Nobel Prize in Literature for Anne Carson: Love is worth the pain of love

This year, the 18 jurors seem to have immersed themselves fundamentally and intensively in the diverse, wide-ranging work of this poet in order to finally find her outstanding enough. Which in turn also means that Carson’s compatriot Margaret Atwood, who has also been considered the favorite in recent years, will no longer receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The decision for Carson is also primarily aesthetic. It seems that the academy has consciously resisted the pressure that has been exerted on it from time to time to make a political statement with its election. Carson is more of a “writer’s writer” and certainly not a popular writer; the literature of many centuries is indispensable for her own literature.

Carson is a classics scholar

And she is a first-time classical philologist and expert in the metrics of Greek, and earns her money teaching classical Greek and Roman literature in Montreal, as well as translating. In her books she prefers to refer to ancient myths and stories and combines the Greek and Latin languages ​​with history, anthropology and modern cultural studies.

In 1986, Carson published her first book, “The Bittersweet Eros,” an essay about the “limb-dissolving” Greek god, whom Sappho was the first to describe at the time as “bittersweet”: “No one who has ever loved contradicts her.” The essay, which is based on Carson’s doctoral thesis, is also about love, lust and jealousy, but at the same time it is itself a poetic treatise in which Homer and Sophocles are used as much as Kafka or Kundera.

Already in this debut it was clear that Carson has mastered more than just one literary form, and so she mixes lyric, poetry, prose, drama and essay. For example, in books that have also been translated into German, such as “Glass, Irony and God” with five epic poems and an essay about the gender of sound. Or Carson wrote a book like The Anthropology of Water, with texts that combine lyrical forms, prose, pop and anthropological insights.

And then there is perhaps her most successful and best-known book, the “Red Roman in Verse”. This verse novel consists of 47 poetic sections, tells the story of the mythical outsider and monster Geryon, who was ultimately killed by Heracles, and transfers it to the present day, alternating between poetry and prose. Both find themselves as homosexual teenagers: “Love is worth the pain of love,” it is once said. There is also a volcanic landscape in the background: “Like the earth’s crust, which / is ten times as thin as eggshells, the skin of the soul / is also a miracle of pressure equalization.”

Love exercises with Marcel Proust

For Carson, the ancient world is a large reservoir that can, but does not necessarily have to, be important for the present. As she said in an interview, when asked about the current relevance of the ancient myths, ideas, ideas and heroes in her work: “They form the root of everything that grew from them and formed the trees on which we live today – they are fresh, the ideas are still carefree. (…) The newness of the world dawns on the Greeks themselves again and again.”

What Carson otherwise likes to do: immerse himself in individual words, experiment with language, write short stories without a plot, for example, obviously, one about Gertrude Stein, “around 9:30: How strange. I had no idea. The day is over.” Or, a great joy for every Proust fan, to quickly trace the relationship between Marcel and Albertine in 59 love exercises (+ appendices), of course with the help of other Proust exegetes such as Samuel Beckett or Roland Barthes.

Carson is being honored “for her bold and imaginative work,” said the Swedish Academy in its statement, for a work “that created new forms for contemporary literature in a playful dialogue with the classical tradition.”

Although some of Anne Carson’s books have long been translated into German by various publishers such as Piper, S. Fischer, Matthes & Seitz, Wallstein and the Vienna-based Turia und Kant Verlag, it is now time to really discover them. This might not be easy, but it is certainly an aesthetic pleasure.