Mens Deducta Tua Mea Lesbia Culpa (To This Point Is My Mind Reduced) Catullus is brought low Decay flaps upward from my mind O my love Where it fingers your crime. The autumn night comes on so cool. The final essay in Men begins with the sentence ‘My mother died the autumn I was writing this.’ Carson’s version of the consolatory elegy for Calvus after the death of Quintilia does not specifically mention autumn, but the image of the shape of a tree emerging from mist does seem to me to evoke an autumnal scene: As tree shapes from mist Her young death Loose In you This brings us to the last poem we have room to discuss, the version of Catullus 101, which anticipates some ideas reworked and developed in Nox. Carson has very carefully 278

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replicated here the complicated relationship enacted in the poem itself between the performance of a graveside ritual and the recording of an epitaph.26 She mentions sound twice (in line 4, ‘How long does it take the sound to die away?’, and in the final line, ‘What sound?’), suggesting the performance of a ritual lament. On the other hand, the poem also suggests inscription (‘cut out carefully the words for wine milk honey flowers’), an idea rejected categorically by Fordyce, whose commentary Carson surely had to hand. The Latin words for ‘wine, milk, honey, and flowers’ are not in Catullus’ poem, but they do appear in Fordyce’s commentary in the precise order they appear in Carson’s poem. In addition to ritual lament and inscription, Carson brings to bear on the poem the method she will use later in Nox, namely collage, when it turns out that ‘cut out’ does not refer to cutting in stone, as would be expected for a funerary epigram, but the cutting out of paper as the final lines make clear: Cut out carefully the words for wine milk honey flowers Drop them into a bag. Mix carefully. Pour onto your dirty skeleton. What sound? Carson invokes and rejects both possibilities – inscription on a tomb and graveside lament – in favour of a third: a poem on paper, dismantled and ‘remixed’, that becomes, itself, the libation poured on the body. The most famous line of the poem is missing in Carson’s version – it is perhaps one of the most ‘untranslatable’ aspects of Catullus 101. We can close by returning to Virginia Woolf: she too did not translate the final line when she noted it down, drafting a possible epigraph for Jacob’s Room (1922) as a dedication for her brother, Thoby Steven: Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. Julian Thoby Steven (1881–1906) Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.27 More poignantly still, the note or draft of this epigraph Woolf made in her diary is crossed out. It is curious that Carson should make no mention of this as far as I am aware – but she does like to play her cards close to her chest, and make her readers work a little.

Notes 1. I owe thanks to Josephine Balmer and Fiona Cox for their insight and comments, and for their encouragement.  2. Carson’s elegiac phase arguably begins with her treatment of her father’s death in Carson (1995).

