Anne Carson Has No Borders Between High Classics and Everyday Scraps

On a windy hillside in Iceland, where Anne Carson has lived for several years, a television crew stopped her to ask how she felt about winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. She had just learned of the win on a call with the Nobel committee. She works with no formal borders, making something from a street scrap as readily as from Homer.

She greeted the prize with dry humor. Crazy, she said. I think they are all crazy. She described her call with the Nobel committee as rather halting, saying they asked the usual questions and she had no answers. Asked whether the prize would change her readership, Carson said, "Well, I guess the publisher hopes so."

Carson, a longtime student and teacher of ancient Greek, writes poems that turn into plays, essays that turn into translations, and novels in verse that turn ancient myths into modern life.

Her best known book, Autobiography of Red, shows how she does it. It takes Geryon, a red winged monster from Greek myth who was killed by the hero Heracles, and recasts him as a present-day adolescent navigating first love and rejection. In an extract from Carson's text, read by actor Simon Russell Beale, the boy is in agitation at 7 a.m. He has put off calling Heracles for two days and, in Carson's words, had placed the telephone "in the bottom of his sock drawer." Beale reads: "He was not thinking about the two of them in their hotel room on the other side of Plaza de Mayo."

Alice Spawls, who helps edit the London Review of Books, a British literary magazine that has published Carson for 25 years, says genre defying does not come close to describing her. Carson is genre destroying, Spawls observes. There are no formal borders in her work, and, in Spawls's words, "whether it looks like a poem or a play or something else entirely," readers will have their expectations upset.

Spawls describes Carson as a universalist. The classics run deep in her, after a life spent as a scholar and professor of Greek, but she also reads widely in Chinese and Japanese poetry, in translation, and in European philosophy. With that same openness, Spawls notes, Carson can take a found scrap, "with a few words on it" in Spawls's phrase, and make "something magical" from it, no less than from Homer, the ancient Greek poet behind the Iliad and the Odyssey.

That mix of high and low is why admirers say newcomers need not be intimidated, even by work rooted in ancient literature. Spawls says "there is something so down to earth and unpretentious in, in everything she's written," and points to her sonnets on the artists Marcel Duchamp and Gertrude Stein as welcoming introductions. It fits with Carson telling reporters, "Oh, I was just sweeping the kitchen floor when I found out." She is, in Spawls's words, "not necessarily someone who wants the attention of a major prize," but for those who have championed her work for so long, it is well deserved.