On Anne Carson

Twenty years ago, i wrote my master’s thesis (at the time called a “mémoire de licence” in French speaking Belgium) on translating Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red: a Novel in Verse. In the autumn of 2022, I penned an essay for the twentieth issue of Extra Extra Magazine: Anne Carson In Sensual Gestures: one version in print, which was published in issue 20 of the Magazine in April 2022, and another one for the podcast The Protagonist of the Erotic, which was just launched on 26 April and you can listen to now:

This is how my essay in the magazine starts:

‘The Glass Essay' (1994) was the first work of Anne Carson I read in lan 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 (belonging, 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."

Translation becomes an artistic practice.

Anne Carson’s work invites us for a deep and multi-layered reading of her work, which is exactly what I have been doing as I wrote this essay, bringing in the works and words of artists, writers and filmmakers, such as photographer Aysel Bodur, writer Begoña Méndez, filmmaker Fiona Tan,… but also linking my readings to my own life and family history, especially to my connection with my maternal grand-mother, who passed away right as I was commissioned to write this essay.

Further down the essay (both in the print version and the podcast), I mention how:

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.

Below is a photograph the page I mention…

It has been an immense joy and honour to write this essay, and even though I never got to have my initial translation of Anne Carson’s work published, the years of study and reading and passionately engaging with this immense poet’s oeuvre have now shown their fruits, both in print and audio… and I am thrilled to share these with you. I hope you will enjoy reading and listening.

And before I close this short update, a special shout out to translators of Autobiography of Red in Turkish: Aslı Biçen (at Metis Kitap) and in French: Vanasay Khamphommala (at l’Arche Editeur), translation truly is a labour of love, translating Anne Carson, further more than that.