The secret of Anne Carson's youth

BarcelonaEven though she is approaching 80 years old and Parkinson's has caused her to lose her beloved handwriting, the poetic and essayistic work of Anne Carson, 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, knows how to preserve its youth thanks to a secret her readers know well: a mischievous, perceptive, and erudite sense of humor, without the latter implying pedantry.

Since the beginning of her literary career with Eros the Bittersweet (1986; and coming soon in Catalan from Veles i Vents), Carson has sought to connect her academic specialty, classical Greek literature—from Sappho to Sophocles and Euripides, which she has translated into English—with her own life experience and a critical look at current events. In books such as Autobiography in Red (1998; in Spanish from Pre-textos) and The Beauty of the Husband (2001; in Catalan from Vaso Roto), she combines the longing and malaise caused by a lost love with well-administered sparks of wit. Although in recent years her work has gained layers of complexity, blurring the lines between poetry, prose, essay, and translation—a good example being Red Doc> (2013; in Spanish from Bajo la Luna)—, Carson continues to connect antiquity with the most immediate present through unusual strategies.

That is why when she makes the poet Ovid cry in Short Talks (1992, revised in 2015), his tears are also those of any reader who can or wants to understand what exile means. Every night, Ovid "dresses himself in sadness as if it were a garment and continues writing" without losing his smile. Just as Anne Carson persists in her writing, who since her Parkinson's diagnosis signed up for boxing classes to slow the progress of the disease.