Caterina Ricciardi on Anne Carson

Su Anne Carson rileggiamo il saggio  del 2010 di Caterina Ricciardi. Segue un esercizio di traduzione su 'Reticent Sonnet’ della celebrata scrittrice, svolto nell’ambito delle attività di CanaDiana che,  secondo scopi suoi propri, propone il ‘tradurre’ cultura canadese

 

ANNE CARSON
IN AGRODOLCE

Siamo quello che leggiamo, afferma, più o meno, Anne Carson in un’intervista alla «White Review» del 2017, volendo significare che non c’è alcun diaframma interposto fra chi legge e la materia di cui si legge. Di conseguenza, la lettura sarebbe parte di un processo in cui ciascuno di noi diventa, a suo modo, Virginia Woolf o Pascal, George Eliot o Sofocle, e questo perché veniamo catapultati nel cuore del mondo dei libri e dei loro autori con un vigore così trascinante da prestarci a convergere insieme in un’osmosi tenace. E ciò a dispetto dell’epoca globalizzata in cui viviamo, aggredita, com’è – nel bene e nel male –, da una comunicazione tramite media digitali, impostisi ormai come i principali responsabili della perdita di un sapere acquisibile in modo schietto, quello che ci mette in sintonia (fisicamente, non virtualmente) con uno stato emotivo e – idealmente – conoscitivo sia degli altri sia di noi stessi. Se così intende, ne consegue che Carson sembrerebbe battersi per un ritorno – magari assistito digitalmente – alla tattilità della pagina (o della scena teatrale), alla sua magica corrente attrattiva, capaci di sincronizzare la sympatheia tra entità diverse, che resterebbero altrimenti distanti nel tempo o nello spazio.

Appassionata di Simone Weil, Virginia Woolf, Emily Brontë e degli autori antichi (in particolare di Catullo), traduttrice dal greco (Saffo, Sofocle, Eschilo, Euripide), vincitrice di numerosi premi e riconoscimenti (a Berlino, alle università di Cornell e New York, a Toronto) e a lungo docente di studi classici in istituzioni accademiche di alta distinzione, Carson è emersa allo sguardo pubblico solo verso la metà dell’ultimo decennio del Novecento, pubblicando, dopo alcuni volumi apparsi in Canada (per esempio Odi et Amo, Ergo Sum del 1981), presso la prestigiosa casa editrice New Directions di New York, la quale, interessata al suo uso del Classico e a una versificazione del tutto sui generis, finirà con l’adottarla per sempre.

A renderla celebre è però nel 1998 Autobiography of Red. A Novel in Verse (nel 2000 in traduzione italiana), del quale nel 2013 esce un presupposto seguito con Red Doc>. Appropriandosi di due eroi dell’antichità, Carson riscrive la versione lacunosa di Stesicoro del mito di Eracle e il mostro Gerione, al fine di proiettare i due mitici giganti in due squinternati giovani gay dell’odierno Ontario, la terra in cui ella è nata nel 1950, e vive tuttora. Abilmente ella sa attivare in questo cosiddetto ‘romanzo’ l’interazione di autobiografia e mito, tempo antico e tempo presente, nonostante i suoi protagonisti non siano nemici – come nel mito – ma due personalità attratte l’una dall’altra. Essi infatti s’innamorano, si tradiscono a vicenda, si lasciano e si ritrovano, consumando così la loro intesa amorosa nel vortice spiraleggiante di un desiderio costantemente frustrato.

Si può dire dunque che, al di là dei richiami al passato, Autobiography of Red è, nella sostanza, un singolare ritratto autobiografico dell’artista contemporaneo, scritto da un Gerione con le ali (una sorta di Geroneide canadese), tormentato dal suo congenito non sapere della sua quidditas. È un dramma psicologico che il nuovo mostro paradossalmente alato (un angelo di qualche genere?) cerca di ridimensionare tramite lo scottante rapporto omosessuale con Eracle. Con Carson il mito si mette platealmente al servizio di una realtà dissonante a noi vicina, fratturando tuttavia gli antichi schemi di Stesicoro.

Tale scrittura fratta si radica nel corpus delle sue opere con poche varianti rispetto al disegno consueto di una trama verbale fatta di sconnessioni, dettagli luminosi, singole parole promosse a frasi sbrindellate, lacerti provenienti da lontano per restaurarsi nel presente, e un acrobatico rimescolamento intersemiotico di poesia, traduzione, racconto e arti visive (Velàsquez, Edward Hopper, Hokusai, Audubon...): sono le rovine dell’afflato poetico di fine secolo, quasi una radiografia dei dissesti di cui oggi tutti risentiamo.

