Opinion
Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize for Literature this month. She wasn’t the odds-on favourite – that was the Chinese experimental fiction writer Can Xue. She wasn’t the crowd-pleasing choice either – that would’ve been Salman Rushdie, or Margaret Atwood, or Thomas Pynchon or Helen Garner, or really almost anybody but Carson, a Canadian-Icelandic poet and classics professor whom (let’s face it) very few people had heard of. But she was the right choice.
Carson spent much of her career teaching ancient Greek in classics departments in Canada and the US, and almost all her Nobel Prize-winning poems are inventive translations or creative transformations of ancient texts, including Euripides, Aeschylus, Sappho and Catullus. Her modern literary influences include Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf.
Since the 1990s, Carson has been one of the poetry world’s anointed ones, canonised in classics and English departments and independent poetry bookshops across North America. Just last year she was chosen to deliver the Robert Fagles Lecture for Classics in the Contemporary Arts at Princeton University, which she did wearing boxing gloves. Carson has Parkinson’s disease and says that it’s “all but impossible” to worry about the “black doorway” of death when someone has strapped a boxing glove onto your hand.
Since the announcement, Carson has gone viral. The Nobel Prize is a barometer of what feels urgent and globally important across all major domains of human knowledge, and Carson’s purposeful confrontation with degenerative illness and death, paired with her provocative sparring with the poetry and drama of 3000 years ago, gives us a crucial primer for human intelligence as we confront the crises of generative artificial intelligence and the unstoppable rise of powerful, warring AI companies.
Ancient writing constantly reminds us how close death is to life. To read Carson’s translations of ancient Greek and Latin is to feel, viscerally, the urgency and beauty of being human in this present. Here’s her translation of lines from the 6th century BC poet Sappho, a wealthy woman from Lesbos, whose poems survive only in fragments and scraps of language. The poet is watching as a random man at a dinner leans in and “listens close” to the “sweet speech” of a woman whom she herself loves. The speaker’s heart races with envy, longing, desire and fear, so intense that she feels dead. There the fragments end. We won’t ever know what happens.
oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
Carson’s shift from Ivy League darling to global literary celebrity shows that what we want, and need, to do is get clear about what human intelligence (HI) is, stat. HI is a set of wise, discerning – above all clunky and imperfect – capabilities that are inextricable from feelings and bodies, and that are entirely distinct from their synthetic counterparts in data centres.
Carson’s poetry can be difficult. It’s often unhelpful, the opposite of a chatbot, pushing back at the reader without trying to soothe, flatter and appease. At the end of her lecture at Princeton, brandishing her boxing mitt, Carson said, “Form fights back!” She meant that, when we humans apply our attention to a human-made form that is highly structured or rule-based, like poetry or boxing, we discover our weak spots. We also find our power. Humans need clashes with demanding mental activities like reading hard books, writing essays, or translating from other languages because these are the human habits that enable us to “fight back” against our tendency towards avoiding discomfort, ignoring complexity and being afraid of uncertainty.
Even more importantly, when we grapple and clash with difficult forms, rules and frameworks, we don’t necessarily get the win. Carson has written that, when one translates Greek and Latin poetry, “mistakenness is valuable”.
“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.”
Translating pushes writers and readers to accept imperfection, unlikeness and even error. Poetry, like humanity, demands courage.
Sophie Gee is a professor in the English Department at Princeton University. At the University of Sydney she holds roles as the inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Fellow (2024–) and co-director of the Eleos Collaboration. She co-hosts the globally successful Secret Life of Books podcast.
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