Where words work: Anne Carson on Greek

A friend in California shared this observation of Anne Carson's (author of Eros the Bittersweet and translator of Sappho):

"I don’t know every language in the world—maybe if I knew Sanskrit and Chinese I would think differently—but there’s something about Greek that seems to go deeper into words than any modern language. So that when you’re reading it, you’re down in the roots of where words work, whereas in English we’re at the top of the tree, in the branches, bouncing around. It was stunning to me, a revelation. And it continues to be stunning, continues to be like a harbor always welcoming. Strange, but welcoming."

It's an excerpt from an interview published in full here.

Geometries of desire: Anne Carson, Women of Trachis

A slender volume by a close reader. Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet culls superb lines from the entire corpus of Greek literature on the subject of Eros, and ponders them with the mind of a poet and the knowledge of a teacher of ancient Greek. She speaks of the divided soul, of love as lack, and is particularly suggestive when it comes to staged erotic triangles.

In Sophocles' Women of Trachis, triangles proliferate:


                           Achelous                           Heracles                          Hyllus



                                                  Deianira                             Iole



                                                                    Nessus

One more ode to one more man

Struggling with the second ode of Sophocles' Antigone this week, I came across this, and nearly wept with delight:

Many terribly quiet customers exist but none more

terribly quiet than Man:

his footsteps pass so perilously soft across the sea

in marble winter,

up the stiff blue waves and every Tuesday

down he grinds the unastonishable earth

with horse and shatter.

Shatters too the cheeks of birds and traps them in his forest headlights,

salty silvers roll into his net, he weaves it just for that,

this terribly quiet customer.

He dooms

animals and mountains technically,

by yoke he makes the bull bend, the horse to its knees.

And utterance and thought as clear as complicated air and

moods that make a city moral, these he taught himself.

The snowy cold he knows to flee

and every human exigency crackles as he plugs it in:

every outlet works but

one.

Death stays dark.

Death he cannot doom.

Fabrications notwithstanding.

Evil,

good,

laws,

gods,

honest oath taking notwithstanding.

Hilarious in his high city

you see him cantering just as he please,

the lava up to here.

Anne Carson