Original subtitles

Hello, and thank you.

And welcome, Anne Carson, to the stage.

I had a heavy bag with me. I carried all your books with me.

So they're here.

We're going to talk about them.

Okay.

How are you?

Fine, thanks.

Good.

How are you all?

There's water.

Yeah.

I'm a little nervous.

Anne Carson is the writer I love the most.

And we have spoken on stage many times.

And I'm always a little nervous, but I'm very happy and honored that we are

speaking again today.

I want to start by talking about yesterday's performance that I think a

lot of people saw it, Stax.

Who saw the performance yesterday?

Yes. So a lot of people saw it. Some people didn't see it.

And it's you reading an essay from Float called Stax.

And your collaborator and husband, Robert Curry, and there

he is, and another helper, stacking cardboard

boxes on top of each other while you are reading.

And actually disturbing your reading.

We hope.

And I've seen this performance many times, and I'm always, in the beginning,

I'm almost annoyed.

Like, why is all this happening with the boxes? Because it's disturbing. I want

to hear the words.

But then there's something very moving about it, because there's this tension

between attention and distraction.

And these are two words that go through all of your writing. Can you talk

about...

The distraction?

Well, the distraction is mostly Curry and a helper, who was Mr.

Smith last night. Mr.

Smith and Mr.

Curry have a sort of friendly warfare with a

bunch of boxes on stage.

And originally...

I can't remember why we made this piece, but I think we were invited by somebody

to a certain space where we thought we'd like to use the whole space, not just do

a normal reading.

And so I wrote a piece about stacks, the

concept of stacking things, like boxes.

Curry's function generally in our collaboration, as we like to call it, is

to add space to something, because I think of reality

as a sentence.

words on a page, and he thinks of reality as a sculpture, a language as a

sculpture, and reality as all kinds of things involving space and people and

movement. I can't think in those ways, so he puts that stuff into the words.

So in this case, that stuff turned out to be cardboard boxes. I forget

why. I guess we just had some in the back.

And so it becomes a sort of flurry of activity.

I don't think of it as attention and distraction, although originally I think

we started to do things together, he and I, because I

am uneasy being the center of a stage worth a

spotlight in reading.

blah, blah, blah, it always seems to me a little inadequate as an evening's

entertainment for you, so I thought, well then, good idea to move me to the

side of the stage and have something else happening in the middle, and then

it would be interesting for people at least to watch, and so that's how we

began to make things that had these different parts to them, but

Lynn thinks of it as more

maybe conceptually as a tension between attention and distraction,

which maybe is reasonable too.

You're talking about not wanting to be in the center of things.

And that reminds me of something that Merce Cunningham, who I know you, the

great choreographer Merce Cunningham, who lived and collaborated with...

the composer John Cage, I know you used a lot of their

work in your work, in your and Currie's work, and Merce Cunningham said

something that he understood what it would be to create

a performance, to create a new choreography

by going away from the whole idea of center stage.

opening up the stage.

So it's just as interesting, what happens over there, and what happens

over there, and what happens over there, and it seems to me that that's a little

bit about what you're saying.

I think so.

Also,

when we started to work together, Curry and I, he introduced me to John Cage's

work and thinking, and John Cage influenced Merce Cunningham.

in a major way, and one of their notions was, as Lynn says, to move the focus of

your attention to the margins of everything happening, not have it just

be focused on some person in the middle.

So his dancers don't face always you, they face different ways,

and they have almost no expression on their faces, and they don't...

They don't try to focus your thought on a point. It moves around.

So I think for performance of writing, that's disturbing,

as you say, but also it breaks up the event so that you can think into it at

different places.

My tendency, because I'm a...

kind of, well, I've been a professor all my life, my tendency is to want to

lecture. And lecturing is me having a truth and I insist that you know this

truth. And you know it in these words I'm going to give you and no other way.

And that's really tedious.

