Carson doesn’t try to ‘make literature’ … Louis on the Nobel-winning writer. Photograph: Golli/Kjartan Þorbjörnsson
The French author discovered Carson on a bus while stranded in a snowstorm and has been enthralled by her fearless imagination ever since
1. Anne Carson is one of the greatest writers of our time. I discovered her work on a Peter Pan bus from New York to New England. I’d bought Antigonickin a bookstore a few days earlier, almost randomly. From the very first lines, I was enthralled. While we were on the bus, a snowstorm suddenly blanketed the roads, and the other passengers and I found ourselves stuck for 10 hours in rural America, surrounded by an entirely white landscape. I took my computer out of my backpack and started to translateAntigonick into French. Spontaneously. I was so absorbed by the power of Carson’s text that I didn’t notice the hours pass.
2. One of Carson’s greatest strengths is that, unlike so many other contemporary writers, she doesn’t try to “make literature”. She writes. Sometimes clouds do the speaking, in her work, and sometimes monsters do; sometimes, in the middle of a collection of poems, she lets an imaginary Catherine Deneuve take over the narration. Sometimes she writes a letter to her own sleep and sometimes she publishes notes she’s scribbled on her hand. She writes about Homer, but also Rosalía; about Brecht, but also Marilyn Monroe.
3. In Carson’s work, time is upside down – out of joint, as Shakespeare writes in Hamlet. This is one of the strangest aspects of her work and it has fascinated me from my first reading. In her rewriting of Antigone, in the first scene, Antigone and her sister Ismene talk about Hegel. And yet, in Carson’s play, the conversation happens as if entirely normal, as if the ancient Greek Antigone and Ismene really had discussed Hegel together. One day, my friend Ivo van Hove decided to put on Sophocles’ Antigone and called Carson to ask her if she would do a new translation. Carson responded, “I already did a translation, titled Antigonick.” Ivo said, “Of course, but that’s not a literal translation of Sophocles – in the first scene, the two sisters talk about Hegel.” Carson responded, “That’s what’s written in Sophocles’ text. All I did was translate.”
A tribute to Carson’s brother … Nox. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
4. One of Carson’s most wrenching texts is called Nox. In it, she tells the story of her brother, or rather, the story of her brother’s absence. When he was very young, her brother was convicted by a Canadian court. Rather than go to prison, he fled. He hid in Europe and Asia for decades under false identities. During the time of his disappearance, he would sometimes send his family a brief letter, or a postcard with quick phrases scribbled on the back. On a few occasions he called, just for a few minutes. One day, the Carson family received a call informing them of his death in Copenhagen. Carson gathered the photos she had of this brother who had just died and whom she hardly knew, and also the letters he had sent her, and she wrote fragments about her memories of him interspersed with an analysis of a poem by Catullus. She added in reflections on Herodotus and history, and very personal notes on pain and loss, reminiscent of Barthes’s Mourning Diary. Then she put all these notes into a box. And later Nox was published in the form of this box, with a single sheet of paper folded accordion-style inside bearing all the notes and images and fragments that she had accumulated. Never had a book looked like this – a shoebox with an enormous accordion foldout inside.
5. Carson thus spurns the limits of what a book is; her work Float is made up of several booklets on different subjects gathered together in a plastic envelope. Nox is indeed a box. H of H Playbook is a wide rectangular facsimile edition, impossible to put on a bookshelf. Lots of writers across history have tried to reinvent writing. Very few of them have also had the idea of reinventing what a book is, or transforming the book-object itself. Anne Carson did.
6. But Carson’s formal inventiveness should not lead us to forget the powerfully political dimension of her work. In Autobiography of Red, she takes inspiration from the ancient poet Stesichorus to tell the story of the monster killed by Hercules during his 12 labours. She chooses to tell the story of the monster, the victim, rather than repeat the tale of the hero, the executioner. She imagines a story in which a young Hercules and Geryon have a devastating homosexual affair. In her books, Carson often places herself in the position of the defeated.
7. For a long time she identified with Oscar Wilde, to the point of having a Wilde outfit that she regularly wore during her adolescence.
8. Women are also at the heart of her work, and always have been. In Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, one of her most beautiful texts, she makes Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy into one and the same character: two women who, despite the centuries between them, remain the object of the same masculine violence, the same dictates of obligatory beauty. Carson has also translated Sappho’s poems. And in her version of Euripides’s Bacchae, she gives an unheard-of psychological depth to the female characters.
9. On a more personal level, I can say that Carson has a distaste for the kind of social interaction that tends to come with a literary life. I sincerely believe that she likes nothing more than to be at home, writing. One day when we were signing copies of our books side by side, she said to me, “I really hate this!” Another time, after a performance we did together at the House of Literature in Oslo, she proposed that we quickly head for the restaurant in order to avoid the small talk.
10. Recently, we were talking about a trip I’m getting ready to take to Iceland, where she lives. I suggested to Anne that we do a performance together, with two voices, like we had done in the past. Then I felt bad about adding work to her life and so I sent her a follow-up message saying, “But we don’t have to do something public. We can just relax and enjoy ourselves.” Anne responded: “I prefer working. That way I don’t have to think about the world. Or myself.” How better to sum up the greatness of Anne Carson?
