Amsterdam Anne Carson – In Sensual Gestures

‘The Glass Essay’ (1994) was the first work of Anne Carson I read in Ian Rae’s class in 2002 at McGill University, where Carson was a professor of classics and where I was an exchange student. Our paths crossed, yet I never met the Canadian poet, translator, classicist on campus. If I felt connected to the poets we studied through how they bent genres, broke down boundaries to express (be)longing, loss, sexuality, love, place and memory, reading Carson aroused the translator in me. As a parting gift to my class, I read ‘Autobiography’ by Nâzim Hikmet, leaving traces of my native Turkey in the space where Anne Carson taught classical literature. In From Cohen to Carson:
The Poet’s Novel in Canada (2008), Rae writes that in Carson’s work translation becomes ‘an act of composing elements from different epochs and speech genres, rather than an exercise in maintaining a uniform identity for the text across languages and periods.’¹ Translation becomes an artistic practice.

‘Imagination is the core of desire. It acts at the core of metaphor. It is essential to the activity of reading and writing.’² It all starts with Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, published in 1986, Anne Carson’s reworking of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto from 1981, the inception of a life-long artistic, academic and poetic yearning, trying ‘to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them. They are not like anything else, but they are like each other.’³ The roots of Carson’s oeuvre will grow from here, making connections that will appear in various works, experimenting to push boundaries of language, genres, mediums, refusing to be caught in just one space. The way Anne Carson creates mirrors desire as defined in Greek, aka the eros, she describes in her first book:

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.⁴

Writing, reading and translation become erotic gestures which entail an ongoing yearning for creating on the edge.

WEAVING CONNECTIONS
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I spilled black ink all over my desk where my copy of Plainwater (1986) was laying open on the chapter ‘A Sudden Unspeakable Sweat Floweth Down My Skin.’ The ink seems to have moved with intention, covering the words ‘Sweat. It’s just sweat. But I do like to look at them.’ In many interviews, Carson mentions randomness, the freedom to invent, working with archives as being her happy place, and especially the ephemeralness of things: ‘I’ve always assumed my work would disappear five minutes after I died,’ she says to John Freeman, adding that she has been drawing on bad material and crappy paper. ‘I definitely write in the moment,’ Carson says, which enables creation beyond self-expression even if the self is all over her writing, ‘I am more interested in expressing what is true about the world rather than myself,’ finding the next word that is true, weaving connections from life events, fragmented archives and random encounters.

I first read The Beauty of the Husband:
A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001) years before I was betrayed by a lover, perceiving the main protagonist as a victimised female voice, eroticised to take away her agency. Rereading the work for this essay, my post-betrayed body ceased to receive the poetry as intellectual exercise attacking my then-comfortable love story:

A wound gives off its own light surgeons say.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out you could dress this wound by what shines from it.⁵

Carson wasn’t painting a victim, but explored beauty, language and the (im)possibility of being one flesh: ‘Husband and wife may erase a boundary. Creating a white page.’ The poet infuses the page the lover failed to fill, eroticising her own narrative not as a revenge plot but to create in the same way she fills the silences in classical texts lost over time, through translation, allowing a new interpretation that will never be fixed in time but rather exist in its moment of making and receiving.

Browsing a bookshop in a recent visit to Madrid, I got struck by a title, Autocienciaficción para el fin de la especie (2022) by Begoña Méndez, with its back cover depicting a black and white photograph by Marcelo Viquez of a half-naked woman, face buried behind a rag, twisting her thighs and ass towards the viewer as she crosses her legs, her labia appearing in between as a shadow. The image sent me back to a line in ‘The Glass Essay’: ‘thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon/at a man who no longer cherished me.’ Two decades ago I was spurned by this description, yet today my perception shifted, and this random encounter with Méndez’s work shaped my reflection. In a paragraph of Autocienciaficción, Méndez introduces the reader to the photograph to describe her own writing as a way to find her (mis)belonging, as a transformation that will go all the way to erase her face, becoming ‘a useless and highly valuable object,’ something ‘so precious that you would face death to possess it, so far away that you can never reach.’⁶ Then she recounts her desire to stay and dwell in Viquez’s photograph of ‘a body dispossessed from its face. Half-nude, defenseless. Something that used to be a woman. Nameless flesh.’⁷ She continues for a few paragraphs citing the many possible (mis)interpretations of this image, some resembling my initial reading of Carson’s burning red backside offered to a man who no longer cherished her. Like some critics of Viquez’s photograph, I first saw the sordidness, the objectification of the female body, a male gaze dispossessing the poet, the model. But Méndez’s writing offers a deeper vision, and in her urge to write she joins Carson’s analysis of eros:⁸

