Poet, novelist, and professor Anne Carson, who won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, is sure to reawaken interest in Greek classics just as the movie Homer has done this year. So, we are all going Greek and Latin, Korean and Hungarian, while English looks for a truly original writer—especially with many of the recent Nobels going for translated novels. English literature is being taught a lesson, rightly so. Carson lives at the intersection of different roads, and it is difficult to get a handle on her. She has double citizenship of Canada and Iceland of all countries, knows better Greek than she knows English, and uses poetry and prose as if these are easily interchangeable genres. She mostly scoffs at contemporary literature, saying she only reads books written beyond 500 BC. Carson is the third Canadian to receive the globally powerful 1.2 million-pound prize after Saul Bellow (1976) and Alice Munroe (2013).
Greek Myth As A Source Of Inspiration
Greek myth is her home, and her “reinterpretation turns myth into the recording and surviving of pain through the viewfinder of poetry,” a critic says. Carson mostly takes incidents from Greek myths and turns them into something more recent. Like in the Autobiography of Red, in which her concern is a moody teenager, she uses fragments from Greek myth to explain present-day foibles. Her main contribution is that she has made poetry approachable and likeable, and many of her poetry collections have sold over a lakh of copies each, an impossible task in an age where the mind is instructed not to work at all. No subject is off-limits to her; one poem in Wrong Norma is about the Roget’s Thesaurus.
Revisiting The Classics In Modern Literature
Carson’s work as a teacher and writer and classicist brings into focus the state of contemporary literature. Are there no stories to be told anymore that we have to hark back to 500 BC and recreate the illegible fantasies of a forgotten age? The fact that the year of AI is also the year of classic Greek literature reveals that in many ways we value what is old and fear what the future holds. Carson gives the impression “of someone from another world, either extraterrestrial or ancient,” a critic writes.
A Writer Confronting Parkinson’s Disease
Carson is old-fashioned not just in her writing but in other ways as well, unconnected with any of the technological wonders of this world and seeking sanctuary in the long-forgotten stories. She is used to taking reams of notes and now complains that she cannot write, as her hands have been overtaken by Parkinson’s disease.
“The upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, and the slant loses its smooth smart angle; it all looks embarrassing. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame,” Carson said a few years back.
What matters to us is that her poetry need not be scrubbed away in shame.