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Anne Carson/ Antiquity 3. Marsden (2013). 4. Woolf (1917). 5. The quotations of Bacon are cited in Halpert (1996). 6. Halpert (1996: 74). 7. Balmer (2013: 149, 163). 8. Lowell (1958: xi). See also Lowell’s assessment of his own translation of Juvenal, compared with Ben Johnson’s adaptation, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’: ‘While I just try to give an accurate, eloquent photograph of the original, he did something much more avant garde.’ Lowell (1988: 138). 9. Simon (2007: 108). 10. See perhaps Balmer (2013: 162) on how Carson’s Catullus seems to inhabit ‘the sparse landscapes and dark violence of North American cinema’. 11. See McCallum (2007). 12. Constantine (2014: 36). Also see Carson (1992): ‘I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madame Bovary. Cloud shadows roved languidly across her huge rock throat, traced her fir flanks.’ 13. For example, in poems 1, 14, 22, 36, 50, 68. On the short poems, see Feeney (2012). On 68, see Lowrie (2006: 115–32). 14. See Marsden (2013: 195). 15. Theodorakopoulos (2013: 285). 16. See Greenfield (2015). 17. Woolf (2001: 7). This must evoke Iliad 23.331–2, and of course Woolf goes on to say that she would prefer them to be tombs ‘finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf ’. 18. Carson (2000: 7): (‘you grasp at once without any mention of the fact that someone is a man. [. . .] Not only because of his need for newspapers and view of the war [. . .] but because he at once identifies the mark on the wall as what it is.’) 19. Woolf (2001: 3, 5). 20. The Mimnermos translations in Plainwater use a very similar formal presentation. See Rae (2000: 25) for the MImnermos translations as a prototype for Autobiograpy of Red. See Maxwell (2015: 60) for the Mimnermos pieces as ‘companion pieces (rather than representations of) originals, suggesting translation is primarily an act of being with’. 21. See Simon (2007: 110) on how in Carson’s translations ‘process takes over from equivalence’. 22. McNeilly (2003). 23. Balmer (2013: 149). 24. By ‘Steinian’ I mean to suggest some of Carson’s modernist obscurity, her often sparse punctuation, but also the playful and humorous tendencies she often displays, and more formally, in the poems in Men, the repetitions and the visual arrangements of poems which are reminiscent of, for instance, the poems in Stein’s Patriarchal Poetry. See Dean (1997: 84–5) for Carson and Stein. And see the direct use of Stein in Carson (1998). 25. I owe this realization to Fiona Cox. 26. On this, see Feldherr (2000) with bibliography. 27. Silver (1983: 235–6). On Jacob’s Room as elegy, see Zwerdling (1981). Catullus also has a strong presence in Woolf ’s highly elegiac novel The Waves (1931), and Woolf thought 280

There It Lies Untranslatable about inscribing the name of her brother Thoby on the final page of the manuscript. Woolf herself described To the Lighthouse (1927) as an elegy. See The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 34. For Woolf ’s well-attested love of Milton’s Lycidas, see Diary, vol. 3: 330. Also see Smythe (1992).

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INDEX OF TERMS

absence 251–7 acts of deterrence 84 acts of restoration 84 Aeschylus 100–1, 221 aleatory poetics 6, 7, 76 Archilochus 96–7, 123 Aristotle 29 Bacon, Francis 44, 76, 85, 126–7, 263, 265, 272–3, 276 Barthes, Roland 54, 55 Benjamin, Walter 76, 82–3, 130 Breton, André 91 Bronte, Emily 39, 197, 204 Cage, John 99 Carson, Anne and antiquity 1–2, 7, 8, 9, 20, 39–40, 48, 107, 233 and classicism 3, 5–6, 7, 9, 51, 63, 70, 76, 107, 163, 181–2, 187–8, 193, 207–8, 264 and eclecticism 39–40 and eroticism 54, 55, 59, 96, 97, 169–70, 193–7, 200 and hybridity 4 language 8, 31, 58, 64, 65, 84, 213 mythopoeticism 188 philhellenism 10, 222, 227, 229–30 as poet 39, 63–4, 70, 72, 120, 241 praxis 2, 4, 5, 9 as scholar 63–64, 68, 72, 120, 218 as translator 239–41, 244, 247, 271–4 untranslatability 222–4, 229, 263 Carson, Cieran 248 Catullus 41, 42, 44, 113, 127, 256, 271, 273, 276–7 Celan, Paul 5, 6, 7, 13, 18–19, 21, 32, 44, 78, 107, 108, 110, 213, 226 Charman, Janet 19 Chimeras 26–9, 32–5 Cicero 109–10 colonialism 231–3 desire 14, 16–17, 19, 20, 97 Dickinson, Emily 189–90 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 57

