Anne Carson’s work is inseparable from her cult of classical authors. Raised in Ontario, the daughter of a bank employee, Carson remembers her adolescence as that of “a disaffected person in need of stimulation.” One day, he discovers the poetry of Sappho. While at the Institute a decisive event occurs. A teacher, Alice Cowan, offers to give him Greek lessons at lunchtime. To her, Carson would say, “I owe my career and my happiness.” After graduating from the University of Toronto, he dedicated himself to studying Greek metrics. Then, start drawing and, by extension, writing. A mixture of sentimental essays, sober verses and prose, his work, as he has said Marco Martos“invent a way of reading the world.”
His first bookEros” (Lumen), from the year 86, is defined by her as “an approach to the primal nature of desire.” Erotic desire, according to Carson, is configured “as a triangulation whose consequence is the impossibility of achieving what one longs for. It is not in vain that the meaning of the word eros in Greek is lack.”
From then on, poetry books followed one another. “The beauty of the husband. A narrative essay in 29 tangos“(Lumen) is one of the most accomplished. In these poems, marked by the rhythm of long and short verses, representing the movements of a tango, the story of a failed marriage is told. Inspired by Keats’s phrase (“Truth is beauty. Beauty, truth”), the book states that marriage is like a tango, that you have to dance to the end. In the prologue he writes: “If prose is a house, poetry is someone on fire running through her.”
At that time, in one of his interviews he confesses: “If I knew what poetry was, I wouldn’t need to write.” In Men in Their Free Hours, he writes that no matter how hard life is, “what matters is doing something interesting with it.”
Carson’s well-deserved fame is consolidated with “Autobiography of Red, (Pretexts) the story of Geryon“. The book follows the poem by the Greek Stesichorus, where Heracles kills the winged red monster Geryon, to steal his cattle. In Carson’s poem, Geryon is a vulnerable child, a tender, red, winged monster, who lives on an island in the Atlantic. The boy has a hard life marked by the sexual abuse of his brother. When Heracles appears, Geryon falls in love. They both travel together to Hades. When they are separated, Geryon is devastated. Years later he meets Heracles in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately for him, Heracles is accompanied by a couple. Ancasha Peruvian. Attacked by jealousy, Gerión nevertheless accompanies Heracles and Áncash to Peru. In Lima, Ancash tells them about some sacred beings, the “Yazcol Yazcamac”, (“those who went, saw and returned”). It is a call to immortality.
The “Yazcol Yazcamac” have returned from a volcano in the fictitious town of Jucu, with red skin and wings, leaving their shortcomings behind. Under the attraction of that story, the three decide to travel to Ancash. In the last scene, they walk through Jucu under the fire of the volcano. As Gerión thinks, “We are wonderful beings, we are neighbors of the fire.” It is the same quiet fire that burns in the verses of this great Nobel Prize winner.
