Anne Carson’s collections of poetry include Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, Nox and The Beauty of the Husband, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her many translations of classical works include An Oresteia, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Antigone and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. Her H of H Playbook, inspired by Euripides’ Herakles, is being made into an opera.
Once, once somehow I lost both of them, a man was saying as he came out of the elevator that morning. He was alone. He flicked his eyes on me, off me. He had a furtive tinge and a swank black overcoat – I thought at once of Joseph Conrad, as he is in formal photographs, with the not-quite-Western eyes and virtuosic goatee.
Once I attended a christening at a farmhouse in a country far...
Final Choral Ode from ‘Norma Jeane Baker of Troy’
[enter Norma Jeane as Mr Truman Capote]
Norma Jeane:
Enter chorus. I am my own chorus. ...
Gods do not fall, falling is human. Fall at the start, from between the knees of your mother to the ground. Fall again at the end. Gods, no. Even when new they didn’t lose their balance. They never will now. Even in battle they glare and fuss and stumble, receive light wounds, but don’t hit the ground. Have very little to do with the ground. Traverse it faster than thought. Feet...
Although gamma is the third letter of the ancient Greek alphabet, the fourth book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is called Metaphysics Gamma because there are two extant Metaphysics Alphas and (may we suppose) no one could bear to call one of them lesser, so references to the fourth book are given as Metaphysics Gamma (IV) or sometimes Metaphysics IV (3), this being the book where Aristotle...
Anne Carson reads her poem, ‘A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways’.
In a rare UK performance Canadian poet Anne Carson read from her recent verse novel Red Doc>, a sequel to her 1998 Autobiography of Red.
The pieces in Wrong Norma are not formally linked but interesting connections among them can be found in the idea of wrongness, which appears not as a fact or a verdict but as a feeling.
Some writers discover their powers gradually. Others – Anne Carson, for example – spring from the head of Zeus. With three books in four years during the mid-1990s, the Canadian poet,...
Some time ago the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant reminded us that Greek gods are not persons but forces; and in Anne Carson’s Oresteia, her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three...
Some time around the ninth century, Sappho’s nine books were irrecoverably lost. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem – the...
I am going to end up talking about love, but let me start by talking about money. Money, as Marx tells us, is the enemy of mankind and social bonds. ‘If you suppose man to be man and his...
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