In tal senso, in Eros, the Bittersweet (1986), commentando La trottola di Kafka, Carson afferma che la «comprensione di qualsiasi dettaglio» è sufficiente «alla comprensione del tutto». Il che vuol dire che alla base della sua scrittura ella pone una rete di dettagli spezzati e al contempo interconnessi, compensati, nel disagio della frattura, dal piacere della metafora che Carson, ricorrendo all’immagine perno del racconto kafkiano, così spiega:

Un significato vortica restando fermo su un asse con moto normale, ovvero allineato alle convenzioni di connotazione e denotazione, ma il suo vorticare non è normale, e la dissimulazione di una verticalità normale tramite un moto bizzarro è impertinenza.

Riferendosi al fallimento del filosofo di Kafka, ella sembra denegare ironicamente il suo stesso metodo: non è detto infatti che un dettaglio ci dia il senso del tutto, come dimostra il racconto, eppure, anacronisticamente, Eros, the Bittersweet aspira a realizzare proprio tale obiettivo. È l’impertinenza, ella precisa, a istigare la ricerca del bello nell’amore, sebbene a un certo punto finisce col subentrare un qualcosa che ne rende impossibile la realizzazione. Quel qualcosa precisa ancora Carson, si deposita nella contraddizione implicita in ogni rapporto d’amore, ovvero nella capacità che l’eros ha di procurare oltre al dolce anche l’amaro. Odi et amo, dice Catullo nel carme 85; glukupikron (agrodolce), scrive Saffo nel frammento 130; bittersweet si dice in inglese; Lest thou thy love and hate and me undoe, ricorda John Donne (da Catullo) in The Prohibition. È il paradosso erotico esposto da Saffo nella celeberrima Ode alla gelosia, che Carson traduce così:

He seems to me equal to gods that man
who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking
is left in me.

 

Come uno degli Dei, felice
chi a te vicino così dolce
suono ascolta mentre tu parli
e ridi amorosa. Subito a me
il cuore in petto s’agita sgomento
solo che appena ti veda, e la voce
si perde sulla lingua inerte.

(Trad. di Salvatore Quasimodo)

 

Ed è sulla base del glukupikron che – per vie analitiche, epigrammatiche e giustapposte – in Eros the Bittersweet Carson si avventura («Eros è un verbo», scrive contestualmente) in una ricostruzione delle modulazioni del dilemma dell’eros nel tempo: da Saffo, appunto, a, per esempio, Omero, Tristano e Isotta, Andrea Cappellano, Dante, Petrarca, Keats, Emily Dickinson, Kierkegaard, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Freud, Lacan, Sartre, fino addirittura a (con un incomprensibile gap dal Cinque al Settecento) Il cavaliere inesistente di Calvino.

Tuttavia, rispetto al suo metodo fratto ed epigrammatico, qualcosa si muove via via che la sua carriera progredisce. Per esempio, in Nox (in latino «notte», come pure «tenebre», «Averno»), un’elegia per il fratello Michael, le modalità di composizione cambiano un pochino. Qui entrano in scena l’immagine, la fotografia, dettagli deittici di fotografie, calchi scansionati di testi antichi, brandelli di tessuti, buste datate per lettera, francobolli da collezione, lacerti di scrittura manuale, vecchie pubblicità, riproduzioni di arti d’avanguardia, zumate, sovrascritture, e infine lemma da dizionario, in cui – come nell’Oxford Dictionary – sotto un singolo termine si danno i diversi suoi significati (si veda sopra il mio intenzionale approfondimento di nox) come potrebbero essere stati intesi dai più svariati autori. Il dizionario diventa dunque, a sua volta, letteratura intertestuale che partorisce un ipertesto da – si fa per dire – Orazio, Properzio, Plauto, ecc. È il caso, per esempio, di «Fortuna». Così riporta Carson:

Fortuna fortunae feminine noun / [cfr. FORS] the more or less personified agency supposed to direct events, Fortune; fortunam temptare to try one’s luck; (distinguished good or bad): bona fortunam (euphemism) nobody; forte fortuna by chance; fortunae committere to entrust to fortune; in fortuna positum esse to be dependent on chance (...).

