Tag: anne carson

There is too much self in my writing…I do not want to be a windowless monad— my training and trainers opposed subjectivity strongly. I have struggled since the beginning to drive my thought out into the landscape of science and fact where other people converse logically and exchange judgements—but I go blind out there. So writing involves some dashing back and forth between that darkening landscape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of everything I do not know. It is the clearing that takes time. It is the clearing that is a mystery.

anne carson

from economy of the unlost, vii

Attention is a task we share, you and I. To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling. Partly for this reason I have chosen to talk about two men at once. They keep each other from settling. Moving, and not settling, they are side by side in a conversation and yet no conversation takes place. Face to face yet they do not know one another, did not live in the same era, never spoke the same language. With and against, aligned and adverse, each is placed like a surface on which the other may come into focus. Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky.

Anne Carson from Economy of the Unlost, viii

Paul Meyer

Reading an Anne Carson translation can feel like reading the fragments of a lecture. By this I don’t mean the lecture form as it is traditionally practiced (i.e., as a closing off of teaching). Rather, Carson’s translations seek to open up that space between languages for a third thing to happen. In that space, she would like you to have your own thought of what she’s trying to get across as opposed to making you have her own. This desire (realized in the ‘translation moves’) is imminently pedagogical