And also it isn't really thinking because it doesn't move. Your mind wants

to move and the best thing a work of art can do is take your mind with it moving

somewhere.

that you never expected to move.

So I think that's what we're fond of in Merce Cunningham

and John Cage, or one thing.

Didn't Gertrude Stein also say something about moving things away from the

center?

Yes. Can we remember that quote?

Let's see.

I can't remember it, but something about moving away from...

Yeah, she says that several different ways, I think. It was important for her,

too. But I mean, that's a good illustration of how hopeless it is to

try to do this, because when you think Gertrude Stein, you don't think the

margins of other people around her. You think of her monumental self in the

middle of your attention.

So it's a strange and hopeless project to lose the self,

especially in the middle of making...

art works.

But we keep trying.

I'd like to read something that you've written on the

back of your collection of essays called Wrong Norma.

Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph

Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, Snow,

Poverty. Roger's thesaurus. My dad.

Saturday night.

The pieces are not linked.

That's why I've called them wrong.

That doesn't make sense to you?

Well, actually it does, but I... I love your preoccupation with wrong.

Ah.

But can you talk about it?

Well, sure.

I think the word wrong, it's a great word,

came to me

many years ago when somebody was asking me, because I was born in Canada, but I

live now in the United States and Iceland, but I came to the United

States. to teach there, and people would ask me inevitably at cocktail parties,

so what's the difference between life in Canada and life in the United States?

And I never knew what to say because they don't want the truth about that.

I took to saying, well, Canadians are different

than you. You rule the world. Canadians are...

always polite but wrong.

And that seemed to me true at the time. It still does.

But anyway, I thought, well, that's me. What I'm doing as this Canadian person

in America is being wrong most of the time. And it comes out in ways like

this.

A collection of pieces of writing.

is often thought to be a coherent whole, an experience, you know, that works

one piece after another to accumulate into a central idea.

But mine don't.

So there that is, I thought. And they always want you to say something on a

book, something embarrassing about how famous you are. So I thought, well,

instead of that, I could just...

tell people what they're getting into when they read the book.

That would save a lot of trouble.

About things being side by side or stacked or wrong, not

in the center, in the margins.

You write in the book

about a visit to the lake and swimming.

This is the essay called 1 equals 1. Yeah.

And you write about swimming.

You're a swimmer, right?

Sometimes, yeah.

You write a lot about water and swimming.

And also here.

It's a beautiful essay.

And then you write about the lake, ending to the lake, the swim ending.

And then you write...

Filthy families and souls in despair pressed flat against one another in the

grip to survive.

Uncountable arms and legs, torn open eyes, locked all night in a train

waiting for dawn. A scene so much the antithesis of her own mourning.

She cannot think it. And then you write this sentence.

What sense it makes for these two mornings to exist side by side in the

world where we live.

Should this be framed as a question?

Would not be answerable by philosophy or poetry or finance or the shallows or the

deeps of her own mind?

She fears.

Now, I would have loved to read that sentence five more times about the two

mornings existing side by side. I want everyone to go home and read that essay

and read that sentence.

But can you talk a little bit about these two...

about the two mornings, the two opposites, the harmony and the

terror existing side by side.

Well, the physical situation out of which that sentence arises in that story

is that I had a lovely morning by myself swimming in the ocean and then

went home and read the newspaper and it was at the time of, I think, the

Syrian exodus from Syria. People were trying to get out of Syria and go

places. And there were stories in the paper about people trying to go

on boats, you know, inadequate boats and drowning and other people in

very crowded, what do you call them, trains

by railway.

And so it seemed to me, it always seems to me when contemplating the news, as we

call it, how you can read a story about tragedy and trauma

and enter into the sorrow of that and then

close the paper and go make toast.

You know, how do we do that?

How do we just let...

non-existence be right beside existence, and it's okay.

And I don't know how we do, but we do. We have to. It's what we call going on

with life.

But it always seems to me a problem that doesn't resolve, no matter how you think

into it.

Has this been... Yeah, go.

