By George Steiner.
Anne Carson’s is among the most inventive, astringent sensibilities in modern letters. Her work encompasses classical and philological erudition, poetry, criticism and translation. Her meditation on Simonides, Paul Celan and the arts of remembrance is masterly. Under licence, as it were, to Ezra Pound, Carson has “translated” the Greek tragic poets and Catullus. Her Sappho may well be the most incisive we have. Intertextuality, collage, declared and covert citations are instrumental and often enlightening in her “decreations”. Carson’s tactics of montage enlist opera libretti, screenplays, oratorios and philosophical arguments. Pascal is in counterpoint to Artaud; Hephaistos dances a “Hunger Tango”; Gertrude Stein, a titular influence, and Abelard meet. Beckett is pervasive, as are the terrors of vacancy in Antonioni. The reader, the listener is provoked and challenged to the utmost. An Anne Carson construct is a palimpsest drawing us into an opaque, turbulent vortex.