Anne Carson on Winning the Nobel: “I Think They’re All Crazy”
When the Swedish Academy phoned Anne Carson last Thursday, October 8, she was in Iceland, “listening to the wind,” according to the academy’s permanent secretary, Ingrid Carlberg. “She was very taken by surprise,” Carlberg said. Carson’s own verdict on the people who had just handed her the Nobel Prize in Literature, given to the Icelandic broadcaster RUV and reported by AP: “I think they’re all crazy.”
The academy’s citation praises her “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” Read that cold and you picture homework. Greek fragments, Latin elegies, a classics professor’s footnotes. Carson’s reputation runs the same way: brilliant, admired, slightly intimidating.
The case for readable
We think that reputation has it backwards. Carson is one of the most readable laureates the prize has picked in years, as long as you open the right book first. She writes in short lines and shorter chapters, about heartbreak and grief and boys who fall for the wrong person. The Greek is there, but it works like scaffolding you can walk straight past.
She made a version of the argument herself last week. Poetry, she said, is “probably more useful than prose right now because it’s faster, and everybody is in a hurry.”
Some of her books really are hard, and we will say which. The whole trick is the order you read them in.
Where to start
1. Autobiography of Red (1998). Start here. Carson takes a fragmentary poem by the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus, in which Herakles kills the red, winged monster Geryon, and turns it into a love story. Her Geryon is a lonely boy with wings who falls for an older Herakles, gets left, and meets him again years later in Buenos Aires. It reads like a novel in 47 short chapters, and it has sold nearly 100,000 copies in the U.S. alone, according to AP. That is not a number poetry hits on reputation.
2. Glass, Irony, and God (1995), for its opening piece, “The Glass Essay.” A narrator visits her mother’s house on the moors and turns over an ex-lover and the poems of Emily Brontë. If Autobiography of Red hooked you on her voice, this is the same voice with the mask off.
3. Men in the Off Hours (2000). A grab bag of short poems, verse essays, epitaphs and translations that won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001. Ideal for dipping. Read one piece, close it, come back.
4. If Not, Winter (2002). Her translation of Sappho, brackets and gaps left in. Once you have read Carson’s own poems, the white space on these pages makes sense.
5. Nox (2010). Her book about the absence and death of her brother Michael. Committee chair Anders Olsson called it “a creation as sculptural as it is literary,” and he means it: it comes as a box holding an accordion fold-out of pictures and letters. Wonderful, and a real object to handle. Save it until you trust her.
6. Eros the Bittersweet (1986). Her first book of criticism, built around Sappho’s word for desire as pleasure and pain at once. This is where the scholar shows. Rewarding, slower, best read last.
7. Bakkhai (2015). Her Euripides, for when you want to hear what she does to a whole Greek tragedy.
So which is it?
Readable, with a warning label on two of the seven. Begin with the boy with wings and you will wonder why anyone called her difficult. Begin with the box or the criticism and you will understand. Carson, for her part, expects the prize to help in a modest way. “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book,” she told AP. “Stickers help.” Go find the copy with the sticker, and make it Autobiography of Red.