If the presence or absence of literacy affects the way a person regards his own body, senses and self, that effect will significantly influence erotic life. It is in the poetry of those who were first exposed to a written alphabet and the demands of literacy that we encounter deliberate meditation upon the self, especially in the context of erotic desire. The singular intensity with which these poets insist on conceiving eros as lack may reflect, in some degree, that exposure. Literate training encourages a heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one’s self. To control the boundaries is to possess oneself.⁹

Méndez offers the possibility of looking at the crudeness of the image beyond a violent or pornographic gaze, where beauty is possible. She sees a body renouncing the course of time, reclaiming its agency through abandonment, laying her longing out in the open without exhibiting it. It’s a superb example of female desire, as society does not allow it; my initial rebuke of Carson’s line is an example of such an internalised taboo. Through the act of writing, Carson eroticises a boundary, here between reality (the sordid) and poetry (the beautiful); the body is rewritten, in control of its own boundary, regaining possession. Méndez juxtaposes her own voice on the woman in the photograph: ‘Take a good look at what I am. Observe my wrinkles, my folds, all the curves tracing my feminine condition; look at my transparent skin, the veinous branches, that dark place in between my thighs. I am an unassailable body suspended in time.’¹⁰

TRANSLATION
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‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’ (2008), Carson’s essay on resistance in translation and untranslatability, opens with: ‘Silence is as important as words in the practice and study of translation.’¹¹ Later in the essay, Carson analyses Hölderlin’s translation of Antigone which ‘made Goethe and Schiller laugh aloud,’ and has been called the work of a madman.¹² Hölderlin was certified insane in 1806, and died still insane in 1843, Carson tells us. This pushes Carson to question the relationship between translation and madness. ‘Where does translation happen in the mind? And if there is a silence that falls inside certain words, when, how, with what violence does that take place, and what difference does it make to who you are?’¹³ Carson places translation as ‘a practice, a strategy, or what Hölderlin calls ‘a salutary gymnastics of the mind’ that does ‘give us a third place to be’.¹⁴ That third place resembles the one many of us born in migration, writing and thinking in between languages, try to exist in. It can lead to translation, and it can drive one mad. Not unlike unfulfilled desire, the third place is also the one Eros fills. To finish the essay, Carson proposes an exercise, neither in translation nor untranslation, but in ‘catastrophizing translation’ – almost an act of madness; she takes a fragment of ancient Greek lyric poetry (unsurprisingly one that deals with Ibykos’s own experience of Eros) to translate over and over using the ‘wrong words,’ as she suggests ‘A sort of stammering.’¹⁵ In each new translation, Carson uses words from John Donne, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Gustav Janouch’s conversations with Kafka, signs from the London Underground and her microwave oven manual. This juxtaposition of unrelated imaginaries finds a common space in the act of translation, the intense desire to bring different discourses, emotions, contexts, into that space Eros couldn’t fill. Translation becomes play beyond the power struggles of language, categorisation and its hierarchy, and it results in pure kinky pleasure.

The ink I accidentally poured continued to flow down ‘Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings,’ pointing to a passage where sexual penetration is a border crossing. ‘The translations in ‘Mimnermos’ combine fragments from the Greek lyric poet Mimnermos with contemporary details such that poet and translator seem to be engaged in a kind of cerebral copulation, or ‘brainsex.’¹⁶ When translation is about crossing boundaries, not just of language but of everything language can represent in the way it frees or restricts – sociologically, politically, literally – the act of translation becomes an erotic gesture. It necessitates the body, mind and soul revealing a variety of instances from arousal to obsession: every word becomes a matter of life and death, sounds and syllables find their way to the tip of our tongues until sweat pours out of our skin to flow like ink onto the page. The translator does not seek symmetry, but rather yearns for connection(s). The many works in Carson’s oeuvre are spectacular examples of how a translator’s brain steers imagination. We have seen since Eros the Bittersweet how Eros acts as a mediator between lover and beloved, in ‘The Brainsex Paintings,’ the translator seems to have taken over that task of Eros. This is particularly apparent in the interviews that create a staccato rhythm cut up by silences or avoided answers, building an erotic tension that will end in anorgasmia, with the interviewer stating, ‘I wanted to know you’ and Mimnermos answering ‘I wanted far more.’¹⁷ We are left with our and the translator’s lust suspended in text and time.

