WRITING BACK: ANNE CARSON, EMILY DICKINSON

Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, translator, and professor of Classics. One of the acclaimed forces of her published work is its singular ability to combine acts of writing that are normally distributed amongst these different occupations. With unlikely freedom and exactness, her works mingle poetry, translation, essay, scollop literary criticism, lecture, libretto, interview and more. It is indeed an oeuvre that embodies in admirable manner the now much discussed reciprocity between writing, reading and translating. This article reflects upon the ways this happens in Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. I explore the hypothesis that a quasi-paradoxical attention to facts presides over the gestures of reading, translating, and poetic writing that Carson enacts and imbricates in this unclassifiable book. Special emphasis is given to an Emily Dickinson poem Carson uses as the novel's epigraph: it is with a translation of this poem that I open my reflection here.