Yeah.

Now, I was thinking about

Danez Smith, who did an interview here a couple days ago, he was talking about

this in a more contemporary way.

He was talking about the difficulty of being him, himself.

He's from Minneapolis.

He's black and an activist poet.

So in his work he describes things like the death of people in Minneapolis shot

by the police and he makes a nice poem out of it and he performs it and people

say, good poem, and then what does he do with that?

It's like we all go home thinking, well, we checked that box, we dealt with...

the police shooting people in Minneapolis, because we listened to this

poem, and that's okay now, we go on to the next problem.

But, you know, it isn't okay, it's still just there, and that's what poets like

him have to conjure with all the time, that those two things being just there,

and what does he do with that in the presence of you, and what does he do

with that after he goes home.

Is this also the subject

or the themes that go through all your writing? These things

knocking against each other and not

being able to exist side by side?

Yeah, that resistance.

Yeah,

it's a kind of resistance.

reality to the representations of reality, I guess you would say. There's

a collision.

Which, yeah, what's the result of that is that we live in doubt about whether

we can possibly ever be good people.

I was just reading, I mean, this is really off the cuff, but Lynn elicits

that method of thinking.

Just thinking today, reading something about Descartes, and Descartes said this

famous sentence, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, which everybody

knows and learns in school.

But if you look at the sentence, really it says, dubito ergo cogito ergo

sum. I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.

Oh, really?

Yes. Isn't that surprising?

I didn't know it either, because I never looked it up.

I had, like, explosions going on in my head now.

I know, you see cogito ergo sumon t-shirts all over the world, but dubito

has a bad press.

I mean, because... Thank you. Thank you, Dick Cart.

So that makes me, that's very provocative. Everything starts in doubt,

or it also could mean hesitation, but same idea.

And hesitation, you have written a whole essay called On Hesitation.

I did write an essay on hesitation.

What is it without hesitation that

you grapple with?

That's a good question. I think I wrote the lecture,

in order to investigate that question, and it really got nowhere, but the

interesting thing about that lecture was, I did it because I got invited to

do a lecture at the Prado Museum in Madrid, and I thought, whoa, that's

cool, I'm really a cool person now, and then I wrote this lecture, and you know,

lectures, they start somewhere with a question, then they go God knows where,

because thought has its own paths.

end up being a lecture about chipmunks, which they don't have in Spain.

So the whole underpinning of the thought was just pretty remote

for them. But anyway.

But also about Goya's dog, I seem to remember. Yeah, Goya enters into it. I

tried to put in Spanish stuff, you know, after I realized it was all about

chipmunks. So fortunately, Goya has a painting.

You've probably seen this painting. When you look at it, you think it's a detail

of a painting because it's a huge sort of gold-colored canvas with down in this

corner a little dog's head, just the head of a dog looking with some

expression that people all see differently, looking up at the hole

above, the space above.

It's a fascinating painting.

But we digress.

Well, that's what we're supposed to do. So good.

I want to go back a little bit to float.

It has stuff on it. I'm sorry.

Peanut butter?

Well, something.

It's in little pamphlets.

There's something about, and I want to come back to that.

several of your books are, I mean, they're physical objects. They're

physical objects, art objects, or objects. I remember first time I was,

you and Curry introduced me to float. I think Curry sort of did a kind of very

dramatic gesture where he sort of threw all the pamphlets over the audience.

Because you can do that too. You can read it and you can throw it.

There is an essay, in float, called

Uncle Falling.

It's one of my many favorite essays.

And that has an autobiographical theme to

it.

And I was wondering if you could read a little bit from Uncle Falling.

Harry? Yeah, great uncle, my dad's uncle.

Great uncle. And what was it about Uncle Harry? Uncle Harry was a hermit.

He lived in the northern woods of Canada by himself with a

dog and two horses.

And he was, I don't know, was he crazy?

He was a very inward person, very, had his own view of reality.