Nulla di nuovo presenta, tuttavia, tale pastiche se pensiamo alla scrittura collage che la statunitense Susan Howe pratica da tempo. E nulla di nuovo presenta anche Float (2016), una miscellanea di pezzi nuovi o inediti, consistente di conferenze, poesie, ricette, pièce teatrali, un saggio sulla storia del colore purple (purpureo), derivato anticamente dal murice (ce lo aveva già detto Hilda Doolittle), e pamphlet su Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, ovvero un potpourri di materiali vecchi e nuovi obbedienti a quel metodo di incollamento che Carson finisce con lo spartire con la grande Susan Howe, con la novità di raccogliere ciascuno di questi elementi in modo scollato, cioè in un ordine di successione che il lettore può ricreare a suo modo. Nel 2017, e non a caso solo dopo la pubblicazione di Float, tutte e due si sono impegnate volentieri in un confronto (o una gara?) al Centro artistico d’avanguardia Fort Gansevoort di New York, riscuotendo entrambe, con le rispettive letture dal proprio canone, un notevole successo.

Naturalmente, le due più fantasiose poetesse multimediali della nostra contemporaneità prediligono materiali diversi. Assieme ad altri divertissement, Carson va prevalentemente sul classico, Howe sul passato del suo paese e dell’Irlanda, entrambi buoni per una tipologia di collage non certo riconducibile, come dimostra il luogo dell’incontro/confronto, all’avanguardia primo-novecentesca (lo aveva già dimostrato Susan Howe).

Ma, per quanto simili e al contempo distanti, Carson e Howe si occupano entrambe di parole, e di parole che funzionano in modo nuovo, con risultati di grande godimento e piacere intellettuale. Carson tuttavia accarezza le parole del suo imponente dizionario (o dei suoi dizionari) in modo diverso, ovvero, depositando enigmaticamente nel loro seno il proprio personale arcano.

 

Tre meditazioni sull’acqua di sapore orientale, composte lungo la strada e in luoghi dove spesso l’acqua non c’è. Di questa materia fluida è costruito Antropologia dell’acqua, apparso in Italia nel 2010 nella traduzione di Antonella Anedda, Elisa Biagini, Emanuela Tandello. Si tratta di un testo ritagliato da Plain Water. Essays and Poetry (1995) della canadese Anne Carson, docente di Classical Studies all’Università del Michigan, traduttrice di Sofocle, Euripide, Eschilo, Saffo, Catullo.

Nel 2000 Bompiani aveva pubblicato Autobiografia del rosso (1998), un romanzo in prosa lirica che ricrea il gigante Gerione dai frammenti di Stesicoro e lo trasforma in un teenager appassionato di fotografia, un piccolo mostro alato gay vinto dall’amore del suo antico mortale nemico: il possente Eracle. In Antropologia dell’acqua, anch’esso in prosa lirica, di classico c’è lo spunto nel prologo in cui si rievoca il mito di Danao e delle sue cinquanta figlie consolidato da Eschilo. Al castigo infernale delle quarantanove Danaidi destinate a versare acqua in un catino bucato per aver ucciso ciascuna il proprio marito la notte delle nozze in nome della verginità, si pone in parallelo «un’ordalia dell’acqua» praticata in una non meglio definita cultura al fine di riconoscere le vere vergini: una fanciulla intatta potrà immergersi senza rischi mentre una donna che ha conosciuto l’amore annegherà.

Il seguito di Antropologia dell’acqua si offre come un esercizio di rilettura di quanto accadde a Ipermestra, la Danaide che disubbidì al padre e accettò il matrimonio dando origine alla stirpe dei Danai; al contempo intende proporre un invito a superare la sfida vendicativa dell’acqua: a tuffarsi e, sorrette dalla leggerezza della propria castità, provare a non annegare. Le tre ripartizioni attraverso cui questo duplice esercizio si sviluppa si codificano, dunque, come riflessioni sull’unione del maschile e femminile – o sulla natura dell’amore – ma con una pregiudiziale: «L’acqua – dice l’incipit – non è una cosa che puoi trattenere. Come gli uomini. Ho provato. Padre, fratello, amanti, amici veri, fantasmi affamati e Dio, uno per uno, mi sono scivolati via dalle mani» (come dal catino).

