How writer and scholar Anne Carson used elegy to piece together fragments of her late brother
The Toronto-born poet, essayist and professor of classics spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2011
Canadian poet, essayist, Greek and Latin scholar and librettist Anne Carson is known for infusing classical philosophy with witty, ironic brilliance.
The only two-time winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetry, Carson is the author of Autobiography of Red, Antigonick and Red Doc>. She has also won a Guggenheim, a Lannan Foundation fellowship, a MacArthur "genius grant" and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
With her 2001 book, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, she became the first woman to receive England's T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Her latest book, Wrong Norma, a collection of prose pieces greatly varying in subject matter, was published in early 2024.
When Carson spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2011, they discussed Nox, her most recent work at the time and an elegy to her brother structured around Poem 101 by Roman writer Catullus.
Much of your work invokes the ancient classical period, references to Greek myths, translations from Greek or Latin Essays on ancient thought. What first drew you to that world?
It was a little experience I had in a shopping mall in Hamilton, Ont., in about 1965. I was just trolling around the bookstore for something; for some reason they had a bilingual edition of Sappho by Willis Barnstone, the translator and editor, and it had the Greek on the left, English on the right, and it just looked so fascinating.
I thought, 'I should learn this.'
Then by chance, we moved. The next year I went to a high school in Port Hope, where the Latin teacher knew Greek and when she found I was interested, she offered to teach me during my lunch hour. So I owe it entirely — my whole career and happiness — to Alice Cowan and Port Hope High School.
Was it that the letters, the language looked so alien or it looked enticing?
It was partly the look and just the aesthetic [of the Greek letters]. But it was also, at that time, I was fancying myself as a reborn Oscar Wilde — the whole world of intellectual life in Oscar Wilde's time, which included a lot of Latin and Greek, was sort of a myth to me.
So I thought, 'Well, if I learn Greek, I could be all the more like Oscar Wilde.' So it seemed like the natural next step.
A sense of mystery infuses Nox. I mean, there is the difficulty of elegizing a brother who had disappeared from your life long before his death. And you say your brother was running from the law and went overseas in 1978. What did you know about his life around that time?
I didn't know very much. We both went to university more or less at the same time, different universities. I was immersed in my Greek and Latin and that was the world he had no interest in our patience with. He diverged from my taste and moral standards and everything else that makes you a person.
So I didn't really know him anymore. Then he began to deal drugs and that seemed stupid to me, so we argued about that. And then, after he got arrested, he decided to jump bail and left the country.
Nox itself is presented as an artifact. It's a foldout accordion-style book with pieces of paper stapled or glued on, sometimes with text. There are photos, painted images, fragments of a handwritten letter. But of course each page is a reproduction of all those things, the original process for you of making the book. What was that like? Was it a way of working through grief?
It was not so much grief. Grief partly, but more the puzzle of understanding him.
When he died, actually just before he died, he had telephoned me for the first time since 1978. This was in the year 2000 and we had a very strange, awkward conversation. I arranged to go to Copenhagen, where he turned out to be living, and meet with him.
But a week before I was to go, I got a phone call from a woman who said, 'You don't know me, but your brother has just died in my bathroom.' That was his wife, whom he had been married to in Copenhagen for 17 years. So I went to Copenhagen and met her and the dog and found out some things about his life. But the more I found out, the more I didn't know about who he ever had been, those 22 years he was gone.
The more I found out, the more I didn't know about who he ever had been, those 22 years he was gone.- Anne Carson
So I started the book as an effort of understanding, just trying to put strands of things I could say about him into one place and see what it added up to. And then as it went on, it became a kind of epitaph, a way of praising him, I think.
About halfway through the book, there's a line that says, "Always comforting to assume there is a secret behind what torments you."
Well, a secret meaning something that would make sense, the answer, rather than just all these bits. I mean, most of us, to be honest, are just a collection of bits that don't make sense. And it's a nice idea that there's a coherent self in each of us with a story that another person could tell. But it's kind of a fiction.
And with somebody like him, you really come up against that fiction. Because he did not want to be known.
Did anything change for you after finishing Nox either in how you saw your brother or the whole idea of elegy and investigation?
I don't think anything changed in my view of him. It was more storied, but not more complete, I think.
It's hard to keep the dignity of the subject without getting your own fingerprints all over it.- Anne Carson
Elegy, I don't know. It's a difficult form. That's all I would say. It's hard to keep the dignity of the subject without getting your own fingerprints all over it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