And he just didn't want to live with other people, so he withdrew to a farm

and died there.

But he got dementia at the end of his life, and that was sad.

But until that time, he was a really admirable person, and he was a figure in

my childhood because he was always there on the farm when we went for summer

vacations, as we did.

He didn't speak much.

He was deaf.

And he got deaf by jumping into the lake when he was a kid and burst his

eardrum.

And because he was deaf, I guess he didn't find it pleasurable to mix with

other people.

But I think he wouldn't have wanted to live with other people anyway.

However, yeah, he was deaf and kind of sad, but always helpful.

You want to stand?

No, I don't want to stand in space.

No.

All by myself.

I'll just sit.

The Loneliness.

This is about him, about Uncle Harry.

It's called The Loneliness.

Was he lonely?

I don't know.

Nine months of the year he lived alone on a farm in the north of Ontario.

A near town was five miles away, a near neighbor uncertain.

Most land around the lake had been parceled out in cottage lots years ago.

Cottagers are seasonal.

Some come for Christmas or a weekend in winter.

Most board up their cottages on the last day of August and reappear in June.

It was a long, deep winter.

Harry had by himself with his dog and his two horses and his subscription to

the National Geographic Society magazine.

Snow drifted up to the eaves. His hay wagon got him to town every two weeks

for supplies.

He ate tins of corned beef hash and green peas and coffee.

He liked now and then an O. Henry chocolate bar.

Until probably the middle of May, he lived in two rooms of the farmhouse,

namely the kitchen, which had the stove, and the bedroom directly above, which

had the stovepipe.

Other rooms whispered with ice.

And then, three months in summer, Harry's world filled suddenly up.

The cottagers came back, and so did we.

Who's we?

Harry was the brother of my father's mother, Ethel.

Ethel had four children, including my father, and they all had children, and

the children all had friends.

Week after week in summer, these people arrived in groups of three to ten.

The idea was to help Harry bring in the hay.

This was the phrase they used, and to enjoy a vacation at the lake.

This idea was not Harry's.

I never heard him comment on it. He did comment on the inability of my father

and my uncles to master scything technique.

Harry could scythe 100 square meters of hay in three and a half minutes, leaving

a patch as level as his mustache, with fallen stalks unbruised.

there was frustration and a red-faced man in the hayfield many an afternoon.

Harry remained unfailingly polite to everyone.

So did the dog, whose name was Shep, although it was a succession of dogs,

and so did the horses, Prince and Florence, who were immortal at that

time.

Thank you.

You know, reading through your work again, re-reading this summer, it

strikes me how much of your writing is

seemingly autobiographical.

It's not the first thing that I have thought about with you that, you know,

there's snitches here and there, but this time in reading, you know,

there's...

There's the mother and daughter in Glass Essay.

The mother appears again, although that's maybe not autobiographical. I

don't know. In the autobiography of Red and Red Dog, there's the mother.

And, of course, here's the great uncle. Your dad appears from time to time.

Husbands, the beautiful husband.

You know, there's debates.

from time and time again about autobiography and writing, and what is

your relationship to writing autobiographically?

I'm appalled by it.

And every time I sit down to write anything, I'm determined not to do that.

But really, you have no other story to tell.

Or no other understanding of reality except the one you've lived.

So it keeps coming up.

But, yeah,

I don't like it. I don't know what to do about that.

I guess now we have auto-fiction, which is supposed to be somehow free of this

question, but I don't understand why.

Do you?

I think I read somewhere that you, well, I read two quotes, two different

interviews. One where you were asked this question and you said, well, I'm

not Knausgord, which I agree. And then in another essay or another

interview, you said, well, I have no imagination.

That's also true. I don't like to make up things. Is that true?

Yeah.

Basically, that's true.

I can't make up stories.

I have friends who are novelists and they just wake up every day with a story

in their mind of what they could make a novel out of. I've never had that.

But if I stub my toe on the way to the bathroom, then I can write about that

because it just happened. It's real.