Nel caso specifico saranno padre, amanti e fratello i co-protagonisti delle tre prove presentate, tre esperienze raccontate attraverso la prospettiva del sapere orientale e, nel primo caso, con la guida di un antropologo, compagno di castità: il buddismo Zen nel pellegrinaggio penitenziale dai Pirenei al Santuario di Compostela e a Finisterre (davanti all’oceano), un modo da parte dell’io narrante per sanare il rapporto con l’autoritario padre malato di alzheimer; nella seconda prova, sarà la saggezza classica cinese a far da guida nel fallimentare tour in campeggio di una coppia da un’immaginaria China City (nell’Indiana) a Los Angeles, ai margini di un altro oceano: la porta dell’Oriente; nella terza prova una pietra preziosa – un quarzo contenente acqua intrappolata «più antica di tutti i mari» – offre infine l’occasione per leggere il carattere cinese Qi («respiro», «energia») che, secondo il maestro di arti marziali seguito dal fratello della voce che parla, è come l’acqua: noi «fluttuiamo sull’acqua, al giusto livello ogni cosa nuota». Sembra una posizione di equilibrio fra antropografie diverse: il pellegrino è un «setaccio»; il campeggiatore è un catino colmo. Oppure (più vero?): «alcune acque ci annegano. Altre no».

 Nei primi due movimenti il tragitto si compie in compagnia di un antropologo: a Compostela (con il Cid) nel segno della castità; a Los Angeles (con l’imperatore «Hades»/Ade) nel segno opposto della sessualità contrappesato da uno studio da parte della moderna Ipermestra del concubinato nella cultura cinese sul finire della dinastia Ming, cui si deve, fra l’altro, l’invenzione delle bambole Daruma, tutte busto e niente gambe; in La pietra del desiderio l’io narrante sembra aver imparato le varie lezioni antropologiche quando ricostruisce il rapporto con un lago (in Canada?) del fratello scomparso sulle rotte della Cina.

 La «pietra» fabbricata dalla scrittura riflette la natura e i gesti di un matrimonio sacro, di una simbiosi erotica con l’acqua. Il nuotatore (swimmer in inglese non ha ‘genere’), con sulla mano l’anello nuziale che lo unisce al lago, si immerge nelle misteriose profondità, le penetra, le accarezza, le possiede con le braccia, mentre un vecchio gatto in agonia lo osserva. I neuroni di un gatto bruciano come quelli di un uomo, egli pensa. Un giorno, quando il lago è «una fredda lastra di piombo», una «Annunciazione» subacquea lo trafigge riportandolo all’infanzia e al padre. Inutile cercare qui la fine della storia. È triste.

Anthropology of Water è un’opera colta, mistica, sincretica nel tentativo di far convergere Oriente e Occidente. Ma più di Eschilo, e i maestri buddisti, sembra Kafka, con la Lettera al padre e il desiderio di attraversare l’Europa a nuoto «da fiume a fiume», a stabilizzarsi come velato nume tutelare. C’è da aggiungere che, nonostante le complessità della costruzione e del messaggio, la fluida scrittura non pone grandi difficoltà. Tanto più questa resa in italiano delude. Al di là di fastidiosi calchi di strutture sintattiche estranee, è bene notare di volata: in un buon italiano non si «sgranocchia bacon freddo» (munching, letteralmente: masticare); il vento non «abbaia», anche se l’originale (belling: il bramire del cervo) non aiuta, ma con un po’ di sforzo la soluzione si trova; la cattedrale di Astorga non «indossa» (wears) ma mostra un intenso rossore; «l’orbita (eye socket) di una trota» non si rattrappisce su se stessa (to whither in): saranno piuttosto le sue «cavità orbitali» a rattrappirsi (appassirsi, spegnersi) mentre sfrigolano in padella; gli antichi pellegrini non arrivavano «su piedi» macchiati, ma «con i piedi»; «has moved» non è «si muove» ma «si è spostata»; «Non più lunghi venti che rotolano dagli occhi di Orlando» non fa senso in italiano se si traduce «winds» nella sua accezione più comune (venti atmosferici) e non si riflette meglio sul contesto. Non si starà parlando dei richiami con il corno - «winds» (gli strumenti a fiato) - che Orlando fa risuonare lontano dalla sua vista a Roncisvalle? Riflettiamoci su mentre sorvoliamo il resto e torniamo all’introduzione firmata dalle curatrici.

