Why reading Nobel laureate Anne Carson is, first of all, an intellectual delight

In January 2022, during the Omicron surge of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was shut into screens and rooms tense with anxiety, I read Anne Carson’s prose poem ‘Four Talks’. The poem was dense and allusive. I was grateful for the intellectual distraction. 

The first section is titled ‘Short Talk on Todtnauberg’. This, I discovered, is the German village in the Black Forest where the philosopher Martin Heidegger had a chalet and wrote portions of Being and Time. In 1967, the Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan went there to meet Heidegger, who had been associated with the Nazis. Celan’s famous poem ‘Todtnauberg’ is about that meeting. The two men walked outside but never found common ground.  

Carson’s poem about the encounter is brief. Celan feels shame, Heidegger does not. The single chair in the hut is a hard one. Other sections of the poem are harder still. There are “men who need no solace”. An angel is melted down. Innocence is killed.  

The fourth section is about Hegel, the philosopher of order, who regarded marriage as the foundation of family and state. The poem describes his hypocrisy: he abandoned his illegitimate son, Ludwig, along with Christiane, the mother of his child, as collateral damage. At 41, he married a woman from a patrician family. She was 20 years younger than him. Christiane went to an asylum and later died by drowning. Her letters to her son, as well as her poem-fragments, are lost. 

In a year when so many had suffered unbearable loss, the poem stayed with me. A man who went into the forest seeking something from a man who would not give it. Even at the limits of reconciliation, the journey mattered. It was worth recording. I thought of Hegel’s betrayal, and of Christiane, the poem’s real subject. Reading the poem during the pandemic reminded me that the life of the mind was incomplete without training the heart to pay attention to others. One had been reading for intellectual stimulation, but cleverness was less valuable than kindness and moral courage. 

That attention is not only private. As conflict and political violence rage in many parts of the world, Carson has supported the work of human rights organisations like Reprieve and Doctors Without Borders. In the prose poem ‘Fate, Federal Court, Moon’ (2017), she writes about human rights and judicial bias when Faisal, a Yemeni engineer, seeks accountability for the mistaken killing of his relatives in a drone attack. 

The image in your head

Last week, Carson was announced as this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”. Reportedly, when she got the news, she was in her house in Iceland — where she lives for part of the year — listening to the wind. 

I thought of that detail when I re-read her blog post in the London Review of Books, where she describes the Icelandic town of Stykkishólmur. An installation called The Library of Water, by artist Roni Horn, was set up in the empty halls of the town’s former library. Tall glass pillars held waters from 24 of Iceland’s glaciers. “In 2009 when you first glimpsed the town from here it seemed pegged to the side of a giant wind. Each day walking the town you crouched against the force of it. You were adjunct. Small.” As Carson walks around the glass pillars, she is transported back to “one of the endless Canadian Saturday afternoons of your childhood. Was there no weather then either?”. 

This ability to make memory and the weather open into something wider drew me to Carson’s work. I had first come to her writing by chance when I encountered her stunning translation of a fragment from the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho: 

someone will remember us 

I say 

even in another time. 

Born in 1950 in Canada, Carson first learned Greek from a high school Latin teacher, followed by formal study of the classics. Though she has taught the classics for decades, her work has continually probed genres outside the academy. 

Reading Carson is, first of all, an intellectual delight. “I would read anything she wrote,” said Susan Sontag. In a world of borders, Carson moves without restraint and often playfully across boundaries of history, geography, and genre.  

Her writing is also intensely poetic. Suddenly, from the image of the poet sitting in the dressing room of her boxing class for patients with Parkinson’s, holding up her hand for someone else to tie her boxing glove, you are transported to The Iliad, where Priam stands in the ancient ritual gesture of supplication before the tent of Achilles, pleading for the body of his son. 

You re-read the fragment. You go over the sentence. You put the book down. You carry the image in your head for days. 

Pushing beyond reason and language

Carson’s language is spiky and contemporary, with no frills. Images are sudden, like tiny flashes of light as evening falls. A green path lined with flowers; a loaf of white bread on a kitchen table; Europe, wartime, history. In her poem ‘Oh What a Night (Alkibiades)’, Alkibiades describes Socrates as ‘mighty of heart’, like a hero in Homer. In ‘1x30’, the immortal horses of Achilles, dragged onto the battlefield by Patroklos, smell him die. Rage foamed in them. They bent their heads and filthied their deathless manes in the dust.

In her essay ‘Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind’, there is an imagined dialogue between Pepper and Catullus. Pepper asks: “Why not take the shorter way home?” Catullus replies: “There was no shorter way home.” The play Norma Jeane Baker of Troy reminds us of the endless waging of wars by men over the bodies of women: War is the context/ and God is a boy… It’s a disaster to be a girl.

Carson is just as precise about isolation and loss. After her mother sells her house and moves to a senior facility, she tells her daughter it’s funny to have no home. “Funny being a funny word for what she meant. I say this now to remind myself how words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you’re standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning.” 

Carson continually tests the limits of language and form to express that which resists expression. Her most widely known work, Autobiography of Red (1998), is about a gay teenager caught between desire and heartbreak. Based on the tale of Geryon, the Greek monster, it turns an ancient myth into a contemporary story of vulnerability. Nox is Carson’s 2010 memorial to her estranged brother Michael, who died days before they planned to meet. Modelled on the Roman poet Catullus’s elegy for his brother, the book is produced as one long folded page, a relic of personal grief assembled as a collage of postage stamps, scraps of letters, grainy photographs, and words. 

Grief as it appears, one ordinary morning, is also the subject of ‘Lieu Vague’, one of Carson’s most affecting poems. It begins as a breakfast conversation between the narrator and her father, whose memory is failing. He does not know it is his birthday. The second part turns inward. The narrator shares that the more she reads, the sadder she gets. 

Maybe it’s my 

so-called academic training 

All those gentlemen with 

lexicons open 

at the page for smikrologia. 

Smikrologia, I found, is Greek for petty-mindedness; “All those gentlemen” points to the male-dominated academy. The narrator’s academic training, she reflects, sends her in circles. Cleverness isn’t enough. What she wants is the clarity to say, “look at that horse.” 

Carson’s writing pushes beyond reason, beyond language, beyond translation, towards mysteries that remain resistant to explanation. Such as her poem ‘Asta’s Song’, where art is itself compared to a scream, fingers reaching in where they shouldn’t and pulling this from that. 

But I also return to the beginning. A closed room, a screen, a January of isolation, and a poem about another closed room. Inside a hut with a hard wooden chair, a poet seeks a reconciliation that never comes. Nevertheless, he makes the journey, walks beside the man in the forest, and comes away with the poem. This from that. 

Somewhere in Iceland, the woman who gave us these words is listening to the wind outside. 

The writer is in the IAS.