Anne Carson, unsaying herself to self-affirm

The news that the poet Anne Carson has been awarded the Nobel has a touch of self-fulfilling prophecy: just as some recent Nobels (like fellow poet Louise Glück, like Annie Ernaux, like Han Kang, or like the one from just the previous edition, László Krasznahorkai) constituted slight and pleasant surprises, Anne Carson's shines for its forcefulness. “Ah, right, Anne Carson,” the many thousands of readers of her verses around the world must have said. When I say that the aforementioned were “slight and pleasant surprises,” I mean that they were not entirely unexpected: they appeared in the Nobel “betting pools,” in the lists of authors nominated to receive the award, but perhaps in less visible spots on those lists. Not Anne Carson: Anne Carson had already been among the names heading them for years, and it is not out of place to imagine her, in recent years, waiting for the call from the Swedish Academy. A bit like Paul Valéry, who was among the candidates for twelve or thirteen years in a row, and every year, when the Nobel dates arrived, he would go for long walks to calm his nerves. He died without receiving it, precisely the year that the Swedish academics had decided –they said– to give it to him. Anne Carson has declared that she too will go out for a walk in the woods, but in her case “so as not to have to answer the phone; afterwards, we will enjoy the silence.”

Silence is a recurring theme in the poetry of Anne Carson, sometimes as a space of pain and other times as an opportunity for refuge. Anne Carson's poetry starts from the realization that existence is a fact often difficult to bear: the existence of the world and one's own. That is why her verses – long, discursive, sometimes admonitory – often provide room for a vision of language as an instrument to access the dissolution of the self, or, at the very least, its dismemberment, as happens in Decreation or in Autobiography of red. Other times the self, in Carson's poems, dissolves in contact with the egos of others, as happens in Beauty: A Story in Six Parts, an impressive chronicle in verse of the disintegration of a couple. Or it seeks a place to hide within literature, as in Albertine Workout, where the character of Albertine (the fugitive from Proust's Recherche) becomes an alter ego of the poet, by way of a splendid process of transliteration and transmutation of voices and texts.

Anne Carson's poetry is culturalist, but it has the rare virtue of connecting with broad audiences, due to her cold, and at the same time passionate, way of portraying the dissatisfaction of being alive, and of being alive in the time she has had to live, between the 20th and 21st centuries. She uses references such as classical myths, and the great texts of Antiquity (but also of Modernity, such as Proust) as correlates of the frustration that self-awareness produces in the author herself, a frustration shared with her fellow citizens. You can read Carson in Catalan, published by the Vaso Roto publishing house and magnificently translated by Núria Busquet Molist.