Exploring Anne Carson

It’s not every year that a classicist wins the Nobel Prize for Literature (in fact, it hasn’t happened since 1959), so Mary and Charlotte interrupt the schedule to reflect on Anne Carson’s extraordinary career as both a classicist and a poet.

Carson is most famous as a poet, but her work is rooted in her scholarly essays and translations of Ancient Greek. Mary and Charlotte talk about how her pioneering book Eros the Bittersweet (1986, based on her phd thesis) linked Sappho to love poetry throughout the ages, including Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf - at a time when ‘Comparative Literature’ was a dirty phrase. This book also informed Carson’s own bittersweet love poetry in books like Glass and God and The Beauty of the Husband. 

Mary and Charlotte also discuss Autobiography of Red, her bold re-interpretation of Stesichorus’ account of the monster Geryon and Heracles, which not only responds to an Ancient Greek poet most people haven’t heard of, but brings the story into the present day. 

Further reading:

We discussed in particular, Eros the Bittersweet (available in many different editions) and Autobiography of Red (available online here: https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PSPA254/AUTOBIOGRAPHY%20OF%20RED.pdf)

H of H Playbook is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by New Directions in the US.

Her full (immense) biography has its own wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Carson_bibliography

The interview with Carson in the Paris Review is here: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson

The 2013 New York Times profile is here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/the-inscrutable-brilliance-of-anne-carson.html

And in the Iowa Review, here: https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/iowareview/article/id/15965/ (there’s a download link)

Daniel Mendelsohn engaged with Carson on Sappho in the New York Review of Books 14 August, 2003

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