What do you get when you cross Euripides’ classic tragedy, the artistic stylings of Rosanna Bruno, and the poetic touch of Anne Carson? This book! Here’s what we know: Troy has been ravaged. Everyone is depicted as an animal (except Kassandra, who is another planet, which actually makes complete sense when you think about it). Need I say more?
Anne CarsonANNE CARSON was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.
H of H Playbook is an explosion of thought, in drawings and language, about a Greek tragedy called Herakles by the 5th-century BC poet Euripides. In myth Herakles is an embodiment of manly violence who returns home after years of making war on enemies and monsters (his famous “Labors of Herakles”) to find he cannot adapt himself to a life of peacetime domesticity. He goes berserk and murders his whole family. Suicide is his next idea. Amazingly, this does not happen. Due to the intervention of his friend Theseus, Herakles comes to believe he is not, after all, indelibly stained by his own crimes, nor is his life without value. It remains for the reader to judge this redemptive outcome.
“I think there is no such thing as an innocent landscape,” said Anselm Kiefer, painter of forests grown tall on bones.
Here is a new comic-book version of Euripides’s classic The Trojan Women, which follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache, and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. This collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson attempts to give a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world).
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a meditation on the destabilizing and destructive power of beauty, drawing together Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe, twin avatars of female fascination separated by millennia but united in mythopoeic force. Norma Jeane Baker was staged in the spring of 2019 at The Shed’s Griffin Theater in New York, starring actor Ben Whishaw and soprano Renée Fleming and directed by Katie Mitchell.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Anne Carson writes, “Euripides was a playwright of the fifth century BC who reinvented Greek tragedy, setting it on a path that leads straight to reality TV. His plays broke all the rules, upended convention and outraged conservative critics. The Bakkhai is his most subversive play, telling the story of a man who cannot admit he would rather live in the skin of a woman, and a god who seems to combine all sexualities into a single ruinous demand for adoration. Dionysos is the god of intoxication. Once you fall under his influence, there is no telling where you will end up."
Translated by Anne Carson
Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is her seminal work. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the author, “Dear Antigone.”
The Albertine Workout contains fifty-nine paragraphs, with appendices, summarizing Anne Carson’s research on Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust’s Á la recherche du temps perdu.
Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of “Poem 101” by Catallus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry.
Anne Carson’s poetry––characterized by various reviewers as “short talks,” “essays,” or “verse narratives”––combines the confessional and the critical in a voice all her own. Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson in Glass, Irony and God weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style. This collection includes “The Glass Essay,” a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson’s reading of the Brontë sisters, “Book of Isaiah,” which evokes the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism, and “The Fall of Rome,” about her trip to “find” Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of terrible alienation there.
Translated by Anne Carson
Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is her seminal work. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the author, “Dear Antigone.”
It is the masterwork by Danish poet Inger Christensen (“a true singer of the syllables,” said C. D. Wright), often cited as a Nobel contender and one of Europe’s most revered poets. On its publication in 1969, it took Denmark by storm, winning critical praise and becoming a huge popular favorite. Translated into many languages, it won international acclaim and is now a classic of modern Scandinavian poetry. it is both a collection of poems and a single poetic epic, forming a philosophical statement on the nature of language, perception, and reality. The subject matter, though, is down to earth: amoebas, stones, and factories; fear, sea urchins, and mental institutions; sand, sexuality, and song. The words and images of it recur in ways reminiscent of Christensen’s other works, but here is a younger poetry, wilder, and crackling with energy. The marvelous and complex use of mathematical structure in it is faithfully captured in Susanna Nied’s English translation, which won a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.
What do you get when you cross Euripides’ classic tragedy, the artistic stylings of Rosanna Bruno, and the poetic touch of Anne Carson? This book! Here’s what we know: Troy has been ravaged. Everyone is depicted as an animal (except Kassandra, who is another planet, which actually makes complete sense when you think about it). Need I say more?
There’s no other writer that can present such demands on a feather pillow for the reader, fuse erudition with insights so fluidly, and naturalize unorthodoxy in a manner preserving stylistic originality with timeless thought.
In her classical translations, Carson has pursued what T. S. Eliot called “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.”
This little grenade of a book is difficult to categorize. It’s a performance piece and a treatise on war and beauty, reality and fakery, bombshell and bombing—with ancient Greek etymology lessons woven in to show us how the small and everyday becomes epic, and vice versa. Marilyn Monroe (neé Norma Jeane Baker) is fused here with Helen of Troy, and elements of both milieus—Homer and Hollywood—populate the narrative. It’s easy to imagine the blunt beauty of Carson’s language being spoken and sung on stage.
Carson at her best: arresting, exact, at once surprising and unsurprised. She depends on Euripides throughout, but pushes him further than he was prepared to go.
