Jul 142012
 

“I hate travel,” says Anne Carson in this delightful Lannon Foundation interview from back in 2001. My thought exactly.

Amazing what you can unearth, disinter and otherwise reveal on the Internet.

dg

 

  6 Responses to “The Horror of Travel & Other Literary Meditations — Anne Carson Interview”

  1. What a pleasure watching this interview. I love what Carson has to say about attention being a practice, and writers sometimes accidentally come upon ways to use something they’ve paid careful attention to, though sometimes they never do find the right moment for it. And what she says about Celan (I think) equating attention to prayer – the ability to “step beyond the border of self” – is wonderful. Good material to spark a conversation with my students. Thanks for posting it, Doug.

    Julie

    • Thanks, Julie. Carson has been influential in all sorts of ways. I used her book Eros the Bittersweet a good deal in my book on Cervantes, The Enamoured Knight. That idea of the gap recurs in all sorts of contexts, love and yes translation. Equating prayer and attention also shows up in Iris Murdoch’s book The Sovereignty of Good and also in Simone Weil.

  2. Meant to say, too, that what she says about translation is intriguing – I sure wish we had some room in the Writing for Children program at VCFA where people could study translation. I believe it would make for better original writing eventually. The idea that you stand at the edge of a word, and you see where you need to go, but there is a gap you can’t quite get across, and the gap tells you something about language that you don’t learn any other way – that is so true. Another possible conversation with students…or maybe a special residency workshop I could design…? Fun! Carson might be a little aloof in this interview, but what she does offer is worth listening to.

  3. Lovely. I am just about to embark on a Carson-related project and it was great to see this on my feed reader this morning.

  4. This is so rich, and she is so dry and odd and funny and brilliant. Thanks for this.

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