De «Note on method»

So writing involves some dashing back and forth between the darkening landscape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of everything. I do not know. It is the clearing that takes time. It is the clearing that is a mistery. 

Once cleared the room writes itself. I copy the names of everything left in it and note their activity. 

How does the clearing occur? Lukács says it begins with my intent to exercise everything that is not accessible to the immediate experience (Erlebbarkeit) of the self. Were this possible, it would seal the room on its own boundaries like a cosmos. Lukács is prescribing a room for aesthetic work; it would be a gesture of false consciousness to say academic writing can take place there. And yet, you know as well as I, thought finds itself in its room in its best moments -

locked inside its own pressures, fishing of facts of the landscape from notes or memory as well as it may - vibrating (as Mallarmé would say) with their disappearance.

Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost, Princeton Paperbacks, 1999.

O mais esperado

Mandelstam

Akhmatova was translating Macbeth in the early '30s
(a time she called "the vegetarian years" to distinguish
its charm from "the meat-eating years" still ahead).
For a poem in which he likened Stalin's fingers to worms
Osip Mandelstam was arrested in May 1934. All night
the police searched his papers and threw them out on the floor
to the sound of an ukelele
from the next apartment.
Akhmatova never finished Macbeth although
she liked to quote her hero saying people
in my homeland die faster than
the flowers on their hats.

Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours, Cape Poetry, 2000.

Make noise

The play's centerpiece is a deception scene in which two men manipulate Elektra with lies to a point of near hysteria. She is an adult but unmarried female in the house of a mother who hates her and she has neither social function nor emotional context. She seems to squat on the doorstep of the house rather than live inside. Her sister calls her a maniac and waves her ideas away. Her brother treats her as superflous to his plans - he finds her wild, emotional, depressing. She is a woman stranded at doorways and passivity is killing her. 

There is only one thing she can do.

Make noise.

Anne Carson sobre Electra in Sophokles, "Elektra", An Oresteia, Faber & Faber, 2009.

A sudden Unspeakable Sweat Floweth Down my Skin

He gazes, perhaps he blames

Sweat. It's just sweat. But I do like to look at them.
Youth is a dream where I go every night
and wake with just this little jumping bunch of arteries in my hand
Hard, darling, to be sent behind their borders.
Carrying a stone in each eye.

Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Vintage Books, 1995

LXIII

Meanwhile I know you will be pleased
if I leave with you

to chew over in your own time,

a small question of interpretation
which arouse out of my visit to Orvieto.
The cathedral contains a chapel,

now know as the Signorelli Chapel,
decorated in 1499 with monumental frescoes,
painted pilasters, panels of grotesques

and false windows
by the famed Luca Signorelli
for a fee of 180 ducats paid pro rata.

Around the lower walls of the chapel
Signorelli has added
series of grisaille medallions

illustrating scenes from Dante's Commedia
They are monochrome,
eerie in appearance

and iconologically
controversial.
For example,

one medallion depicts the scene from Purgatorio III
where Dante is accosted by a mob of souls.
They are demanding an answer.

E urgente.
Permesso?
They point.

Dante's text makes clear
that it is Dante's shadow
which has mastered the attention of the whimpering shades,

for throughout the Purgatorio (you well know)
only Dante,
as a living man,

casts a shadow.
Dante makes no mistake
about what the laws of optics require here.

Shadow is a matter of interception of light.
The dead intercept nothing. Capisco.
Much less clear

is Signorelli's rendering of the scene.
He had given everyone a shadow.
Why?

The standard guidebook explanation
fails to nourish me:
'...Signorelli has assigned shadows

to all figures unable to supress
his naturalistic training

even at the expense of poetic veracity.'
Non capisco.
I point.

LXIV

There are three ways  to master death.
Here is the third one (the one
Anna Xenia told me

on the way home from Orvieto).
Signorelli is painting late in his studio
when they carry in his son,

killed in a riot.
He sits up all night with the body,
making sketch after sketch

and throwing them into a pile.
From that time
all his angels

have the one same face.

Anne Carson, Glass and God, Cape Poetry, 1998

Error-Rome

On fire

(Chorus) Nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without ruin

But of course there is hope Look here comes hope

Wandering in

To tickle your feet

Then you notice the soles are on fire

Antigonick (Sophokles), "translated" by Anne Carson, illustrated by Bianca Stone (Bloodaxe Books, 2012).

Um verso

Antigone: And when my strength is gone I'll stop

Antigonick (Sophokles), "translated" by Anne Carson, illustrated by Bianca Stone (Bloodaxe Books, 2012).