Анн Карсон: Канадский поэт и классик

Canadian poet and academic (born 1950)

Anne Patricia Carson (born June 21, 1950) is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor. Trained at the University of Toronto, Carson has taught classics, comparative literature, and creative writing at universities across the United States and Canada since 1979, including McGill, Michigan, NYU, and Princeton. With more than twenty books of writings and translations published to date, Carson was awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, has won the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General's Award for English language poetry, and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters.

Anne Carson was born in Toronto on June 21, 1950. In high school, a Latin instructor introduced Carson to the world and language of Ancient Greece and tutored her privately. Enrolling at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, she left twice—at the end of her first and second years. Carson, disconcerted by curricular constraints (particularly by a required course on Milton), retired to the world of graphic arts for a short time. She also spent a year studying Greek metrics and Greek textual criticism at the University of St Andrews.

Trained as a classicist, and with an interest in comparative literature, anthropology, history, and the arts, Carson fuses ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernises, and translates Ancient Greek and Latin literature – writers such as Aeschylus, Catullus, Euripides, Homer, Ibycus, Mimnermus, Sappho, Simonides, Sophocles, Stesichorus, and Thucydides. She is also influenced by, and references more modern writers and thinkers, such as Emily Brontë, Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Gertrude Stein, Simone Weil, and Virginia Woolf. Many of her books blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non fiction to varying degrees. First editions of Carson's eighteen books of writings (as of 2021) have been published by Alfred A. Knopf, New Directions, and the Princeton University Press in the US, by Brick Books and McClelland & Stewart in Canada, and by Bloodaxe Books, Jonathan Cape, Oberon Books, and Sylph Editions in the UK.

Eros the Bittersweet – Carson's first book of criticism, published in 1986 – examines eros as a simultaneous experience of pleasure and pain best exemplified by "glukupikron", a word of Sappho's creation and the "bittersweet" of the book's title. It considers how triangulations of desire appear in the writings of Sappho, ancient Greek novelists, and Plato. A reworking of her 1981 doctoral thesis Odi et Amo Ergo Sum ("I Hate and I Love, Therefore I Am"), Eros the Bittersweet "laid the groundwork for her subsequent publications, [ ] formulating the ideas on desire that would come to dominate her poetic output",

Men in the Off Hours (2000) is a hybrid collection of short poems, verse essays, epitaphs, commemorative prose, interviews, scripts, and translations from ancient Greek and Latin (of Alcman, Catullus, Sappho and others).

Carson's first book of poetry – 1984's Canicula di Anna – garnered her first literary prize: the Quarterly Review of Literature Betty Colladay Award. Acclaim for her first book of essays, Eros the Bittersweet, grew in the fifteen years after it was published in 1986: the book "first stunned the classics community as a work of Greek scholarship; then it stunned the nonfiction community as an inspired return to the lyrically based essays once produced by Seneca, Montaigne, and Emerson; and then, and only then, deep into the 1990s, reissued as 'literature' and redesigned for an entirely new audience, it finally stunned the poets." By the turn of the millennium, Eros the Bittersweet had also entered into the popular consciousness, voted onto the 1999 Modern Library Reader's List for the 100 Best Nonfiction books of the 20th century, and mentioned (along with Autobiography of Red) in a 2004 episode of the television series The L Word. Early recognition for her work also came from the Quebec Writers' Federation Awards (known as "QSPELL" until 1998), which shortlisted Carson for Short Talks in 1993 before going on to award her the honour three times between 1996 and 2001 (for Glass, Irony, and God, Autobiography of Red, and The Beauty of the Husband). She was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 1998 for Glass and God, her first book of poetry published in the UK. Carson was the first poet to be awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize (for Men in the Off Hours in 2001), She was also a judge for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2020, she was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, with the jury noting that she "has attained levels of intensity and intellectual standing that place her among the most outstanding of present day writers". and received the 2020 Governor General's Award for English language poetry for Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, an award she was first shortlisted for in 2001 (for Men in the Off Hours). and Anne Carson/ Antiquity (sic), edited by Laura Jansen and published by Bloomsbury in 2021, which examines Carson's classicism as it emerges in her poetry, translations, essays, and visual artistry. In recent years, Carson has been regarded as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, alongside such writers as Margaret Atwood, Maryse Condé, Haruki Murakami, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Can Xue.

Carson began her Classics teaching career at the University of Calgary in 1979, before completing her Ph. D. at the University of Toronto. She also taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York during her time there as a Rockefeller Scholar in Residence (1986–1987). Failing to make tenure, Carson left Princeton in 1987 to teach classical languages and literature at Emory University in Atlanta for a year, before moving to Montreal to join McGill University as Director of Graduate Studies in Classics. the University of California, Berkeley (Spring 2000), and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (Spring 2001). Carson moved to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan in 2003, where she served as Professor of Classical Studies, Comparative Literature, and English Language and Literature until 2009. In 2004, Carson was in contention for the Professor of Poetry Chair at the University of Oxford, placing second behind the eventual appointment Christopher Ricks, with around 30 nominations. She was cited as a potential contender for the four year position again in 2009. Carson joined the New York University Creative Writing Program as Distinguished Poet in Residence and Visiting Professor in 2009. Together with her husband and collaborator Robert Currie, she teaches an annual class at NYU on the art of collaboration, called "Egocircus". Carson was an Andrew D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University from 2010 to 2016, and the Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University (Creative Writing Program) in 2013. She joined Bard College as Visiting Distinguished Writer in Residence in 2014, teaching classical studies and the written arts. Carson has described her more diverse role in the latter part of her career as "a visiting [whatever]", and her decades spent teaching ancient Greek as "a total joy". In May 2023, she was announced as Honorary President of the Classical Association, 2023–24.

Carson is known to be reticent about her private life, and discourages autobiographical readings of her writings. Information about her in publications is often limited to the phrase: "Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living." While not a confessional poet, her work is considered personal. Carson's first marriage, during which she used the surname Giacomelli, lasted eight years and ended in 1980. Carson has confirmed that her first husband took her notebooks when they divorced (as happens to the protagonist in The Beauty of the Husband), though later returned them. Carson's father Robert had Alzheimer's disease. "The Glass Essay" (collected in Glass, Irony, and God), "Very Narrow" (collected in Plainwater), and "Father's Old Blue Cardigan" (collected in Men in the Off Hours) all deal with his mental and physical decline. Carson's mother Margaret (1913–1997) died during the writing of Men in the Off Hours. Carson closed the collection with the prose piece "Appendix to Ordinary Time", using crossed out phrases from the diaries and manuscripts of Virginia Woolf to craft an epitaph for her. Carson's brother Michael was arrested for drug dealing in 1978. Jumping bail, he fled Canada and she never saw him again. Nox, an epitaph Carson created for her brother in 2000 and published in 2010, has been described as her most explicitly personal work. On April 19 2022, Carson and Currie were granted Icelandic citizenship.