Ancient Words, Modern Words: A Conversation with Anne Carson, by Peter Constantine

A prizewinning Canadian poet, essayist, and translator, Anne Carson (b. 1950) will receive the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm on December 10. The following interview first appeared in the “Classics Rekindled” section of the January 2014 issue of WLT. Reviews of her work that have appeared in the magazine can be found here.

Peter Constantine: As a translator of Ancient Greek myself, I’d like to begin by asking about the extent to which you feel that the ancient texts have affected your own writing.

Anne Carson: the ancient texts are a source of constant refreshment to me 

because a constant source of problems. problems revive engagement. easy to become anaesthetized to the problems of one’s own language, which are no less real but slip below the surface of habit. the effort of translation can jolt all this awake. 

and problems come in many different forms. e.g. the artist Jenny Holzer is currently carving bits of Sappho (translated into English) onto rocks in a park in Oslo. she is using my translation so has been asking me questions about choice and placement of texts on boulders and cliffs, which has given me new angles of thinking on the texts themselves and the reader’s experience of them. when i wrote a book about Simonides of Keos some years ago i tried to make the point that as a poet he had to think ahead to the constraints of the stone on which a poem would be carved, had to think about space and surface and economics in a particular way. it was all rather theoretical to me at the time, but now it comes alive in Oslo! 

it is also true that i like constraints in general, 

there being no better freedom. 

Constantine: Some of your works, particularly NOX, have a powerfully visual, spatial placement on the page. Would you say the ancient poetry that has come down to us both as poem and object has also been a starting point for you? 

Carson: the starting point for me from the beginning was drawing/painting. i had little interest in writing as a child but did drawings all the time and still seem to approach writing as a very complicated, rule-bound form of drawing.

when i discovered Sappho at age fifteen, the physicality of ancient poetry (transmitted via the mystique of the fragment) fitted easily into this aesthetic. and Greek letters themselves, the first time i saw them, seemed to me fantastic drawings.

when i discovered Sappho at age fifteen, the physicality of ancient poetry (transmitted via the mystique of the fragment) fitted easily into this aesthetic. and Greek letters themselves, the first time i saw them, seemed to me fantastic drawings. 

Constantine: One of the aspects that fascinates me in your book The Economy of the Unlost, where you counterpoise Paul Celan and Simonides of Keos, is your approach to my two mother tongues, German and Greek, taking their words and reaching down into their layers of meaning. Do you find yourself approaching English words in the same way? 

Carson: yes, when possible. 

[Robert] Currie gave me the OED in its full (and going out of print this year) twenty-volume form, and i have been doing a drawing project that allows me to scamper about from entry to entry. despite the OED’s sixteenth-century bias, i am finding lots of useful layers! 

Constantine: The drawing project sounds fascinating. Can you describe it? 

Carson: i can describe the rules of the project, although they will seem abstruse. 

it started when i decided i was too frustrated and bored with my own writing to keep on being a writer, so Currie (two weeks ago) bought me a small drawing book. not sure what to draw, i looked up the word “void” in my OED and found a sentence i liked among the examples of usage, viz. 

“the small corn lyeth in the hollowe and voyde places of the great beans” 

then i looked around my yard for something related to this sentence that i could draw (i’m not very good) and found three green beans growing. so i picked them and drew a picture of three beans in the small book and added the sentence as caption. then went back to the OED and looked up “beans.” found a sentence i liked, etc.—the whole procedure repeats with each page and leads me from drawing to drawing and sentence/word to sentence/word. 

Constantine: In Greece we tend to see our language as a continuum, Greek having been spoken in its various forms through the millennia, which seems to make us particularly sensitive to the etymologies of our words. What are some of the ways in which word histories have affected your work as a poet and translator? 

Carson: etymology is the place where i begin any research. 

the story of how a word began to mean what it means is a point of entry to everything else about it. 

Constantine: You have been extensively translated into Modern Greek, and Greek seems to be a language that works particularly well with your poetry. When you first traveled to Greece, did you feel a particular response or connection? 

Carson: just ghosts now.

October 2013