Anne Carson’s Seductive Strangeness
· The Atlantic
Anne Carson, who won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature today, doesn’t write masterpieces or door-stoppers, and she has no interest in emulating the great works of the past—including those of past laureates. Despite her training as a classicist and her celebrated skill as a translator, she would likely have little to say about the authenticity of film adaptations of The Odyssey. Carson is a poet by trade, but she’s really an archaeologist of sorts, sifting through the pottery shards of culture and letting the light of our own time illuminate their beauty.
Carson prefers to use fragments as seeds for her own poetry, and the high-cultural touchpoints for her lyrics and critical essays—Sappho, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Michelangelo Antonioni, Simone Weil—sometimes give her work an air of forbidding experimentation that quickly turns, upon reading, into pleasure and delight. You may not know or care who Heloïse and Abelard are, but I can promise that you will enjoy reading them argue in a hotel room in the middle of her 2005 “spoken-word opera,” Decreation.
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Across roughly two dozen translations and original books, a twee-punk “don’t give a damn” attitude pervades Carson’s reinterpretation of ancient texts: Her poetry shuns obeisance to tradition and literality and embraces creative fantasy instead. For that reason, the barrier to entry for her poetry is surprisingly low—surprisingly, I mean, for a poet whose books often contain a page or two of footnotes. Carson wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the ancient poet Sappho at the University of Toronto, in the city where she was born in 1950. When I was a classics major in college, her 1998 re-creation of a bit of obscure Greek mythology, Autobiography of Red, was a cult object. Some of her poetry isn’t even poetry at all, but a mix of essays, screenplays, even the odd oratorio. Nox, her 2010 elegy for her brother—the title is Latin for “night”—arrives in a box and unfolds like an accordion. Carson’s predilection for the classics doesn’t domesticate them; it riffs on how astonishingly strange it can be to put words down on a page (or papyrus) in a meaningful order, and to try to have them capture the human condition.
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Sappho, Carson’s early subject, offers an important clue as to why her work matters to us now, and perhaps also as to why she won the Nobel. Sappho’s poetry has survived only in bits and pieces, and her form of writing, as much as her obsession with love and longing, has inspired Carson’s own iconoclastic, restless tacking among genres. Yet Carson is averse to the common assumption that we have to look for what’s directly relatable in the past in order to fall in love with it. In an interview with The Paris Review, she confessed that she finds very little “direct relevance of ancient things to modern things”; instead, she gets “little glimpses of similarity, embedded in unbelievable otherness.”
That strikes me as pretty close to a definition of poetry itself, the art form that may be better than any other at embedding everyday objects (a wheelbarrow, a coffee spoon) within the tantalizing atmosphere of the new. Carson’s poetry connects us to the past for the same reason that it stands out as some of the most accomplished poetry of her generation: Rather than lulling us with history’s familiarity, she seduces us with its strangeness.
In the days leading up to the Nobel Prize announcement, I happened to have been rereading Autobiography of Red for the first time in 24 years. This “novel in verse” takes its prompt from a 6th-century-B.C.E. fragment about a little monster, Geryon, who falls in love with Herakles—before the god kills him. In Carson’s rendering, the two meet as teenagers at a bus station and reunite years later in Buenos Aires. They travel by plane to a volcano in Peru, where Geryon, now an aspiring photographer, takes pictures of the bubbling lava (no one dies). From so fragile, bizarre, and slender a source—we never forget this is a meet-cute between a red, winged monster and a divine hero—Carson conjures a romance in which love feels unbelievably alien and yet utterly recognizable: “Up on the overpass / the night was wide open / and blowing headlights like a sea. He stood against the wind and let it peel him / clean.”
Carson’s playfulness, humor, and curiosity—and, above all, her tenderness—make her poetry a powerful antidote to the chilled and coarsened social world of the present, not to mention the worry that history and the classics will lose their audiences. What I find most moving about her work is her ability to turn abstract thought into concrete feeling, and to make this feeling our own. Who has not wondered, as the young Geryon does, what “distance” looks like? Carson writes, “It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.” When I gaze down a path or a road, when I feel the separation from someone I love, or when I think of the gulf between the present and the past, I somehow know exactly what she means.