Keynote Address: Anne Carson
The Untranslatable (In All of Us)
Thursday 24th March at 8.30pm (€18/14/12)
A singular force in modern literature, Anne Carson’s body
of work defies classification. Her writing marries formal
inventiveness with fierce discursive depth; her poetry and
non-fiction effortlessly stretches boundaries, meshes traditions
and morphs genres. The late Susan Sontag declared Carson
the one writer whose every word she would seek out, while
The New York Review of Books described her as having
“spectacularly obeyed” Pound’s injunction to “Make It New”.
Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson published her first book, Eros
the Bittersweet in 1986. Since then, in addition to her acclaimed translations of classical writers such as Sappho and Euripides,and her triptych rendering of An Oresteia (2009), Carson has published poems, essays, libretti, prose criticism and verse novels. Works include Plainwater (1995), Autobiography of Red (1998), The Beauty of the Husband (2002), Decreation (2005) and, most recently, the stunning book-object Nox (New Directions), in which Carson uses Catullus’ poem 101 as a lens through which to write about the death of her brother. Its appearance last year was hailed as a major publishing event. Carson is currently Professor of Classics at New York University.
Tonight, speaking in Ireland for the first time, Carson will present what promises to be a characteristically hybrid and compelling exploration of a subject which she has come to know intimately through her work as a poet and classicist: translation and its difficulties, as well as untranslatability and its attractions and privileges. Carson will consider Homer, Joan of Arc, Rembrandt, Holderlin and Francis Bacon in the course of her lecture.
“Anne Carson is a rare talent - brilliant and full of wit,
passionate and also deeply moving.”
Michael Ondaatje