Anne Carson’s Nobel Prize Celebrates Ancient Greece — and Literature Challenging to Readers

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Canadian writer Anne Carson adds to a banner year for ancient Greece, some two millennia after its Athenian heyday.The Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, Ingrid Carlberg, reports that Ms. Carson, 76, was in Norway “listening to the wind” when she was told that she had been awarded the most prestigious prize in letters. Ms. Carson later told Swedish public broadcaster RUV that the Academy was “all crazy” for bestowing upon her the honor, which carries a prize of some $1.2 million.Ms. Carson is among the highest-profile winners in recent years — though not quite as celebrated as, say, Bob Dylan or Winston Churchill. Ms. Carson, who writes across an idiosyncratic skein of poetry and prose and is also a prolific translator, told RUV that poetry is “probably more useful than prose right now because it’s faster, and everybody is in a hurry. So basically I think it’s good because it’s brief. Except Homer. Homer’s not brief.”Nearly all of Ms. Carson’s work touches on ancient Greek antecedents, and her ascent to the Mt. Olympus of literature comes months after Sir Christopher Nolan’s cinematic rendition of “The Odyssey” emerged as a wildly profitable Trojan horse at the box office, grossing around $1.8 billion across the globe. The Academy notes Ms. Carson’s “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” One member of the Academy, Steve Sem-Sandberg, reckons that “nobody writes like her.”Ms. Carson’s most famous book is “Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse,” from 1998. It riffs on the fragmentary poem “Geryoneis” by the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus, little known but partially preserved in Egyptian papyrus, which in Ms. Carson’s retelling, depicts the tale of Geryon as a young gay teenager who falls in love with a half-god named Hercules. It ends in heartbreak. A sequel, “Red Doc,” imagines the two on a road trip as adults.The newly minted Nobel winner writes that Stesichorus “came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” Ms. Carson’s style is lyrical, pedantic, and obsessively observational. In “Autobiography,” she writes that “Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”Ms. Carson told the New York Times in 2013 that ancient Greek “seemed to me the best language,” and she was an academic in Classics before she started publishing for general audiences. “Eros the Bittersweet,” 1986, is a reworking of her doctoral thesis, which argues that the Greeks, and especially the ancient poet Sappho, understood eros, or romantic love, as a mixture of pleasure and pain. Ms. Carson writes that eros is “deferred, defied, obstructed, hungry, organized around a radiant absence.”“Eros” and “Autobiography” have matured into cult classics — not quite obscure, and certainly not popular, but conferring a cultural currency that signals that those who have read — or heard of them — are among the ranks of the sophisticated. They elicit knowing nods both in the lounges of the Harvard English Department and at book-launch parties in Bushwick. “Eros” is even mentioned in an episode of “The L Word.”“Nox,” 2010, unfolds like an accordion — almost literally — and mixes her translations of the Latin poet Catullus with letters, photos, and sketches that touch on her relationship with her late brother. One of Ms. Carson’s early heroes was the Irish wit Oscar Wilde, who studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford. She is the third Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Alice Munro and Saul Bellow.Ms. Carson, who lives in Reykjavik, wrote in 2024 in an essay in the London Review of Books that she is battling Parkinson’s. She reports that she used to take pride in her handwriting, but the disease’s ravages mean that “now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks embarrassing. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.” May the Nobel Prize lift that shadow.

Anne Carson’s Nobel Prize Celebrates Ancient Greece — and Literature Challenging to Readers

Anne Carson’s Nobel Prize Celebrates Ancient Greece — and Literature Challenging to Readers

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