Qui troviamo riportato in originale e traduzione (di Anedda) uno dei testi recenti più apprezzati di Carson: Reticent Sonnet, da Possessive Used as Drink (Me). Vale la pena citarlo in parte. I versi:

like Venetian blinds.
Speaking of Venice, called the ‘Shakespeare of the cities’ by a friend

of mine,
reminds me how often the Sonnets misprint ‘their’ for ‘thine’;

beware the fog in Venice.
Beware those footsteps in a hush

(«...come le persiane veneziane. / Parlando di Venezia, chiamata da un mio amico “la Shakespeare delle città”, / mi sovviene come tanto spesso nei Sonetti “loro” è un refuso per “tuo”; // guardati dalle nebbie di Venezia. / Guardati da quei passi che finiscono nel silenzio»).

sono resi così:

come le persiane.
E parlando di Persia, chiamata da un mio amico
Rumi dell’Oriente, mi ricordo
quanto spesso un refuso del Sonetto sia scambiare tu con loro.

Guardati dalle sabbie della Persia.
Guardati dai passi che affondano nel silenzio.

Filologia shakespeariana a parte (i Sonetti, con i loro problemi testuali, sono un’opera di Shakespeare), qualcosa non torna (non più solo l’italiano, o altro). D’accordo che la traduzione può essere – ed è anche bene che sia – una ‘metamorfosi’, o una ricreazione. Ma fino a che punto?

 

 

Anne Carson

 

Reticent Sonnet

A pronoun is a kind of withdrawal from naming.
Because naming is heavy, naming may be slightly shaming.
We live much more lightly than this
we address ourselves allusively in our minds –
as “I” or “we” or “one” – part of a system
that argues with shadow, like Venetian blinds
Speaking of Venice, called “the Shakespeare of cities” by a friend of mine
reminds me how often the Sonnets misprint “their” for “thine”:
beware the fog in Venice.
Beware those footsteps that stop in a hush.
I used to think I would grow up to be a person whose reasoning was deep.
instead I became a kind of brush.
I brush words against words. So do we follow ourselves out of youth
brushing, brushing, brushing wild grapes onto truth.

Sonetto reticente

Un pronome è un ritrarsi dal pronunciare il nome.
Pronunciare  il nome è pesante, può essere  quasi disdicevole.
Noi viviamo in modo molto più leggero,
mentalmente ci volgiamo a noi stessi con allusioni -
‘io’ o ‘noi’ o ‘uno’- che come lamelle
di una tenda veneziana fendono l’ombra.
Parlando di Venezia -Symonds, mio amico, la chiamò ‘la Shakespeare delle città’-
ricordo come spesso i Sonetti   confondono their, loro, con thine, tuo:
guardati dalla nebbia di Venezia.
Guardati da quei passi che si dissolvono nel silenzio
Pensavo di diventar persona capace di pensieri profondi,
invece sono come una spazzola.
Sospingo le parole contro le parole. Seguiamo così noi stessi oltre la giovinezza
spazzolando via l’uva acerba, spingendola fin dentro il vero.

 

Sam Solecki on Anne Carson

Following the recent awarding of the Nobel Prize to Anne Carson, let us read what Sam Solecki  has sent  us. It is a chapter he wrote for his book

The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination. Montreal. McGill University Press, 2022.

Anne Carson: “Canicula di Anna” (1984) and Norma Jeane Baker in Etruria
Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up / Like killer kings on an Etruscan cup. (Robert Lowell, “Beyond the Alps”)[i]
                                                   
