Twice in the last five years, the Swedish Academy has awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to a woman who takes eros seriously: Annie Ernaux, in 2022, and, now, Anne Carson. Each is, in her own way, a minimalist, and both have pursued forms of writing that constrain a terrible excess of feeling—that give shape and weight to the maelstrom of passion. There are many finely wrought forms in Carson’s œuvre: poems, plays, essays, translations of ancient Greek tragedies and lyrics, an opera, a comic book, a book-in-a-box. I first learned of her in college, through “If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho,” a translation of the poet’s surviving verses:
I remember the “melter of limbs.” (Compare it to “loosener of limbs,” an ungainlier translation that makes Eros sound like a personal trainer.) I remember, too, the shock of “sweetbitter,” which sounded all wrong—perhaps because “bittersweet” was so familiar that it hid in plain sight the brutal simultaneity of pleasure and pain. Carson had used the familiar word for the title of her first book of criticism, “Eros the Bittersweet” (1986), about the ungovernable force of desire in ancient Greek literature. “Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without. Eros is an enemy,” she wrote. This enemy could be detained by a line of poetry, but it would always overrun the will’s defenses.
Translation is Carson’s primary art form. One way to describe it is as the art of sustained metaphor: a word in one language is similar, but not identical, to a word in another language. To translate is to commit to imperfection, to unlikeness and even error, from the get-go. “Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself / in the act of making a mistake,” Carson wrote in “Men in the Off Hours” (2000). “Not only that things are other than they seem, / and so we mistake them, / but that such mistakenness is valuable.” It is the mind’s experience of error and, through it, of discovery that courses through the rest of her writing, and that allows her to move among unlike things, whether within a line (“Eros shook my / mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees,” from Sappho), or across an entire book, such as “Economy of the Unlost,” in which she reads Simonides of Keos as a distant analogue to Paul Celan, “a poet who uses language as if he were always translating.” The opposite of error is a kind of divine indifference—not bringing unlike things into considered proximity but strewing them about at random, and delighting in the disorder one creates. I think often of these chilling lines from “The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos” (2001):
