Anne Carson

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

—Carson, Grief Lessons, 8

By the time I was seventeen, I was already taking Latin and had been for years. It was my favorite class and I was exceptionally good at it and still I did not consider myself a classicist, or a classicist-to-be. What I liked about Latin was the mechanics, the way that all its precise, highly-inflected parts fit together like clockwork and how it could be dissected and decoded into neat, orderly boxes. I did not much care for the literature that put the language to work, only for the theoretical machinery of its grammar, so the idea of studying that literature (much less Greek literature) in any serious way did not appeal to me in the least. It's unfathomable to me now but I'd even read some Ovid by that point, and I wish I could even say that I'd hated it, but really, it had simply passed unnoticed.

At some point, though, I saw a quote from a translation of Euripides' Orestes. Not the famous one ("Not to me. Not if it's you.") but this:

SLAVE: You won't kill me?

ORESTES: Go.

SLAVE: Fabulous.

ORESTES: Unless I reconsider.

SLAVE: Not fabulous.

It was funny. I didn't know ancient literature could be funny.

The Tumblr post with the screenshot thoughtfully cited its source (Carson's An Oresteia); I bought the book on Kindle and I read it in a single night. It wasn't just one translation but three, one from each of the three major Greek tragedians, and each came with an introductory essay that felt like magic. I was up until maybe three AM and by the time I woke up the next morning, I knew I was going to be a classicist.

So Elektra talks, wails, argues, denounces, sings, chants and screams from one end of the play to the other. She is onstage almost every minute and has one of the longest speaking parts in Greek tragedy. Sounds of every kind emerge from her, articulate and inarticulate. Her power of language is fantastic; she can outtalk anyone in the play. Her vocabulary of screams is so rich that I chose to transliterate her cries letter for letter—OIMOI! instead of the conventional Alas! or Woe is me! This is not a person who would say Woe is me! She is a torrent of self. Actionless, yet she causes things to happen and people to change. Hopeless, yet she keeps Elektra going.

—Carson, An Oresteia, 79

For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros. When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps.

—Carson, Eros the Bittersweet 16–17

1.2 Autopsy is a term historians use of the "eyewitnessing” of data or events by the historian himself, a mode of authorial power. To withold this authorization is also powerful. Herodotos carefully does not allege to have seen a phoenix, which comes only once every five hundred years, although he mentions the same legends as Hekataios. Herodotos likes to introduce such information with a word like λέγεται: "it is said,” as one might use on dit or dicitur. When my brother died his dog got angry, stayed angry, barking, growling, lashing, glaring, by day and night. He went to the door, he went to the window, he would not lie down. My brother's widow, it is said, took the dog to the church on the day of the funeral. Buster goes right up to the front of Sankt Johannes and raises himself on his paws on the edge of the coffin and as soon as he smells the fact, his anger stops. "To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?” asks a dog in a novel I read once (Virginia Woolf Flush 87). I wonder what the smell of nothing is. Smell of autopsy.

That bit of dialogue from Carson's translation of Orestes was the first bit of ancient literature that ever truly caught my eye. Carson's translation of Sophocles' Elektra was the first Greek text I ever loved. Carson's Eros the Bittersweet was the first bit of real classical scholaship I ever read and when I read it again after graduating from college and I understood it, it felt like I'd made it somehow.

I want desperately to be able to write like her. Not in the sense of style, but more in the confidence. Her translations get dinged sometimes as being "unfaithful", too much of her and not enough of the text she's translating, and while I understand where that comes from,^[1] I come away from the experience envying her boldness, her willingness to render the text as she sees it. Eros the Bittersweet reads the ancient Greek concept of eros ("desire") through Kafka and Velázquez's Las Meninas and Virginia Woolf, and it isn't even that it's learned, it's that it feels personal, like a glimpse inside of her head.

I don't think I'll ever be able to disentangle whether I love her work because it sits at the very foundation of my academic life, or whether it lives there necessarily because of how much I love it. Honestly, I don't know how much the direction matters, when I can determine the magnitude of the effect.

Velazquez' artifice triangulates our perception so that we all but see ourselves looking. That is, he has arranged his painting in such a way that a haunting fact gradually dawns on us as we observe it. Namely the fact that the vacancy recorded by the mirror is not that of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana. It is our own. Standing like understudies in the place where the king and queen would be, we recognize (vaguely disappointed) that the faces looming from the mirror are not our own and we all but see (if the angle did not keep jumping out of focus) that point where we disappear into ourselves in order to look. A point lying in the gap between ourselves and them. Attempts to focus on that point pull the mind into vertigo, while at the same time a particular acute delight is present. We long to see that point, although it tears us.

—Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 72

To be clear: there is no such thing as a translation "neutral" enough to act as a perfect substitute for the translated text. Such a thing is simply impossible. As for why some translations are considered "unfaithful" while others are not, there is some element of style involved (Carson, for example, make liberal use of modernist-style emphatic line breaks and I suspect that this accounts for a not insignificant portion of the complaint that she adds too much of herself to the text), but there is also the simple politics of neutrality, the fact that that "because whiteness and masculinity are seen as default identities...[Stanley] Lombardo's voice doesn't overshadow Homer's, but Carson's does Sophocles'" (Bess Myers, "Women Who Translate").^{^}