ARTS & CULTURE · LITERATURE

In honoring Anne Carson, Stockholm pays tribute to a poet of fragments—coincidentally during the very week that Frankfurt is reflecting on artificial intelligence and translation.

The Wind

There are phone calls one wishes one could have overheard. On Thursday, Ingrid Carlberg, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, reached her future laureate in Iceland. Anne Carson was reportedly very surprised; there was no time for a long conversation, yet the poet shared one detail: she was in Iceland specifically to listen to the wind.

One might dismiss this as affectation—the pose of a scholar who, at a pivotal moment, prefers to present herself as a listener to nature rather than the object of global acclaim. I, however, view that remark as a poetics in miniature. The wind requires crevices and cracks to become audible at all; where there is no obstacle, there is no whistling. And a poet who has spent her life working with texts composed primarily of fissures may well have an ear for what drifts between the words.

What does this have to do with Frankfurt? More than one might think. As of today, the general public is admitted to the Book Fair—the celebration of books runs until Sunday—and the Guest of Honor, the Czech Republic, has had an artificial coastline with a lighthouse constructed on the banks of the Main; from this structure, quotes from Czech literature are projected using artificial intelligence. Here, abundance; there, the wind in the cracks. Both of this week’s stories pose the same question, and I do not wish to evade it: What remains of a poet who honed her craft by translating fragments, in an age when machines promise to close every gap?

A Classicist with a Playful Streak

Anne Carson was born in Toronto in 1950, the younger of two children. Her father worked for various banks; the family moved frequently, living in smaller towns across Ontario. As a child, she once told the *New York Times*, she wanted to be like Oscar Wilde: well-read, elegant, and witty. Her path to that ideal led through Latin and Ancient Greek—and took her far enough that the admirer of that great ironist evolved into one of today’s most learned poets, a professor of Classics who has held academic posts in both Canada and the United States.

Her books defy categorization. *Autobiography of Red* (1998) is a novel in verse that transplants the myth of Geryon—the monster whose cattle were stolen by Heracles—into the present day, transforming the beast into a vulnerable boy who takes and loves photographs. *Eros the Bittersweet* (1986) examines desire as the Greeks described it: an experience at once pleasurable and painful, compressed into a single word coined by Sappho—*glukupikron*, or "sweet-bitter." It is impossible to decide whether such books are scholarship or poetry—nor do they wish to be defined as either. Carson herself occasionally refers to her long poems as novels or essays, while her scholarly writings read like prose poetry.

The Academy has recognized this. It honors her courage and inventiveness, praising above all her "playful dialogue" with the classical tradition—an engagement that has given rise to new forms of contemporary literature. The word "playful" merits attention. To play is to observe rules while simultaneously making use of the latitude those rules allow; Anyone who sees only the scope for play has failed to grasp that without the rules of the game—in other words, without philology—there would be no game at all. Carson is therefore playful with the rigor of a reader of manuscripts, and rigorous with the playful instinct of a poet.

The Papyrus Principle

To understand how Carson works, one must picture a refuse heap. Around the turn of the twentieth century, papyrologists excavating the ancient trash heaps of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, unearthed scraps bearing verses by Sophocles, Euripides, and Sappho. Sappho—who is said to have composed poetry on Lesbos around 600 BC and whose work was collected into nine books by the scholars of Alexandria—has come down to us only in fragments: in quotations by other authors and on papyri that are torn and riddled with holes, sometimes smaller than a postage stamp. Only a single poem is considered to have survived intact.

In 2002, Carson published *If Not, Winter*, a collection of all of Sappho’s surviving fragments, presenting the Greek on the left and her English translation on the right. Her approach was as simple as it was radical: wherever the papyrus breaks off, she inserts a bracket and leaves a blank space. There are no additions, no speculative insertions in the running text, no comforting smoothing-over. In the introduction, she describes the brackets as exciting, noting that they signify "a space of freedom for the play of the imagination." This startles the reader, for one had previously assumed that the purpose of translation was to bridge gaps. Carson, however, puts the gaps on display; she frames them and makes them readable.

For anyone who considers this a matter of interest only to specialists, it is worth recalling a discovery that lies closer to us than the field of philology might suggest. In 1958, the Genevan papyrologist Victor Martin, associated with the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana in Cologny, published Papyrus Bodmer IV: an almost completely preserved comedy by Menander titled *Dyskolos*—the story of a curmudgeon in perpetual conflict with the world—of which, until then, only quotations and fragments had been known. Lake Geneva is a long way from Lesbos, yet the ancient world, when it reaches us, is everywhere the same: a fragment preserved by chance, desert sands, or a collector. To read it is to read the traces of accidents. Philology is, if you will, the study of accidents with a better reputation, and Carson is arguably its most delightful and precise investigator.

Shards of a Larger Language

In 1923, Walter Benjamin erected a monument to this situation—albeit a covert one. "The Task of the Translator" appeared as the preface to his rendering of Baudelaire’s *Tableaux parisiens*, and the very first sentence denies the reader what readers typically desire: Benjamin asserts that consideration for the recipient is nowhere conducive to the understanding of a work of art. Translation does not serve the person unable to read the original. It is a form in its own right, ensuring the original’s afterlife and its "ripening"—that late unfolding which the author himself could not have foreseen.