There's two kinds of people, you know.

It's lovely in Glass Essay, which is out in Danish.

now recently in a new edition, Glass Ironing God.

I mean, the description of the mother and the grown-up daughter is just so

beautiful with the mother.

It's small things, you know, how the mother sits at the breakfast table and

things she does making breakfast.

So it's these little things that are poignant.

I guess that's true. I guess I think that's what...

The task of a writer is to just notice small things.

Because noticing large things is for people like Descartes,

basically.

And I can't do that.

But noticing small things makes a difference.

Why?

Because mostly what we do, especially in relation to other people and even more

especially in relation to the other people in our family, is to assume that

we know them and sort of smear across them in daily life.

Mother's always in the other room complaining about something.

And I've learned...

I mean, it's only taken 74 years. I've learned to pay attention to things

people do anyway, things people do or how they do things outside of the

stereotype I already have of them.

And then it's always surprising.

It's always surprising.

I find this is true not just with the family, but with... I've been doing...

Lynn wants to talk about this later. I've been going to boxing class lately.

And a boxing class is a kind of constant core of people who go all the time and

we sort of have come to know each other.

And they're very different people than me because I've

always been an academic, so I'm basically an arrogant

intellectual thinking I'm a little better than everybody else because I've

read all these books.

And these people in the boxing class are not mostly academics or intellectuals.

In fact, they don't read at all, as far as I can see. They watch TV and they

come to boxing class.

And I could dismiss them, therefore, because they're not like me.

And I gradually learned not to do that.

And when you don't do that... then you begin to see that they're each

actually pretty unique, probably crazy and

willing to be nice to you.

So it just, you know, that kind of attention to details leads you somewhere

truer than generalizing, I would say.

Since you now mentioned boxing,

You suggested actually backstage that if we run out of things to say, we could

always box.

But Curry, you have written about boxing also.

I have.

And I want you to read from that essay in London Review of Books. It's one of

your latest essays.

And it's a remarkable essay, also about attention and about boxing and

handwriting.

Your collaborator in Currie sent me a picture.

We have two of them.

I should emphasize this was not my idea.

I think we should raffle these off at the end.

Yeah.

Give the money to the Louisiana Museum.

Yes.

So, Curry's showing everyone, and here's another one, and I'm going to put it

here. Anyway, yeah, I started to do boxing class because...

I don't know, maybe you know this. I have this disease called Parkinson's,

which is a neurological disorder.

And it interferes with attention as well as with physical movement. And

one of the recommended therapies for this disease is boxing

because it teaches you to pay attention to hand-eye coordination of movement.

and also to sequences of actions, because boxing workouts

are a sequence of different kinds of punches which are

dictated by the teacher.

They call out numbers, and you have to do the motion that corresponds to that

number. So you have to pay attention in a particular way that if you have

Parkinson's, your brain doesn't want to do, so you have to keep...

stimulating your brain to do that thing.

So boxing, therefore, is why. I mean, that's why I began the boxing.

And I really like it.

How long have you been boxing?

Oh, how long?

Two or three months, maybe? I just joined it recently.

I asked you, I made a print of the essay in the London Review of Books.

Everybody has to go.

and read this whole essay, and it was printed in August, and I'm wondering if

you would read the beginning of that essay.

Okay. Thank you.

Speaking of not wanting to be autobiographical... Oh, well.

This essay was called Gloves On, because that's a phrase that is used.

is explained here.

So, your life.

There it is before you, possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a

map.

Let's say you're 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks,

have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor, a pirate, a

cosmetologist. Years pass, maybe in a family, maybe not.

maybe happy, maybe not.

Then one day you wake up and you're 70.

Looking ahead you see a black doorway.

You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you

look at it or not.

Most moments contain it.

Most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the

glass.

You wonder if other people are seeing it too.

You ask them. They say no.

You ask why.

No one can tell you.

