DramaLit Blog 1.0: BU School of Theatre

Anne Carson’s book, Nox, may be considered an exploration of grief through translation. This is my best grasp at defining an undefinable work. Like the act of translation itself, in trying to find a definition of this work to post for you, I could discover no “one-to-one” correlation between mediums I am familiar with as a reader and this work. That is not to say that the book is unstructured, it simply plays by its own rules, rules that I was unfamiliar with as a reader.

Nox is a meeting of two events. Anne Carson’s translation of Cadmus’s poem 101,  her fragmented relationship with her brother after he ran away from home and his death. Carson began translating the poem before the death of her brother, though it seems always in relation to him. Perhaps she began in an attempt to process their fractured relationship.

Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed — 
I arrive at these poor, brother, burials 
so I could give you the last gift owed to death 
and talk (why?) with mute ash. 
Now that Fortune tore you from me, you 
oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me, 
now still anyway this — what a distant mood of parents 
handed down as the sad gift for burials — 
accept! Soaked with tears of a brother 
and into forever, brother, farewell and farewell. 

— Catullus (translated by Anne Carson)

Anne claims even after the publication of Nox that the translation contained therein is unsatisfactory to her. The words she has chosen are not her perfect words. She is still searching, and even in Nox, the pages– filled with definitions of all possible options for a word– are an invitation to search with her.

Nox contains, among the process of translation laid bare for the reader, the personal fragments that Carson dealt with in composition. The only picture of her brother,  fragments of the only letter he ever wrote after fleeing home, and pieces of her own story: what happened after her brother’s death, accounts of what he said the few times she spoke to him on the phone. And tucked in at every corner the Greek and Latin words that flooded her world. This is physical evidence that (at least for Carson) translation is anything but clinical.