This year’s Nobel laureate is in her second home country, Iceland, and has just gotten into the car with her husband, Robert Currie, when TT gets a few hilarious minutes with them on FaceTime. She still has “no big words” to say about the significance of the prize.
“It’s a good thing, but the nicest thing so far is all the people who have reached out from different times in my life. They have written and congratulated me. I am very happy to make people so happy,” she says.
For decades, she has grappled with ancient literature and sometimes written new works based on scattered fragments of poetry. But she sees it more as being faithful to the Greek language.
I go back and forth between different stories, but I think the stories are embedded in the Greek language that I had the pleasure of learning as a young man. It opened the door to stories, but even more to language. Language is an endless mystery to me.
Will you come to Stockholm to receive the award?
“I don’t know yet,” she replies, to which her husband adds:
Hopefully we will. We will have a lot of meetings about it now.
Aren’t you going to celebrate a little?
“We’re on our way to have a bowl of soup now,” says Anne Carson, to which her husband exclaims:
We are in the middle of the celebration!
Anne Carson also tells of the absolutely magnificent rainbow seen above their house in Reykjavik earlier in the day.
I imagine it’s a big celebration - from the cosmos.