The few Etruscan instances in Carson are as suggestive and elusive as the three in Emily Dickinson’s poems and the one quoted above from Robert Lowell. There is a thin bronze boy with elongated arms—a figure still not fully understood by Etruscologists—in the early “Canicula di Anna.” The noun “Etruria” is dropped dead centre into “Wrong Norma,” (2016), a very different poem, published thirty - two years later. And there are Etruscans in dialogue with Marilyn Monroe in a recent poem, “Detail from the tomb of the diver (Paestum 500 - 433 BCE) second detail.” I begin with “Canicula di Anna,” the most substantial of the three, an academic fable which circles around a Perugia - based phenomenological conference concerned with the nature of the self and freedom.[ii] Anna walks around old Perugia after seemingly failing to register for the event. (If I use “seem” more than usual in this chapter, I can only plead that Carson, like Mallarmé, Rilke, and Stevens does that to readers.)
Within the medieval walls are considerable remains of the lofty terrace walls of the Etruscan period. Some old Etruscan calling, “Ah . . . ,” in the rain, is it possible? Doubled and fell off the parapet, gone by now in the sea.[iii]
Since Perugia is far inland, it is unlikely that someone might fall off the walls into the sea. But since the poem takes place in several time periods and is without a fixed narrator, it is best to keep one’s mind open to art as well as geography. As Paul Meyer points out, there is a painted sea - side Perugia in Benedetto Bonfigli’s (1420 - 96) Miracle of the Merchant Who Found his Purse Lost during a Shipwreck in the Stomach of a Fish on view in the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia. Perhaps the impossible image of Perugia on the sea—a deliberate confusion of the real and the imagined—stayed with Carson. But there is more. In Carson’s archive there is a postcard of another painting by Bonfigli, Totila’s Siege of Perugia and the Burial of Saint Herculanus. The painting shows Herculanus, the Bishop of Perugia, being hurled from the ramparts by Totila the Gaul in 549. That takes care of the sea and the fall, but why an “old Etruscan”? Meyer suggests that much of poet’s information about Perugia comes from the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), which explains some cruces: first the encyclopedia; then Carson’s version.
PERUGIA (ancient Perusia), . . . situated 1444 ft. above sea - level . . . upon a group of hills nearly 1000 ft. above the valley of the Tiber. Its outline is very irregular . . . This is the extent enclosed by the medieval walls; within them are considerable remains of the lofty terrace walls of the Etruscan period.
Perugia (ancient Perusia) is situated 1444 feet above sea - level on a group of hills overlooking the Tiber: 1000 feet below. Its outline is irregular. Within the mediaeval walls are considerable remains of the lofty terrace - walls of the Etruscan period. (8)
The “old Etruscan” may be a way of introducing the Rasenna past, a synecdochic way of evoking the ghostly Etruscans who were silenced in mid - sentence, so to speak, by the Romans when their world was absorbed into Rome’s.
Having invented “Anna,” the author whose name is Anne now plays with textual freedom, temporal freedom, and phenomenological freedom, shifting through the various time periods available in Perugia: Etruscans, Perugino’s (whose paintings dominate the local gallery), her life, and the conference. The narrator exercises the freedoms available to her and in the process embodies and enacts the conference’s topic. Since this is Anne Carson, the situation is not without its sly humour.
Famous phenomenologists of tutta l’Italia have foregathered here. They take things back to the sophists then climb the stone stairs for a heavy lunch. Their foreheads are not so tall as the foreheads of the French phenomenologists but they are much more good - natured. (53)
The humour has a light touch, closer to David Lodge’s Changing Places than to Laurent Binet’s recent philosophical novel La Septième fonction du langage. Of course, the French phenomenologists would have the tallest foreheads, just as they have the most original, if questionable ideas, and write the longest books. The Etruscans are good for one more turn in the poem. The National Archaeological Museum of Umbria has its own L’Ombra della Serra, (Evening Shadow) one of the tall, very thin elongated bronze figures that some suggest have been resurrected by Alberto Giacometti and which I related earlier to Picasso and David Smith. Anna stops in front of it:
Her wings gleam and fold shut.
She pauses
before an Etruscan boy
of green bronze. Leaves
nod heavily on his head.
He looks down, just
discovering
that his arms, if he lets them,
extend to the
soles of his feet.
his delight is total (75 - 6)