LAYERS
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Understandings of time are interwoven throughout Carson’s work; ‘For in what does time differ from eternity except we measure it?’ she writes in Men in the Off Hours (2000).¹⁸ Carson is interested in the non-linear narrative, which is why her work is, while exploring ancient themes, protagonists and canonical narratives, so contemporary. That contemporaneity makes for a palpable experience of reading as erotic gesture; our body participates because the protagonists belong in the moment where we exist. It is in this similar way that I found myself translating Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998) for my MA thesis in 2004. The novel is a retelling of an original poem, ‘Geryoneis’ by the Greek poet Stesichorus, in which we follow Geryon’s coming-of-age story and his encounter with Herakles. I came across Autobiography of Red in Canada, the poet’s home, and wrote fragments of my thesis in Brussels, where I grew up and was studying, and others in Istanbul, where I was born and where my parents fell in love. That year, I had lost my grandfather and travelled to Istanbul to be with my grandmother, to offer some love and solace in a time of grief. Shortly after I undertook the commission to write this essay, my grandmother, a pillar of my belonging, died. I found myself sitting in the middle of the same living-room where I had written parts of my thesis and translation of Autobiography of Red, thinking about that gesture, the urge I had to translate Geryon’s discovery of himself through pain, sex, hope, love. ‘Carson’s version of the Geryoneis remains a ‘matter’ of life and death, but the contemporary poet explicitly eroticizes the border between mortality and immortality.’¹⁹

Talking to Sara Elkamel and NYU undergrads, Carson shares how she creates layers in her work: ‘there are layers that are on the surface and layers that are underneath, and the layers I don’t even know about that emerge because the different layers already there interact with each other […] I wouldn’t be satisfied with a piece of writing if it didn’t offer that experience to the reader, to be able to find layer and layer and layer in it because you’re different people every time you approach a work, you know. You are different. The work is different.’²⁰ I was a different person when I first read Anne Carson in Rae’s poetry class; when I wrote my thesis in my grandmother’s presence as we were grieving my grandfather I became a different person after her death in late September. I think about this verse from Autobiography of Red: ‘There is no person without a world,’ which had shaken me to the core when I was translating it into French, unaware at the time of the third place she represented for me.²¹ Autumn opened like a blade here.²²

WINGS
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Back in Amsterdam, I visited Fiona Tan’s exhibition at the EYE Film Museum, wearing my grandmother’s black boots. I froze in front of Vertical Wide (2018), a video installation showing the dense night-time traffic in West Los Angeles. The ongoing flow of receding car taillights looked like lava; I felt forgotten on the side of a volcano that had just erupted. My senses sent me back to Autobiography of Red, to the days when I was translating it for my thesis, researching imagery that would help me render the verses in French with a similar power to Carson’s original ones. Tan’s video seemed to match perfectly my emotions when I began working on the chapter ‘KISS.’

A healthy volcano is an exercise in the uses of pressure.
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Geryon sat on his bed in the hotel room pondering the cracks and fissures
of his inner life. It may happen
that the exit of the volcanic vent is blocked by a plug of rock, forcing
molten matter sideways along
lateral fissures called fire lips by volcanologists. Yet Geryon did not want
to become one of those people
who think of nothing but their stores of pain. He bent over the book on his knees.
Philosophic Problems.
‘… I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.
But this separation of consciousness
is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is
to believe in an undivided being between us …’
As he read Geryon could feel something like tons of black magma boiling up
from the deeper regions of him.
He moved his eyes back to the beginning of the page and started again.
‘To deny the existence of red
is to deny the existence of mystery. The soul which does so will one day go mad.’23

Red light beamed down from the screen on my grandmother’s boots. ‘Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.’²⁴ In Autobiography of Red, Carson sexualises the encounter between Geryon and Herakles, for whom awareness ‘is no mental event, it comes through flesh.
Herakles’ flesh is a cliche. Perfect physical specimen, he cannot be beaten by any warrior, by any athlete, by any monster on the earth or under it.’²⁵ Although the story has a contemporary setting, Geryon remains with wings: ‘Wings mark the difference between a mortal and an immortal story of love.’²⁶ Throughout Autobiography of Red, Geryon experiences layers of pain and trauma, in the hands of his brother, then in his love story with Herakles, a relationship where the bittersweet Carson has been exploring since the beginning of her oeuvre materialises in this eroticisation of their encounter and journey. In Eros, Carson explains in detail the meaning of wings through an etymological lens:

By adding pt- to Eros, the gods create Pteros, which is a play upon the Greek word pteron meaning ‘wing.’ In the language of gods, then, desire itself is known as ‘the winged one’ or ‘he who has something to do with wings.’ Why? The gods have a reason for their Pteros, namely that desire entails a ‘wing-growing necessity.’ […]
Pteros is truer than Eros.²⁷

Carson concludes that Pteros has more truth than Eros ‘because it tells us not just what desire should be named, but why.’²⁸ Geryon’s wings give him agency; even in his vulnerability, he is the reason for desire.

