Six years after Louise Glück, the Nobel Prize in Literature has once again chosen a poet: Anne Carson, Canadian writer, Princess of Asturias Prize winner in 2020 and author loved by almost mass audiences for her genre thanks to the unforgettable Autobiography of Rojo, has entered the Nobel prize list.
The Nobel is "a recognition of a singular work that moves between reality, dream and fantasy and that sometimes approaches science fiction," according to the ruling. In reality, explaining Carson is a task that is partly simple and partly complex.
The simple version says that the Canadian poet applies the perspective of experimental literature of the 21st century and academic knowledge of our world to classical myths, which are her area of professional knowledge. That, more or less, consists of Red's Autobiography, a long prose poem that sometimes tends towards a novel, and that speaks of the contemporary world, through Geryon, grandson of Oceanus and Thetis, of Poseidon and Medusa, fruit of rapes and aberrant loves, a deformed and lonely giant, a freak with red wings on his back and noble lineage, who resigned himself to being a shepherd on an island near Cádiz with no other company than his sheep. In Red's Autobiography, Carson turned Geryon into Red, a teenager lost in the current world and helpless after his parents' divorce. His vision of the world is fractured between life on the outside, which is hostile and incomprehensible, and life that goes inward, which is full of sweetness and fantasy. In his poetic story, another child appeared in Rojo's life, a friendly and brave version of Hercules, who led him to a moment of reconciliation with reality. At her side, Anne Carson's protagonist learned to accept reality and love life with all its harshness.
On the other hand, Anne Carson's complex explanation is detached from her theme and refers to her strategy and her challenging attitude towards everything we take for granted in literature: the ideas of genres and the same themes, the implicit pact of authors and readers, the game of weights between ideas and images... Carson has said that her first dazzle with poetry came from the vision of a bilingual (English and Greek) edition of Sappho's poetry. The two pages before his eyes, one legible and the other not, seemed beautiful like paintings and that visual dazzle may be the hard core of Carson's idea of literature.
"All of Carson's books seek to recreate that youthful experience of being in front of an enigmatic text, perhaps impenetrable, but of great visual beauty: a text that awakens the curiosity of others and at the same time rejects it. Books that erase the boundaries between genres and move freely through that marine delta where poetry, fragments, essays, narratives and even academics come together. Books that show the rings of their deployment or confess their errors," wrote critic Jordi Doce in the pages of La Lectura. In her interviews and public appearances, the Canadian writer uses the same elusive, almost challenging attitude. Some of her books have appeared without any biographical information other than "Anne Carson was born in 1950 and lives in Canada." She herself has said that she is more interested in drawing than writing and that her work is not valuable. "My personal poetry is a failure," he stated in EL MUNDO in 2020, when he won the Princess of Asturias Award. In the photograph from that interview, Carson appeared wearing a tie and an almost masculine, black suit. The image seemed made to scare scared readers.
The failure thing probably refers to his Red. The book had been born in the author's head as a novel, but she had not managed to find the narrative fluidity expected of the genre. The text, then, disintegrated in Carson's hands in the form of poetic prose. As in 20th century art, the blot and stain were the challenge and the beauty.
There are more important books in Carson's work. Eros: poetics of desire is a half-academic and half-literary investigation into the vision of romantic love in ancient times, with special interest in the discovery of the bittersweetness of desire. Carson attributes this idea to Sappho of Mytilene, the author of her first dazzling. The Beauty of the Husband: A Narrative Essay in 29 Tangos (2003) was the other book that Carson made known in Spain. The charm, again, was in the trompe l'oeil game. At first, The Beauty of the Husband seemed like an essay/digression about John Keats and the idea of beauty that, at a given moment, became the poetic and highly aestheticized story of a marriage that is sinking little by little, but that dances until the last note, just as happens with tangos. As in the case of Autobiografía de Rojo, the book has to do with the need to understand life in its rawness and reach a moment of acceptance from wisdom and generosity.
A little further away are Carson's poetry books, such as Albertine and Flota, translated into Spanish after the impact of Autobiografía de Rojo, but which are probably the core of his work and which were chosen by Harold Bloom among the most important of the genre.