This book fuses poetry, fun Greek history lexicon lessons, Helen, and Marilyn. ‘War creates two categories of persons: those who outlive it and those who don’t.//Both carry wounds.’ Delicious couplets. There are dancers who have internalized the music to such a high vibration that they no longer fit into a strict categorization for what they do. They weave with the music in an ancient alien way. Anne Carson brings intergalactic musical moves to the written page. ‘Hermione it’s me, hello hello hello hello hello.’ I dare you to get to that line and not ache. How does an artist write this way? Brilliance and cherries light her stage.
She reaches past the contemporary moment to craft her unique and universal voice, one that is both as ancient as Sappho and intimidatingly modern.
For two decades her work has moved–phrase by phrase, line by line, project by improbable project–in directions that a human brain would never naturally move. The approach has won her awards, accolades, and an electric reputation in the literary world.
She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote.
Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today.
A striking book.
Maybe her best…totally recherché and weirdly clear, lingered over and neatly boxed. Precious in the word’s best sense.
Anne Carson is a daring, learned, unsettling writer.
In Carson, a single sentence can transcend the entire operation.
[Antigonick] is both riveting and humorous. Bianca Stone’s illustrations are immediate and visceral, and Robert Currie’s overall book design has elegance and strength.
It is a cry of grief posed in question form, emphatic, handwritten, excessive and abbreviated and, in this sense, a measured scream that gives us some sense of who or what lives on when it is all too late.
A beautiful, bewildering book, wondrous and a bit scary to behold, that gives a reader much to think about without making it clear how she should feel.
Antigonick is as much a re-telling as it is a testament to the importance of Antigone in Western art, of re-tellings, and of refiguring narrative.
One of the best designed books of the year and a unique reading experience.
Anne Carson’s is among the most inventive, astringent sensibilities in modern letters.
This is where Carson’s work is best staged: in the uncanny gateway between the temporal and the timeless; in the nick between the world of powerboats and the sublime, terrifying realm of the dead and the still lively gods.
Her poetry is light, swift, and beautiful.
Carson’s poetry convinces…irrepressibly modern and provoking.
It captures, too, the rift between our everyday efforts to keep ourselves busy, and infinite tragedy: that raw nick between Tuesday and death.
Anne Carson’s blunt Antigonick has arrived at the right cultural moment, if not for poetry than for grief.
Antigonick plays extensively with the conventions of narrative form, translation, and the physical presentation of literature.
Carson has perfectly captured Antigone’s moral fervour and her almost erotic desire for death.
Carson is an exceptionally rhythmic writer.
Ms. Carson does more than just update the language and quicken the pacing–she rewrites the play, mines its subtleties, its absurdity and its strangely comic timing and manages to produce a unique text out of a story that goes back much further than the fifth century B.C. when Sophokles wrote his version.
An assemblage of words and images so artfully arranged that they make us reconsider not only what poetry can do and should do but even what a book is… Nox will change the way you read.
Carson has made an extraordinary object, like the phoenix’s egg, and has supplied us with the sublime logic to understand everything inside of it as provisional, sketched, and partial: it is an edifice built on botched attempts.
True, this book — which you can read in less than an hour but will take a life to absorb — takes risks, gambles with exposure… Nox reminds us that where we cannot understand, we can still love.
What a book.
A moving document, a rapt exploration of a few more or less deconstructive ideas, a marvelous object of manufacture, a long trip through a short poem by Catullus, and a minor, memorable occurrence in the career of a major writer… Poetry of the most welcome kind: a work you can admire and interpret.
Carson daringly resists the idea that one cannot think one’s way into another’s muteness and pursues an intimacy occasioned both by necessity and desperation… Stunning in the eloquence of its ambivalence.
Nox is poetic: Its language sings and stings… Carson is less interested in line breaks and stanzas than in creating a collage of texts to mimic the unwieldly and disjointed experience of mourning.
[Anne Carson] applies the habits of classical scholarship, the linguistic rigor, the relentless search for evidence, the jigsaw approach to scattered facts, to the trivia of contemporary private life.
Anne Carson’s shape-shifting powers are epic.
She faces the voids that many of us prefer to turn away from, and this gives her work a rare urgency.
Reading Anne Carson is to experience a euphonious, mystical sort of perplexity.
Here, from the muse of paradox, from Eros the Bittersweet, are poems that shuttle and veer between Hebraism and Hellenism, serendipity and the full blown sequence, the wry and the wondrous, autobiography and the story of the race.
…breathtaking, evidence of visionary publishing at a moment when the book business is increasingly cynical.
Carson has… created an individual form and style for narrative verse… Seldom has Pound’s injunction ‘Make It New’ been so spectacularly obeyed.
