Twice in the last five years, the Swedish Academy has awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to a woman who takes eros seriously: in 2022 to Annie Ernaux and now to Anne Carson. Each is a minimalist in his own way, and both seek forms of writing that restrain a terrifying excess of emotion, giving shape and weight to the maelstrom of passion. There are many elaborate forms in Carson’s work: poems, plays, essays, translations of ancient Greek tragedies and lyrics, an opera, a comic strip, a book in a box. I first learned about her in college thanks to “If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho,” a translation of the poet’s surviving lines:
I remember the “limb melting”. (Compare this with “relaxer of the limbs,” a cruder translation that makes Eros sound like a personal trainer.) I also remember the shock of “sweet-bitter,” which sounded completely wrong—perhaps because “bittersweet” was so familiar that it clearly disguised the brutal simultaneity of pleasure and pain. Carson used the familiar word for the title of his first book of criticism, “Bittersweet Eros” (1986), about the uncontrollable power of desire in ancient Greek literature. “Alien to his will, it imposes itself irresistibly on it from outside. Eros is an enemy,” he wrote. This enemy could be stopped with a line, but it would always break through the defenses of the will.
Translation is Carson’s primary art form. One way to describe this is through the art of constant metaphor: A word in one language is similar to, but not the same as, a word in another language. Translating means falling into imperfections, differences and even mistakes from the very beginning. “Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself/the act of making mistakes,” Carson wrote in “Men in the Off Hours” (2000). “Not only are some things different from what they appear to be, so we mislead them, / but such misconception is valuable.” His mind’s experience of error, and through it, what runs through the rest of his writings and enables him to move between different things, whether within a line (Eros from Sappho shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees) or throughout an entire book, such as “The Economy of Loss,” in which he reads Simonides of Keos as a distant analogue of Paul Celan. It’s like he’s constantly translating..” The opposite of error is a kind of divine indifference; not bringing different things to the considered closeness, but scattering them randomly and enjoying the disorder one creates. I often think of these chilling lines from the book “The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos” (2001):