feminism 72, 173–4, 208–10 Freud, Sigmund 96–7, 106 gender stereotypes 169 Goethe 51–3, 59 Greek myth 34, 109–11, 113–14, 157, 159–66, 169, 171–8, 181–7, 189, 200–1, 207, 261–2, 265 Heidegger 227–30, 233 Hesiod 159 Holderlin, Friedrich 76, 77, 80, 83 Homer(ic) epic 30, 51, 84, 85, 92, 157, 158, 159, 161–2, 197, 211, 242, 263 Improvisation Chamber Ensemble 93 irony 136–40, 144–51 Kafka 79, 80 Kuleshov effect 91 Lacan 106 Lukas Foss 93 Longinus 30 Marxism 21, 214 Mimesis 29 Mimnermos 4, 89–91, 119, 123 motion 79 Nietzsche 55, 170, 225, 227 paratextuality 9, 119–22, 125, 131 Performing Antigonick 243 phallogocentricism 209–10, 212 Philostratus the Elder 58 Plato 64, 95 poetic reading 40–2, 46, 47 postclassicism 233 Pound, Ezra 91–2, 166 Praxis 4, 9 Quintilian 110

Eliot, T. S. 91, 92 Epicureanism 101 Euripides 122, 129, 226, 230, 240, 265

reception 7, 46, 64 Red Desert (Film) 44–5

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Index of Terms Sappho 3, 4, 13, 14, 15, 19, 21, 32, 33, 45, 56, 58, 59, 70, 71, 72, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 97, 99, 105, 123, 135, 136, 144, 149–52, 157, 159, 221, 226, 240–1, 274 sexuality 184 Shakespeare(an) 151 Simonides of Keos 4, 6, 13, 18–21, 44, 78, 94, 95, 107–10, 213–14, 221, 226, 274 Sokrates 33, 34, 95, 136, 137, 144, 149–52 Sophacles 4, 8, 16, 122, 126, 240, 243–4, 273 stereoscopy 20 Stesichorus 6, 30, 35, 92–3, 157–62, 165–7, 189, 197, 200, 202, 204, 226, 230–1

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Succession (TV Series) 247 symbiosis 35 transience 17 translation 4, 9, 32, 42, 43, 66, 71, 77, 81, 82, 83, 84, 109, 120, 123, 221–4, 227, 233, 239–41, 245, 249, 255, 262, 271–3, 276 translation studies 237–40, 246 Tzara, Tristan 91 Tzu, Lao 68–9 Varotsos, Costas 79 Wolf, Friedrich August 52–3 Woolf, Virginia 65–6, 116, 274, 278

INDEX OF TEXTUAL REFERENCES

Aeschylus Agamemnon 100–1, 125–6, 200, 226, 246 Oresteia 186, 223 Apollodorus Biblioteca 200–1 Apuleius Metamorphoses 200 Aristotle Poetics 29, 33 Atwood, Margaret The Handmaid’s Tale 244 Augustine Confessions 126 Bacon, Francis Study after Velasquez Portrait of Pope Innocent X 85 Barthes, Roland A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments 54 Baudelaire Tableaux Parisiens 130 Benjamin, Walter ‘The Task of the Translator’ 82–3, 239–40, 255 Bronte, Emily The Glass Essay 39, 107 Carson, Anne A Lover’s Discourse 54 An Essay on Irony 136–40, 144–50, 152–3 ‘A Lecture on the History of Skywriting’ 114–15 An Oresteia 119–20, 124–5, 221, 224, 246 Antigonick 8, 120, 122, 126, 128, 129, 130, 207, 243–5 The Albertine Workout 30 Autobiography of Red 3, 6, 10, 27, 29, 30, 35, 43, 119, 157, 163–6, 181–2, 188–90, 193–203, 207, 221, 226, 230–2, 273 Bakkhai 120, 122, 128, 130–1, 221 Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera 3, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 36, 40, 44–5, 46, 47 Economy of the Unlost 4, 13, 17–21, 43, 72, 78, 84, 108, 109, 170, 173, 213, 221, 271, 274 Ecstatic Lyre 39, 169 Electra 221–3, 246, 273 Eros the Bittersweet 3–4, 13, 14, 15, 19–21, 25, 34, 53, 54, 55, 70, 79, 96, 98, 99, 109, 119, 135–6, 157, 169–70, 195, 199–200

