There is a sense in which poetry is an exertion of order on both human breath and on event. Rhythm and meter (or lack thereof) are two tools that together arrange an illusion of greater order, reflecting a sensibility beyond sensation. Whether this order derives from God or from the poet is often conveniently elided; whether this illusion is a prayer for the order also usually escapes description. Verse may find coherence and even transcendence where the prose line falters, yet there is an ultimate unknowability that verse can create a shape around.
Anne Carson (1950- ) is a genius between English and Greek. She is a translator, classicist, and poet who writes across genres. Her father worked for regional Canadian banks, her mother was a housewife, she is the youngest of three. All bankers in Canada in that era were peripatetically moved throughout the country, and so she moved from place to place throughout her childhood. Her PhD in classics was begun at the University of Calgary and finished at the University of Toronto, and now she teaches Greek for a living.
She translates, dismantles, writes around and through Greek poems. Her work is unclassifiable but reliably ends up being called “poetry,” though her invention has a trellising, or lenslike, or smelting quality. Sometimes it patterns itself after Greek poems or works, other times gazing at itself through the Greek work as if through deep water. She has said that Greek goes “down into the roots of how words work,” rather than up in the boughs of English, swaying in the wind.
She is a brilliant essayist, in a lyric yet precise mode. Her first book (her reworked PhD thesis) examines the joy and pain commingled in eros, and the centrality of lack to desire. She loves Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Sappho above all. Her book If Not, Winter is subtitled “Fragments of Sappho,” not “Translations”; there is a poetic fabulism to her translation that approaches truth through means both including and beyond the etymological.
The Autobiography of Red is an unclassifiable work occupying the intervolving zone between poetry, translation, and fabulation. The work is set nowhere, in a small town in Ontario, in South America. In myth, Heracles’ tenth Labor was to kidnap from Geryon, a monster with three heads and four wings, Geryon’s miraculous herd of cattle stained red by the sun’s rising and setting, after which Herakles murders him with an arrow in afterthought. (“Geryon” may mean gê, “earth,” or gêryô, “singing.”) In Carson’s work, Herakles does not kill Geryon and steal his cattle, instead Herakles steals Geryon’s heart and kills his innocence. Carson’s work arranges paradoxes of beauty and great delicacy between ages unknowable to one another. Referring to the classical menis, Peter Sloterdijk in Rage and Time describes “...valuations so thoroughly opposed to modern ways of thinking and feeling that one probably has to admit that an authentic access to the intimate meaning … will remain closed off to us.”1 Yet Carson’s work dowses to a deep course that flows between such distant times, and between them sites a space that can be orbited.
There is an original ancient poem in the center of the work, the “Geryoneis,” a fragmentary poem composed by Stesichorus in the 6th century (Carson’s deliberate misspelling as “Stesichoros” is a reference to Gertrude Stein). In Red this central fragmentary assemblage is surrounded by rooms, balconies, reflective surfaces of fragments of Carson’s creation, that bring the whole into sharper relief. Carson has herself used the analogy of a “rotunda”2 that one catches glimpses of, sometimes directly but mostly in pieces, in shards.
The Autobiography of Red3 begins with an essay on the poet Stesichoros; continues with “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros”; next, three appendices, of fragments and essay; then, the eponymous poem; concluding with an “interview” with Stesichoros. In the events of the poem, Geryon is a young gay man who falls in love with, and is deserted by, Herakles, only to find him again living in South America. “Red Meat” is demagoguery for the base; it’s also nourishing sustenance, the carnality of all flesh, and the heart of the matter.
Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros I. GERYON Geryon was a monster everything about him was red Put his snout out of the covers in the morning it was red How stiff the red landscape where his cattle scraped against Their hobbles in the red wind Burrowed himself down in the red dawn jelly of Geryon's Dream Geryon's dream began red then slipped out of the vat and ran Upsail broke silver shot up through his roots like a pup Secret pup At the front end of another red day II. MEANWHILE HE CAME Across the salt knobs it was Him Knew about the homegold Had sighted red smoke above the red spires III. GERYON'S PARENTS If you persist in wearing your mask at the supper table Well Goodnight Then they said and drove him up Those hemorrhaging stairs to the hot dry Arms To the ticking red taxi of the incubus Don't want to go want to stay Downstairs and read IV. GERYON'S DEATH BEGINS Geryon walked the red length of his mind and answered No It was murder And torn to see the cattle lay All these darlings said Geryon And now me V. GERYON'S REVERSIBLE DESTINY His mother saw it mothers are like that Trust me she said Engineer of his softness You don't have to make up your mind right away Behind her red right cheek Geryon could see Coil of the hot plate starting to glow VI. MEANWHILE IN HEAVEN Athena was looking down through the floor Of the glass-bottomed boat Athena pointed Zeus looked Him VII. GERYON'S WEEKEND Later well later they left the bar went back to the centaur's Place the centaur had a cup made out of a skull Holding three Measures of wine Holding it he drank Come over here you can Bring your drink if you're afraid to come alone The centaur Patted the sofa beside him Reddish yellow small alive animal Not a bee moved up Geryon's spine on the inside VIII. GERYON'S FATHER A quiet root may know how to holler He liked to Suck words Here is an almighty one he would say After days of standing in the doorway NIGHTBOLLSNORTED IX. GERYON'S WAR RECORD Geryon lay on the ground covering his ears The sound Of the horses like roses being burned alive X. SCHOOLING In those days the police were weak Family was strong Hand in hand the first day Geryon's mother took him to School She neatened his little red wings and pushed him In through the door XI. RIGHT Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him Joyfully XII. WINGS Steps off a scraped March sky and sinks Up into the blind Atlantic morning One small Red dog jumping across the beach miles below Like a freed shadow XIII. HERAKLES’ KILLING CLUB Little red dog did not see it he felt it All Events carry but one XIV. HERAKLE'S ARROW Arrow means kill It parted Geryon’s skull like a comb Made The boy neck lean At an odd slow angle sideways as when a Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze XV. TOTAL THINGS KNOWN ABOUT GERYON He loved lightning He lived on an island His mother was a Nymph of a river that ran to the sea His father was a gold Cutting tool Old scholia say that Stesichorus says that Geryon had six hands and six feet and wings He was red and His strange red cattle excited envy Herakles came and Killed him for his cattle The dog too XVI. GERYON'S END The red world And corresponding red breezes Went on Geryon did not (Anne Carson, 1998)
As ever, there is much to adore, I would suggest three areas one might particularly attend:
“At an odd slow angle sideways as when a / Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze” The beauty of this line is astonishing.
“Engineer of his softness / coil of the hot plate” Compressed between the vivid and painful contrast of these images— the mother as engineer, the cheek as boiling coil— is the horrible gentleness of the line, “You don’t have to make up your mind right away,” when has this sentence ever not sparked the agony of impending destiny in whoever is so unlucky as to hear it? The bookending with the softness and violence of both of these images heats the line up to boiling point.
“Steps off a scraped … like a freed shadow.” Here is the air, the distance, the small red dog below. The world spills out between them and beyond. What is the light doing? One sees it glancing and bright, visibility extending for miles.
Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, 2013.
From The Art of Poetry No. 88, Paris Review, 2004
Anne Carson, The Autobiography of Red, 1998.