nox
So, I try to be careful about the accessibility of the things I recommend on the internet, because I'm a grad student at a major univeristy in the US and thus am lucky enough to have excellent institutional access, and I know that's not true for most people.
Anne Carson's Nox is going to be an exception. It's an art book, so it's expensive and hard to find. Expensive enough and hard enough to find that, despite having been an inveterate Anne Carson fangirl for over a decade at this point, I hadn't bothered to acquire a copy. Then I realized my department's library had one and I figured hey, what the hell.
The whole book is organized around Catullus 101, a poem in Catullus mourns his dead brother.[1] Carson gives the Latin text, followed by a definition of each word in order, and capped off by her translation of the poem. If you know very little about Catullus or Latin poetry, you'll enjoy it; if you do know a thing or two, you'll enjoy it even more (and even if you do, you should pay attention to the definitions Carson gives).
It is to die for. The experience as a whole is the real art of it, but the individual sections of the poem are also incredible. Here's an early piece that's going to stick with me for a while:
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.
This poems takes me out at the knees, especially given that I am very familiar with another of Carson's works, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, which begins with this:
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He’ll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victims head enables him to throw away the anger of all his bereavements. Perhaps you think this does not apply to you. Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mother’s funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore off her head and threw it out the window they nodded, changed gears, drove away.
Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die.
—"Tragedy: A Curious Art Form", 7
I cannot get over the way the poem plays off of the essay (the latter, for the record, was published four years earlier than the former). Rage and grief, mixed ready to begin the morning (or, rather, the genre) right.[2]
Anyway, I love this book desperately. If you're lucky enough to have either access to a library that owns it (you can check here) or thirty to fifty bucks to drop on 150-ish pages of really good poetry (I know, sorry), you should read it.