‘Essay on What I Think About Most’ 66 Every Exit is an Entrance 105, 111 Float 3, 6, 28, 29, 33, 41, 43, 47, 48, 75, 76, 100, 101, 111–12, 174–8, 207–14, 218, 221, 265 Glass, Irony, and God 3 Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides 120, 122, 125, 131, 221, 224–5, 230 If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho 45, 72, 80, 81, 99, 123, 135–6, 141–5, 157, 200, 213, 221, 239, 241, 273–4 ‘Irony Is Not Enough’ 171 Men in the Off Hours 3, 115, 119, 254–5, 271–6, 278 Norma Jeane Baker of Troy 3, 107, 120, 122–5, 129–31, 181–5, 187–9 ‘Now What?’ 71 Nox 3, 9, 28, 29, 41, 42, 43, 107, 113, 123, 194, 207–8, 248–50, 251–2, 254–7, 271, 274, 278–9 ‘Odi et Amo Ergo Sum’ 14, 53, 55, 56, 58, 98, 157, 169–71, 174 Pinplay 264–70 Plainwater 3, 4, 69, 194, 196–7 Pronoun Envy 208–9, 213–14, 216, 218 Red Doc> 3, 10, 131, 166, 181, 190–1, 194, 202–4 Short Talks 3, 9, 67, 71, 239 Summa Theologica 170 ‘The Anthropology of Water’ 171, 193, 195 The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos 169, 172, 193 The Brainsex Paintings 89–90, 99, 119 ‘The Glass Essay’ 39, 73, 171, 193, 197–8 ‘The Life of Towns’ 68, 71, 72 Variations on the Right to Remain Silent 44, 84, 108, 261, 263 From Elsewhere 248 Catullus Elegies 41, 42, 113, 123, 169, 207, 248, 251–7, 271–9 Celan, Paul ‘Matiere de Bretagne’ 18 Cervantes Don Quixote 166 Currie, Ken Absent Presence 2004 126

297

Index of Textual References Euripides Bacchae 128, 129, 207, 232, 261–3, 264–70 Hecuba 226 Helen 122, 124, 131, 183–5, 188, 189 Hippolytos 125 Orestes 246–7 Foss, Lukas The Fragments of Archilochus 93 Foucault, Michel History of Sexuality 173 Freud, Sigmund Mourning and Melancholia 113 The Interpretation of Dreams 107 Goethe Italian Journey 51–2 Goldsmith, Margaret Sappho of Lesbos: A Psychological Reconstruction of her Life 159 Heaney, Seamus The Burial at Thebes 243 Heidegger Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language 228–9 Hesiod Theogony 171, 174, 200 Homer Iliad 30–1, 92, 124, 157–63, 177, 183, 242 Odyssey 10, 51–2, 84, 157–60, 173, 208–9, 214–17, 256 Hundley Pinplay: A Version of Euripides’ Bacchae 261–4, 268, 270 Kafka ‘The Top’ 79 Martial Epigrams 278 Mimnermus Fragments 4 Moravia, Alberto Il Disprezzo 214–15

298

Nietzsche Birth of Tragedy 55, 225, 227 O’Hara, Frank Personism: A Manifesto 47–8 Ovid Tristia 242 Philostratus the Elder Imagines 58 Plato Phaedrus 33–4, 159 Republic 64 Symposium 52, 109 Robertson, Lisa Nilling 41 Sappho Fragments 19, 45, 56, 72, 81, 82, 99, 135, 136, 139, 141–4, 148, 152, 154, 195–6, 213, 241 Shakespeare, William Cleopatra 107 Macbeth 111 Sophocles Electra 4, 224, 273 Antigone 8, 126, 207, 243 Stesichorus Fragments 158–9, 189, 196 Geryoneis 160–6, 188, 193, 200, 230 The Oxyrhynchus Papyri 139, 141 Tzu, Lao Tao Te Ching 68 Varotsos, Costas The Runner 79 Wells, H. G. Experiment in Autobiography 177 Wolf, Friedrich August Darstellung der Alterumswissenschaft 52 Woolf, Virginia Jacob’s Room 279 ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ 65 ‘The Mark on the Wall’ 271, 275

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