TRANSGRESSION
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Carson draws upon philosopher Simone Weill in Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005) to remind us that desires remain contradictory. So do the mediums Carson uses to express the world, blurring the boundaries between academic writing, poetry, the essay, the epic, the documentary, using a variety of formats such as interviews, translations, performance, verse and fragments. Carson’s mixed-media approach has created confusion in booksellers’ minds as they try to place her work on the ‘right shelf.’ But the poet asks: ‘What do “shelves” accomplish, in stores or in the mind?’ Such a rich body of work invites infinite interpretations and analyses. Building a corpus the way Carson does is an erotic gesture in itself; every boundary that is crossed takes the poet one step closer to the truth she has been yearning to express. ‘Gradually, I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul,’ Carson writes in ‘The Glass Essay,’ ‘I called them Nudes.’ As I open Rae’s book seeking guidance, a postcard of a photograph by Dutch–Turkish artist Aysel Bodur appears in between the pages, from the series Family Ties (2002) I saw in ART Brussels in 2004.
It is a self-portrait of the artist with her family members: her mother, her uncle and his children, nude in a hammam in Ankara. In the context in which Bodur’s family lives, i.e. Turkey, nudity itself can be an act of crossing borders, photographing nudity another one, exhibiting it yet another. Of course, being nude in a hammam does not cross a boundary, the hammam’s function is to scrub the skin, cleanse the pores, for which the body needs to be naked in the overwhelming steam. It is a purification ritual where gender is binary; women and men are allowed nakedness but in separate spaces. By bringing the women and men of her family inside this space for purification, Bodur breaks all the boundaries imposed by the society she sets this family portrait in. She eroticises her own body without ever sexualising it, or the ones of her family members.

In Men in the Off Hours, Carson analyses how myths differentiate between men and women through ideas of dryness and wetness, respectively. Erotic desire becomes a devastating emotion for many Greek poets, as they describe love as a combination of ‘liquescent effect’ and ‘fiery heat’: ‘the lover who is not melted away by Eros is likely to be burned to a crisp.’²⁹ Boundaries are created to protect men from melting, flooding, softening even, to prevent their disintegration, the assumption being that women are insatiable sexual beings more open to erotic desire than men. Carson doesn’t omit to remind us that these Greek poets fear female sexuality. The erotic gestures of Carson and Bodur are far more interesting and complex than sexuality alone; they are concerned with the destruction of conventions that trap bodies and desire into consumable emotions as accepted by mainstream society. By bringing the erotic into their work, they create a connection that enables them to touch one another. ‘As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another – whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis.’³⁰ Because contact violates a fixed boundary, a transgression in a place one does not belong (in Bodur’s case, men and women together in the same hammam, photographed, that photograph exhibited in a gallery). ‘Civilization is a function of boundaries,’ and reading, writing, translating, making art as an erotic gesture is all about transgressing every single one of those boundaries.³¹

‘But no simple map of the emotions is available here. Desire is not simple./In Greek the act of love is a mingling […] and desire melts the limbs […].’³² With complexity, springing between genres and mediums, stepping out of her comfort zone and inviting the spectator of her oeuvre to dive into the many layers of her expression, Anne Carson has created a sensory experience of longing and lust, which none of us may get close to yet alone touch, ‘In fact, neither reader nor writer nor lover achieves such consummation. The words we read and the words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbols never perfectly match. Eros is in between.’³³ And it’s an exquisite place to dwell in.

1. Ian Rae, From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2008, p.236.
2. Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, p.83.
3. Ibid., p.77.
4. Ibid., p.40.
5. A. Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangoes, New York: Knopf, 2001, p.5.
6. Begoña Méndez (trans. Canan Marasligil), Autocienciaficción para el fin de la especie, Barcelona: H&O Editores, 2022, p.162.
7. Ibid., p.163.
8. A. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, p.54.
9. B. Méndez, Autocienciaficción para el fin de la especie, pp.163–64.
10. Ibid.
11. A. Carson and Lanfranco Quadrio, ‘Variations on the Right Remain Silent,’ Nay Rather, London: Sylph Editions, 2014, p.7.
12. Ibid., p.27.
13. Ibid., p.22.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p.30.
16. I. Rae, From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada, p.225. 
17. A. Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, New York: Knopf, 1995, p.26.
18. A. Carson, Men in the Off Hours, New York: Knopf, 2000, p.98.
19. Rae, From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada, p.237.
20. Sara Elkamel, ‘Anne Carson and Robert Currie in Conversation with Sara Elkamel & NYU Undergrads – On Starting in the Middle,’ Washington Square Review, 5 May 2021.
21. A. Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, New York: Knopf, 1998, p.82.
22. ‘Spring opens like a blade here,’ A. Carson, ‘The Glass Essay’.
23. A. Carson, Autobiography of Red, New York: Knopf, p.105.
24. A. Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2006, p.8.
25. Ibid., p.13.
26. A. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, p.164.
27. Ibid., p.166.
28. Ibid.
29. A. Carson, Men in the Off Hours, p.136
30. Ibid., p.130.
31. Ibid.
32. A. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, p.11.
33. Ibid., p.114.