Carson is fond of wings as we see later in her career. Here I assume that they are Anna’s imagined angelic wings, similar to the numerous wings in Perugino or the wings of the Etruscan female spirit Vanth since she is interested in the Etruscan boy or, perhaps, Geryon’s red wings in Autobiography of Red (1998)?  But the question is, to what point? Which may be precisely the wrong question to ask a writer who avoids points altogether, preferring several simultaneous points of view or layers or themes or genres. Her normal procedure is to retreat from a single viewpoint toward a set of possibilities. She acknowledges the boy and nothing more. With his giant hands he is almost a lusus naturae, a violation of realism, and a challenge to phenomenological descriptions of reality. In the conference’s descriptions of the lebenswelt (the world we live in and try to describe) where does he fit in (“belong” is too humanising) with his leafed head, his anorexic body and arms stretching like plasticine to the ground? Is he like Geryon, Foucault might ask, an exception to the totalizing explanatory claims of philosophy or our classifying systems? If we turn to the past: where did he fit into the more flexible often bisexual Etruscan cosmology? The publication of Nox (2010) two decades later allows a sliver of possibility that the mysterious, distant, unapproachable boy is in part an Etruscan version of her troubled brother Davey who seemed never to fit in anywhere. If only Nox mentioned Etruscans instead of Athenians and Spartans, there would be a more explicit link.
Names in Carson are always in question, under pressure. Why “Canicula,” why “Anna,” and why the shifty Italian “di”? If in doubt, Gérard Genette suggests, squeeze the names. The Latin “canicula” is a diminutive for dog and the Dog star, the herald of the season of oppressive heat in Italy. Packs of dogs wander the streets in the poem’s Perugia, though not in the city I have visited several times to see the museum’s Etruscans and to pay homage to Piero in the National Gallery of Umbria. But “canicula” can also refer to “a violent woman” and the poet Persius extends the meaning to the “worst throw of the dice.” If we keep on, we find that Anna is “grace” in Hebrew, but it is also a slippery name: Anne, Anna, Hannah, Ana, Anita. Anne isn’t mentioned in the Bible, but somehow became known as the mother of the Virgin Mary and therefore the grandmother of Jesus. Anna is mentioned in the New Testament (Luke 2:36) as Hannah in the Greek original. If the “I” is hiding behind a name, she has chosen an unstable one, which would be appropriate for a conference on being and freedom whose three main texts sound like Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, and Maurice Merleau - Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” and “Cézanne’s Doubt.”[iv] Behind everything one senses the problem of presence: Greek “Parousia” is almost a homonym for Perugia / Perusia and  also has the theological meaning of “the second coming.” One asks, “Who is present?” The poem itself is as unstable and as impossible to pin down as Anna, as identities, as perceptions, as judgments, as philosophical searches after meaning, as searches for influence . . . and, finally, as the Etruscans. How can we comprehend a people who produced an elongated statue, with arms that reach to the ground, whose function we don’t understand? Is the dying Etruscan’s last not – quite - word—“‘Ah . . . .’ in the rain,” a summons to Anna to, to do what? Remember me? Write about the Etruscans in a poem about death and dying? This makes sense if Paul Meyer is right that “It is a poem, without a story, about death.”[v] Perhaps Freud should have the last word, again, when he suggests that even in “the best - interpreted dreams, one often needs to leave a particular passage obscure, having become aware, during the work of interpretation, that a knot of dream - thoughts rises there that refuses to unravel.”[vi] Carson, like Lowell, has many such moments that remain knotted, polysemous and ungiving while suggesting not just more but perhaps too much. So far as I know, no one has given a satisfying interpretation of Lowell’s couplet at the head of this chapter. It sits like a singularity in physics, so densely compacted that its component parts are not available for inspection. Like Lowell’s polysemous lines, Carson’s poem seems to bring together multiple origins related only by their presence in the poet’s consciousness. I’m not complaining.
Carson returns to Etruria in “Wrong Norma,” a weary and intensely introspective poem about remorse, aging, and death by way of pre - dawn reflections on Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard or, more precisely Norma Desmond / Gloria Swanson / Marilyn Monroe. Our questions begin with the title: If this is the “Wrong Norma,” who is the right one? When I reread the poem, I imagine a triptych by Edward Hopper titled Woman Smoking at Night Window, New York with each of the panels focussed on one of the women and Carson reflected in each. In the work of both artists, precariousness is a felt presence. The poem’s setting is a murky New York City which at this moment and for this woman is a trope for Hades with “the giant white smoke Miltoning to heaven.” In other words, New York is hell, and the female speaker is at this moment a fallen angel remorseful about a “wrong” choice.
Wrong night, wrong city, wrong movie, wrong
ambulances caterwauling past and drowning out
wrong dialogue of wrong Norma Desmond, what
could be more wrong she’s the same age as me
this tilted wreck with deliquescent chin, I turn it
off, eat soup and read a novel. Thoughts trickle
in and out. No one phones. I am safe but that
won’t last. I drift to the past, even 20 years ago
wasn’t it possible to be pure? To just close the
door and think about one thing, the moon, curbs,
Etruria. The self wins anyway. The “s” in self
wins. I used to love making “s” in cursive style on
the blackboard in school, it’s different every
time, every shell on the beach, do they even have
blackboards, teach cursive anymore, I can’t wait
for morning, Sunday morning on West 3rd my