A minute ago you were 25, then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day

you look back from 25 to now, and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.

When I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a symptom particularly

mortifying to me was that my handwriting disintegrated.

Parkinson's, as you know, maybe is a shaking disease, so most people who get

it have a tremor, like your hand does this, and it makes handwriting obviously

difficult.

I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day

after day, year after year.

Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions.

Vowels shrink to blobs. Slant loses its smooth, smart angle.

It all looks embarrassing.

I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.

Hard to describe or explain the shame of bad handwriting.

The shame of bad handwriting.

So handwriting, I don't know. Should we talk about handwriting? Yeah, let's talk

about handwriting.

How many people learned to write cursive in school?

You all did. Wow. Well, the Europeans did. You did too.

I think nowadays it's not so much cared about because people, even

in elementary school, they're reading on the screen a lot.

Anyway, I did, too, learn to write cursive in elementary school, and I just

loved doing it. I remember especially the joy of getting to the letter S,

all those curves, you know?

It's really just extraordinary fun.

Anyway, over the years, I've written in notebooks with, you know, a pen day

after day, and I enjoyed just...

The movement of the thing, line after line, no matter what it said, is a

different category of pleasure from the thinking of what to write.

And when your handwriting becomes uncontrollable, that pleasure is

lost.

Most people who have Parkinson's start to print instead of writing, but

printing isn't much fun.

So, yeah, that was the provocation for this essay, was how frustrated I was by

not being able to write by hand.

And it is interesting, I don't understand this exactly, how that

situation inhibits the thinking of what to write.

I guess the pleasures were so interlinked that now when I think

to sit down and write something, I stop.

because it would be horrible trying to make the marks work.

And I can't seem to type thoughts.

It's different.

Have you always written by hand?

Yeah.

But you say in this essay, this remarkable essay, because you have

written it by hand. Mm-hmm.

It's like it's two forces in that essay. There's this incredible

energy. I mean, you know, gloves on.

And then at one point you say, or you write, life is no longer fair.

And you say...

And I think it's like your whole work, your whole body of work is embodied in

this one sentence, which is the struggle you're speaking of now. I strive, I do

not win.

It's Beckett's, you know.

I strive, I do not win, which I think is, you know.

So in this essay, I mean, it's...

It's a masterpiece because, again, it's these two things side by side.

You're ashamed of your handwriting.

You're right. It's shameful because... And then at the same time, it's gloves

on. Yeah.

Yeah, well, aren't we all kind of in that boat all the time? That sort of

struggle?

I mean, what else would you do?

But also, I'll put in here a parenthesis, that sentence, life is not

fair, is a pun there, because it follows right after saying, I envy

Keats, because if you've ever looked at Keats' letters and

diaries, they're written by hand in this beautiful, formal

kind of...

cursive, and they're some of the most lovely surfaces I've ever seen.

And he called those his fair copies.

And I, writing fair, I remember writing fair with great difficulty

in thinking fair, that has a lot of other meanings besides nice looking.

Yes, because in English, tell me about the different meanings of fair.

Well, fair in English means pretty, basically, nice, comely, pleasant to

look at, but it also means just, equal, equally distributed among

the players.

So that's quite a different thing.

But I lost both.

You have been a translator your whole life.

And in Float, there is an essay

that I love called Variations, The Right to Remain Silent.

And in it, well, there's so much in that essay, but in it you speak of the

silences in translation.

There's a lot of silence in your translations.

obviously in your translations of Sappho, because things have literally, I

mean, you don't have the whole poem. There are brackets, and you make the

brackets as important as the words. So silence is what's disappeared, what's no

longer there, what we don't know. The black spaces are as important as the

words.

Can you talk about the meaning of...

working with disappeared things or silent things, blank spaces in

writing and translation?

I think as far as Sappho goes,

I put blank spaces in.

to represent the history of the text because most of her work has been

lost to us. So it seems simply unrealistic to read

translations that fill out her lines and make a complete story out of something

of which we only really know 11 words.

