Although she was in Iceland “listening to the wind” during the Oct. 8 announcement ceremony, Canadian Anne Carson was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
As a classicist and poet, Carson defies genres in her explorations of how written language can connect the lives of women both past and present.
Carson reimagines ancient texts that “in playful dialogue with the classical traditions, [have] created new forms for contemporary literature,” the Nobel committee said during the ceremony.
It speaks to Carson’s witty storytelling, and her ability to twist ancient classics so they fit in today’s framework of love, grief, despair and longing.
“She uses the myths, the characters, the stories, the fables from [ancient Greek and Latin] and puts them in a modern context,” Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the Nobel Committee for Literature, said following the award announcement. “As a young reader, you can recognize yourself in [her] stories.”
In her most recognized work, “Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse” (1998), Carson plays with structure and translation to create a re-telling of ancient Greek poet Stesíchoros’ myths of Heracles. She transforms it into a modern Bildungsroman, where today’s readers can see themselves in the main character’s journey through love.
Carson has a power to bring ancient texts, written in dead languages, to readers who would have never otherwise encountered the works, creating stories that build a bridge between two times.
In her long poem “The Glass Essay” (1995), Carson weaves the works of Emily Brontë into the text, connecting Brontë to the poem’s main character, a woman navigating life without her husband.
The unnamed woman that Carson writes of and Brontë’s popular “Wuthering Heights” both explore the agency and identity of women, despite being written nearly 150 years apart.
Through her inclusion of Brontë in “The Glass Essay,” Carson comments on the ways in which women’s experiences cross generations, and remain relevant no matter the year.
Many of Carson’s other works connect the experiences of women across time. “She writes about Homer, but also Rosalía; about Brecht, but also Marilyn Monroe… in Carson’s work, time is upside down,” the French author Èdouard Louis wrote.
Carson’s win is “great news for translation, classics, poetry and the breaking of generic and disciplinary boundaries, and the fact that you don’t have to fit a pre-existing mold to have a brilliant, successful career,” author Emily Wilson wrote. Wilson was the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey in English, a translation that, like many of Carson’s works, differed in its interpretations of female characters by using less degrading language.
Being only the second Canadian to win the Nobel Prize for literature, Carson is sure to influence future Canadian writers in how they explore and bend traditional writing structures.
All Canadians should take the time to read her works. Beloved Canadian author Margaret Atwood recommends starting with “The Beauty of the Husband.”
Private from the public eye, yet playful in her writing, Carson is an author who is unequivocally herself. She is an inspiration for bending the rules and exploring what connects us as humans, no matter the time period. Her work will be remembered as bold and captivating but still for everyone in its relatability.