Anne Carson's Ecstatic Minimalism

Anne Carson has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but there is one surprising detail: of all the great emotions, it is eros, desire, that Carson takes most seriously — and she does so using a style of writing that seems restrained, concise, minimalist. The instinct is to think that those who write about intense emotions should be baroque, exaggerated; Carson, however, compresses the chaos of feeling into precise, almost geometric forms. The twist is this: her minimalist writing does not serve to empty emotions, but to contain them — like an embankment that holds back a flood, not a dam that drains everything. Carson turns translation into an art of imperfections: she says that to translate is to commit from the outset to accepting error, difference, and misunderstanding. In one of her poems, she writes: “Aristotle says that metaphor makes the mind experience itself while it is making a mistake” – and she adds that error is valuable, because that is where something new is discovered. As a student, Merve Emre recounts discovering Carson through her translation of Sappho's fragments. She recalls the phrase “Eros, the melter of limbs,” which stuck with her because “melter” sounded too mechanical to her — whereas “melter of limbs,” “he who melts the limbs,” conveys the physical power of passion. And then there is the word “dolceamaro,” which Carson translates as “sweetbitter,” reversing the usual order precisely to convey that simultaneity of pleasure and pain that the familiar version had come to conceal. A detail that shifts the entire way we perceive desire. Carson doesn't just translate the Greeks: she makes them engage in dialogue with everyday life. Take Geryon, the winged monster who accompanies his brother to kindergarten in “Autobiography of Red”; or the TV scripts where Sappho and Antigone chat with Virginia Woolf. But beneath these scenes lies a darker awareness: eros as an essential flaw, a force that makes human beings terrible to one another, as she writes in “Plainwater”: “Men in love are terrible. You see them approaching, hungry like prehistoric wolves, something struggling to survive between them like a root or a soul, flaring up for a moment, then they destroy it.” This desire that can destroy, but also make us feel “ecstatic” — out of ourselves, almost mad or saintly. Carson studies figures such as Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil, women who experienced love as a spiritual calling: Sappho is said to have thrown herself off a cliff for unrequited love, Porete was burned at the stake, and Weil died of starvation. Carson writes that love is the true litmus test between authentic and false spirituality, even though one never knows which side one is really on. The real triumph, she suggests, is not winning a prize, but enduring the blows of eros without breaking. There is one scene that lingers: a woman in crisis, her mother watching her, the doctor saying that grief is a long process. She replies: “I'm holding on! I look it in the eye.” And the mother smiles: “Yes, you can do it.” Carson's writing seems small, but it contains the excess that we usually fear. If this idea has changed the way you see writing and emotions, on Lara Notes you can choose I'm In — it's not a like; it's declaring that this perspective now applies to you. And if, in a few days' time, you happen to tell someone that Anne Carson uses poetry to contain the flood of feelings, on Lara Notes you can mark the conversation with Shared Offline: that way, those who were there will know. This story comes from The New Yorker and saves you 1 minute of reading.