“I came to think of translating as a room,” Anne Carson wrote, in her illustrated book of poems “Nox,” “where one gropes for the light switch.” When the Swedish Academy awarded Carson the Nobel Prize in Literature this month, they continued a long tradition of recognizing the superior art of poet-translators, from Rabindranath Tagore to Pablo Neruda, Czesław Miłosz, Seamus Heaney, and Jon Fosse. In her essays and poems—as in her translations of Sappho, Euripides, and Sophocles—Carson lays down each word as if it were arrived at after a suspended period of searching and testing, of slowly gathering a language to illuminate half-sensed, mysterious thoughts and feelings. As I noted earlier this month, her great theme is eros, and her truly exceptional books let us inhabit the longing and loneliness of desire. Below are my favorites.
The six pieces in Carson’s second collection are clear, sharp, splintered, and luminous. It includes her single most arresting poem, “The Glass Essay,” a chilly, desolate account of the end of a love affair, told by a speaker who believes that she is “turning into Emily Brontë / my lonely life around me like a moor, / my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation / that dies when I come in the kitchen door.” The poem’s anguished meditations on love’s savagery and isolation are designed to draw blood.
“The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”
“Shall we sharpen our eyes and circle closer to the beauty of the husband,” the twenty-fifth section of this furious book-length poem begins. Its swerving, combative style is inspired by the tango, “the forbidden dance”—a stunningly physical encounter between two people who should never have touched but are now violently intertwined. Also intertwined are ancient myths of warring city-states, the raw, moody poetry of John Keats, and the modern battle between a faithless husband and his wife, the poem’s raging speaker. The book was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2001, making Carson the first woman ever to win it.
The “Geryoneis,” a poem by the blind Greek poet Stesichoros, shows us glimpses of Geryon, a winged red monster with three heads, who is brutally killed by Herakles. Carson loosely, haltingly translates Stesichoros’ verses—“Arrow means kill It parted Geryon’s skull like a comb”—then tells the story of Geryon and Herakles as a gay romance. They first see each other at a bus depot: “There it was one of those moments / that is the opposite of the blindness. / The world poured back and forth between their eyes.” The cosmic tenderness of their hungry young love turns into pain and flight, and the poem into “a cry—upcast to that custom, the human custom of wrong love.”
This brilliantly irregular book begins with Carson’s translations of fragments by the Greek elegiac poet Mimnermos (“Half moon through the pines at dawn / sharp as a girl’s ribcage”) and ends with “The Anthropology of Water,” my favorite of Carson’s essays. A woman on the pilgrimage road of Santiago de Compostela meets a man whom she calls “my Cid” and who becomes her lover. In the rain, they walk and talk from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Finisterre, for a little more than a month. “There is no question I covet that conversation,” the woman thinks. “There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is.” We read to find out if her “tawdry, staggering, irresistible” need can ever be sated, or if this is a lonely journey with no end.
For more: read about the Nobel laureate’s ecstatic minimalism.
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Everybody’s talking about:
- The New Yorker Festival. On Sunday at 3 P.M., Tessa Hadley and Colm Tóibín will be onstage at the T. Rowe Price Theatre, with our fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. (Get your tickets!) Hadley has been contributing short stories to the magazine since 2002, most recently “The Quiet House.” Her next publication is a book of essays about reading deeply, out in February. Tóibín’s next work, “The Bridge,” will be published in December. We recently asked him a couple of questions, and learned that every year he rereads “Ulysses,” by James Joyce, and “The Portrait of a Lady,” by Henry James. The book of poems he knows the most lines from? “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.” And a recommendation for those who enjoy his work? “ ‘Secret Daughter,’ by Veronica Gonzalez Peña, is a brilliant new novel about the complexities of family, the crossing of borders, the losing and gaining of home, the keeping of secrets, and the settling in America,” he said. “If you like my books, you will like this book.” It’s out on November 3rd.
Chad Harbach, who wrote “The Art of Fielding,” has a new novel publishing for the first time in fifteen years. “The Brightness,” coming October 27th, is about two best friends, Irma and Pella.
An English translation of Annie Ernaux’s “Writing, the Other Life” is also out on the 27th.
“Public Access Afterworld,” by Jane Schoenbrun (the writer and director of “I Saw the TV Glow” and “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”), is also coming next week. Set in 1988, it’s a mystery about the aftermath of a weatherman’s very public suicide.
Coming soon:
- Chad Harbach, who wrote “The Art of Fielding,” has a new novel publishing for the first time in fifteen years. “The Brightness,” coming October 27th, is about two best friends, Irma and Pella.
An English translation of Annie Ernaux’s “Writing, the Other Life” is also out on the 27th.
“Public Access Afterworld,” by Jane Schoenbrun (the writer and director of “I Saw the TV Glow” and “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”), is also coming next week. Set in 1988, it’s a mystery about the aftermath of a weatherman’s very public suicide.
P.S. Josh Brolin is a self-proclaimed “book freak.” (And, like Tóibín, he’s a fan of Joyce.)