So I put the spaces in for that reason.

And then I put brackets to indicate where the spaces start and stop.

Mostly I did that because it looked nice, to be honest, but it is something

that classical scholars do with textual criticism.

They use different kinds of brackets.

And I suppose it relates to the cognitive procedure of translation,

where you're always coming upon words that can't be...

imitated in the other language, let alone replicated.

And so those holes in the meaning are always there for the

mind of the translator, and usually you're meant to relieve

the reader of the problem of having that, so you fill them in or cover them

up. But I didn't do that.

wrongness you do the opposite you draw attention to the

blankness to the things that don't and I suppose I

suppose it gives also a space for thinking as I was saying before

part of the project of writing or making artworks is

to give other people a thinking that they haven't had before, and having

language with space in it is a place to go and think.

Actually,

it's interesting, since I published that book, I can't tell you how often I've

received in the mail manuscripts by people who have helpfully filled in all

the spaces.

Because they read it and they think they know what she said.

Or should have said.

That's a reparative instinct, maybe.

Trying to make good the holes, I don't know.

Don't know what to say about it either to them.

I usually send them back saying, thank you very much.

In an interview you did in the podcast, the radio program, to

Eleanor Wachtell, who is here at Louisiana, the writers and company.

Great, fantastic book podcast.

You tell her that you love being in a translation.

Did I? Well, yeah.

And she asks you why, and you say...

Because you can glimpse down the cracks at that other thing.

At that other thing.

What's that?

I mean, I guess it's what you've already been saying, that, you know, it's the

cracks. Yeah. Looking down at something that's cracked and not whole.

Yeah, maybe so.

And otherness in it.

I think, yeah, maybe so.

Maybe so.

Translation is a weird process.

You have the original and your version, and then you have in between them,

glimpsed maybe that crack in the book in between the two parts,

you have what it should say, the language in between those two things,

but you can't get to that.

from either side. They said what they said and you say some imitation of it,

but there could be a word, a set of words that does both at once.

Except we don't live in that time zone.

What do you mean we don't live in that time zone? Well, we don't. I mean,

that's sort of like string theory. There could be all these different realities

and we just happen to be living in this one, but we could be living in that one

or we could be living in the crack because it's there somewhere, but we

haven't learned how to perceive it.

Or it's like Walter Benjamin has this famous essay about the task of the

translator where he calls that the sacred conversation, that one down

underneath the two.

So I don't know about sacred, I'm not that sure about sacred anything, but

that's a way to describe that.

You do say in, from Variations on the Right to Remain Silent, you say, there

is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word

that goes silent in transit.

That's well put, isn't it?

I think so.

Also in that essay about translation, and one of the reasons I, and many

reasons I love it, you talk about Hölderlin, or you write about Hölderlin,

who actually went mad translating.

Himself, yeah. Yeah, well, he started translating Sophocles.

You've also translated Sophocles, and he just never felt that he got it right,

and then he started sort of re-translating himself, and then he went

mad.

Perhaps some of you who are writers have done that. I mean, you look at your old

books as written by somebody else, and then you think, I could do that better

nowadays.

And if you start trying, it's a black hole.

That goes, you really are a different person.

But, where did you start that? I forget.

Walter Benjamin?

No. Walter Benjamin, yeah, about madness and Hölderlin.

Oh, Hölderlin, yeah. Hölderlin went mad and... Yeah.

Go on.

He just, I think, the process was, he was alone, he lived alone

in a, tower, he was certified insane, lived alone in a tower

by a river, and he began to reread his own

work and break it down into different ways of saying the same thing, I guess,

and then started to translate it himself into himself.

Quite, yeah, bizarre.

Have you attempted Something like that? Ever?

No, I just don't read the old stuff.

Solves the problem.

But you do say or write some other place that madness lives right next to poetry.

Me say that?

Yeah, you said that.

Dang.

I can't imagine what I meant by that.

