Anne Carson was born in Toronto, Canada, but has lived in the United States for many years, teaching classical Greek and practical arts at North American universities. In translating the ancient Greeks, she has combined poetry from antiquity with her own work.
During a visit to Stockholm in the spring of 2015, Anne Carson and students of classical languages performed "Antigonick", Carson's own version of Sophocles' tragedy "Antigone". Carson added Nick, a silent figure who constantly walked around with a tape measure, a clear image of humanity's measured time. But Sophocles' story was also livened up with lines like "what's up?"
"Like being a match"
Anne Carson translates ancient heroes into modern-day people and lightens the language with contemporary jargon.
It's like being a match and walking around looking for something to strike against, so you can light it. Entering another language or another text is a difficult act, but it is also a scratching that can make you glow, she told TT in connection with a visit to the Gothenburg Poetry Festival.
In an interview with The Guardian, she uses fire to describe the difference between prose and poetry: "If prose is a house, poetry is a burning person running very quickly through it."
Anne Carson had her breakthrough with the prose poem "Red Autobiography" (1998). Based on an ancient poem fragment, she wrote a contemporary story about the unhappy love of two teenage boys. But it is even more about one boy's feelings of monstrosity and alienation.
From Bardot to autism
She took as her starting point a few unsorted sentences by the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus about how the hero Heracles slew the red-winged monster Geryon and stole his cattle. In Carson's hands, they became a tale of teenage heartbreak.
In 2021, the drama "Norma Jeane Baker of Troy" was translated into Swedish. The year before, the poetry collection "Lediga män" and the essay collection "Eros den bitterljuva", Carson's debut, were translated. In "Kort sagt" from 1992 (published in Swedish in 2017), she collected brief, lyrical texts discussing everything from Brigitte Bardot to autism.
"Is a life's mission"
"I do anything to avoid boredom. It is a life's task. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitive or past participle strangely enough, never stop the movement abruptly enough, never abandon the thought quickly enough," Anne Carson writes in the book's introduction.
In 2024, she wrote in the London Review of Books that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease - she finds it particularly humiliating to no longer be able to write with beautiful handwriting.
Born: 1950 in Toronto. Her father worked in a bank, and her mother was a housewife.
Occupation: Classicist, poet, essayist, translator of classical languages.
Background: A high school Latin teacher offered her extra lessons in classical Greek during lunchtime, sparking a lifelong passion for languages.
In Swedish: "Red Autobiography" (2009), "The Beauty of the Husband" (2012), "Red doc>" (2015), "In Brief" (2017), "The Economy of the Unforgotten" (2017), "Unemployed Men" (2020), "Eros the Bittersweet" (2020), "The Albertine Investigation" (2020) and "Norma Jeane Baker of Troy" (2021). Her new book, "Fel Norma", will be released in the fall of 2026.