And then there is the image—familiar to anyone who has ever attended a seminar on the subject, yet never worn thin—of the shards of a vessel. Just as shards must fit together at the most minute level without being identical, so too should translation—rather than merely mimicking the original’s meaning—lovingly recreate its *mode* of meaning within the target language, until both become recognizable as "fragments of a larger language." True translation, the text notes toward the end, is "transparent"; it neither obscures the original nor stands in its light. Ultimately, Benjamin regards the interlinear version—line beneath line, word beneath word—as the archetype of all translation.

Anyone who opens *If Not, Winter* finds Benjamin’s shards laid out before them—only Carson does not glue them back together. The brackets signal that something is missing, and the fact of that absence is itself part of the message. At the same time, a second circle closes—one traced by Hans Blumenberg. In *The Work of Myth* (1979), he describes a myth not as a finished original text corrupted by later storytellers, but as a body of material that lives only through its variations: its reception is part of the myth itself. Aby Warburg had already conceptualized this as the "afterlife of antiquity." From this perspective, Carson’s Geryon is not a misuse of the myth, but its latest chapter.

The Book That Refuses to Be Finished

Carson is most exposed in *Nox* (published in 2010)—a book that is not a book, but a box. When her brother Michael died in Copenhagen in 2000—having vanished from her life decades earlier—it took two weeks for his widow to convey the news; she reportedly could not find Anne’s number among his belongings. Carson, who had long been working on a translation of Catullus’s Poem 101—an elegy for a brother who died on a distant shore—began the following winter to construct an epitaph for Michael in book form. The result, a facsimile of this album, consists of a single sheet folded accordion-style and housed in a grey box: photographs, fragments of letters, collages, mementos, and—on the facing pages—a dictionary that parses every word of the Latin poem individually.

Here lies the touchstone for everything I wish to say about machines. For this dictionary resembles a mechanical process: word by word, entry by entry. And yet, every entry bleeds. Beneath the entry for the vastness of the sea appears the question of whether one has traversed the immeasurable expanse of the night. A translation that cannot be completed transforms into a lament for the dead; the fact that Carson confesses she never arrived at the translation she had hoped for is not a failure, but the very substance of the book. At the end of the album, her version of the final line appears once more—so faded that only a single word remains legible: *Brother*.

The Coast of Bohemia

And now, to the coast. "Czechia: A Coastal Country" is the motto of the guest-country presentation—a title intended, according to the organizers, to be deliberately confusing. It alludes to Shakespeare, who, in *The Winter’s Tale*, has a ship dock on the shores of Bohemia—even though Bohemia is no more coastal than Zurich. It is a coincidence that defies deep interpretation yet merits a smile: Carson’s *Sappho* title also bears "winter" in its name.

The lighthouse in the pavilion, casting quotes into the space, serves as a fitting image for what machines do well: they curate, they bundle, they make sentences light up. Whether they can also take responsibility for the darkness between those sentences is another matter. A lighthouse, after all, is an instrument of warning; it marks where the land ends and danger begins. Carson’s brackets do the same, only in reverse: they show where the text ends and the unknown begins, preventing us from confusing the coast with the mainland. Merely illuminating a poem is not the same as reading it; knowing its edges is where understanding begins.

Shakespeare’s coast is a geographical error—one that literature never held against him, but rather embraced as a gift. A system trained on probabilities would smooth it out, for it is the nature of probability to iron out the improbable. I do not wish to offer a cultural critique of the algorithm. Anyone who works with computers—as I do—is inoculated against disdain and admires what neural translation systems achieve today. Yet precisely for this reason, I know that the most interesting part of a log file is the place where something is missing: a record without a gap is suspicious; the gap itself conveys information. Machines are masters of filling in the blanks, and a process that renders gaps invisible deprives the reader of the knowledge that those gaps exist.

One might call this a dispute over method, and it is an old one. In 1813, Friedrich Schleiermacher articulated the choice: either the translator leaves the writer largely undisturbed and moves the reader toward them, or they leave the reader largely undisturbed and move the writer toward them. A machine that must prove itself in the marketplace almost inevitably opts for the latter: fluid, natural, customer-friendly. Carson and Benjamin choose the former—radically so, and at the risk of causing the reader to stumble. Nothing prevents a system from inserting parentheses; the question is what we choose to reward.

Frankfurt’s answer can be found on the bookshelves: more than 120 books from the Czech Republic have been released in German to coincide with the fair. Behind each one lie hundreds of small decisions made and owned by someone—decisions regarding how much foreignness a German sentence can withstand. Viewed in this light, the Nobel Prize awarded to Carson is also an accolade for this kind of work—work that rarely draws attention to itself as long as it succeeds.

Those Who Listen

The occasion for this column—I admit it—is a news item from the daily cycle, and daily news has a way of losing its urgency after a week. The subject matter, however, does not: ever since Sappho, Menander, and Catull, reading ancient texts has meant listening for what is missing. That the Swedish Academy has chosen to honor this stance—in a year when machines dominate the discourse on writing—strikes me as the week’s most brilliant stroke, whether intentional or not.

For those wishing to catch this spirit, I recommend four works, to be read in this order. First, *Nox*—read it on a long evening with good lighting, or else the physical act of unfolding the pages becomes too taxing. Then *If Not, Winter*, to learn how to read the white space. Next, Benjamin’s essay—a mere few pages that remain inexhaustible even after more than a century. And finally—requiring a certain willingness to embrace a challenge—a book from the Czech section at the Frankfurt fair, mindful of the fact that a human being has labored between the lines.

And when you find yourself at the fair this weekend, standing somewhere between the lighthouse and the buoys, pause for a moment and listen not to the projection, but to the current flowing between the quotations. Anne Carson, it seems to me, has done just that.

Sapere aude!

S.

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