In connection to Holderling or to me? No, you said it.

I try to make order with my notes, so I have this whole page called Translation

and Madness, and it just says, quote... No, you said it to me. Ann Carson said

to me, poetry is right next to madness in the mind, so you're,

you know, just a step away.

Ah, okay. It's in an earlier conversation you've said this to me.

Must have been something you said.

I can't even.

Well, it's a platonic idea that madness and poetry and the lover and the poet

and the madman are side by side psychologically. It's some kind of set

of assumptions about how they should live.

Probably I was quoting Plato.

You know, before we end, I want to go back to...

to the mother figure that appears from time to time in The Glass Essay,

in Autobiography of Red, in Red Dock.

That's on top of my mind.

Just this beautiful mother character.

And in Red Dock...

We meet the red monster, Geryon, again.

We meet him also in Autobiography of Red, and he's sort of on a road trip,

and then he ends up with his dying mother.

And it's very poignant, and I just reread it, and

everybody who's...

had mothers, or who are mothers, or remembers mothers.

It's very beautiful. I even thought about, but that's probably me taking it

too far, because this Garion coming to his mother's bedside reminded me a

little bit of Per Gynt, Ibsen's Per Gynt. This is me being Norwegian,

sitting by his mother's.

bedside and telling the dying mother and telling, you know, everything they're

going to do together.

But do you have, I mean, there's so many playwrights that play a role in your

life. Is Ibsen?

Not so far.

Nope. No, not so far. So that Per Gint essay was probably just me. But the

mother, you know, she's there in the glass essay, which is one of your

earlier works. She's there in your later works.

Can you say something?

Not the same mother, I don't think. Is it not the same mother? That was just me

then. The one in Autobiography of Red, well, I guess maybe.

She's always smoking, for one thing.

My mother did smoke pretty much all the time, but the rest of the personality is

not the same.

But the one in the mother in other...

parts that you mentioned, I think is more like what really happened.

Yeah.

Because I think you did say in an interview that writing the death scene

or sitting by the mother's deathbed was hard.

Yeah, it was hard.

She was not happy.

But what she was worried about mostly, and this is

saddening, was her eyebrows.

She used to pluck her eyebrows every day. She had really bushy eyebrows. And

in the cosmetology of that time, it was a few years ago,

bushy eyebrows were not in fashion.

They are now, actually.

So different world. She had a lot of worry about being in a hospital where

she couldn't do her eyebrows every day and just looking terrible.

So when I went to visit her in the hospital, what we tried to do together

was have me pluck her eyebrows, which if you've ever tried to do that, it's just

impossible.

And anyway, as I kept telling her,

eyebrows were transparent.

I mean, she was totally white haired. And your eyebrows, when they get white,

they just disappear into your skin. It didn't matter whether she plucked her

eyebrows or not. And I kept making this point.

And she just ignored me, which was typical of our experience together to

that time.

But it was also kind of sad that she was still, you know, worried about this, as

it seemed to me, an essential thing. But that's who we are.

I want to end this talk, actually, by you reading from

Red Dock.

I had it from Kindle, so we wrote it on a page, but this is

about Mother in Red Dock, and I was wondering if you could read it.

Yeah, I should explain the formal structure.

Red Dock is a novel, sort of in verse, but it has a

Greek chorus, or a chorus that recurs in the same voice, and the chorus

is called Wife of Brain.

So it's a sort of indeterminate voice that

oversees the action and the thoughts of the characters.

So this is Wife of Brain.

Mothers in summer, mothers in winter, mothers in autumn, mothers in spring.

Mothers at altitude, mothers in solitude, mothers as platitude, mothers

in spring.

Mothers banking their shots, mothers crackling their throats, mothers dumped

from their boats in spring.

Mothers as ice, or when they are nice, no one more nice in spring.

Mothers ashamed and ablaze and clear at the end as they are, as they almost all

are, and then mothers don't come around again in spring.

Anne Carson.