favourite time, no cars, branches stark.
Daybreak greenish and cold and on a rooftop
across from me the legendary water towers of
New York City, the giant white smoke Miltoning
to heaven.
Each time I come to the “giant white smoke” of the ending, I’m sure that there is an earlier line setting this one up in which she holds a cigarette and watches the smoke rise against the window like a woman in a film noir. There isn’t. A nervous sardonic agitation is the poem’s motor. Everything is in motion, even the absent cars just outside the frame. The speed of thought is both electric and slow motion. The mind is in panic, scurrying to list everything that is wrong: night, city, movie, ambulances, but if these are the wrong ones, which ones would satisfy? Perhaps all those in the past, “even 20 years ago,” when it was perhaps “possible to be pure” and when one “was safe,” when “curbs” (Thou shalt / Though shalt not) were respected, perhaps most attentively when violated. That period is the antithesis to this one in which there is a vertiginous “smoke Miltoning to heaven,” though many readers will think both Hell and Eden into the frame and Proust’s suggestion that the only paradises are the lost ones. Even as she expresses the desire to “think about one thing” she fails with three and seems to be in vertigo towards absolute desolation. Her sleeplessness recalls Pascal’s eternal night of waking. The moon as an image of singularity is almost commonplace, the stark gleaming elusive circle in the sky at once an image of perfection, purity, and nothingness. To think about Etruria is to reflect on something that no longer exists, like memories less vivid with each passing moment. But if “the self wins anyway”—that is, even if it fails to “think about one thing”— it does so because of what might be called life’s existential cunning: in seeming to lose we win. The “s” in “self” points in two directions, Janus - like, to the past and into the future. My guess is that the speaker is poised between the named “wrong” Norma of Sunset Boulevard (1950) and the “right” but unnamed actress [Norma] of Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), the poem’s absent presence: Marilyn Monroe (née Norma Jean Mortenson) who plays Sugar Kane Kowalczyk.[vii] Twenty years ago the speaker looked in the mirror and saw Marilyn—the right Norma; today the same mirror shows Gloria, the wrong Norma, unwelcome because old and washed up. Gloria Swanson was born in 1897 and was 53 when she starred in Sunset Boulevard in 1950. Anne Carson, born on 21 June 1950, would have been 53 in 2003. Marilyn [Norma] Monroe, born in 1926, is the absent presence in this poem, waiting to make her entry in “Detail from the tomb of the diver (Paestum 500 - 433 BCE) second detail” where she meets Etruscans.
Carson is a master of unobtrusive numerical forms and cadenced space. In “Wrong Norma,” “Etruria,” appears dead centre in the poem: eleven lines from the first line and eleven from the last. The loosely arranged content is held in place, like filings, by the antithetical magnetic pulls of Etruria (is it “pure”?) and New York. The poem begins in New York, flows toward the lost Etruria of the mind and then back again to New York and the wisp of deferred hope in the poem’s last word, “heaven.” The poem moves toward “Etruria” and then away, an equal distance in each direction. Hollywood to Etruria to New York. Etruria seems called up by the echo in “to be pure,” just as perhaps Milton may come to mind because of “Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks / In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades / High overarched imbower” (Paradise Lost 1. 302). Etruria is the anti - type of New York, historical but also sufficiently unknown to be a sort of never - never land—a haven—for anyone looking for a place of escape, a “somewhere” onto which a writer or reader can project whatever they wish. Etruria is also aurally close to Perugia / Perusia in her mind, the site of “Canicula di Anna,” her first longer work, published in 1984 when the world lay all before her and Eros the Bittersweet was forthcoming from Princeton University Press two years later. Like the poem, the book from Princeton will be spare and clear but also layered, learned, playful, witty, unpredictable, elusive and a genre - bender (or “curb” breaker). Neither gives anything away to the lazy reader. Though there is always the possibility with Carson that “Etruria” holds some random association for her in her dictionary of private meanings. That leads me to wonder whether the hinge or connection is “red”. If Etruria has a colour in our imaginations, it is probably the red of terra cotta and the red - coloured males of the tomb paintings, like the musician in the Tomb of the Triclinium. Red is also the colour of the several volcanoes in Carson’s work—see the cover art for Autobiography of Red (1998). I’m surprised that alizarin or madder doesn’t appear in her work, both words have rich poetic possibilities. Eros the Bittersweet (1986) had a red cover as did Grief Lessons, terra cotta again. The colour may have associations we won’t understand until the biography. I sense a deep emotional syntax binding together what seem scattered motifs.
The Paestum diver in the two poems titled “Detail from the tomb of the diver (Paestum 500 - 433 BCE) first detail” and “Detail from the tomb of the diver (Paestum 500 - 433 BCE) second detail” is also red and therefore probably Etruscan, though the painting itself isn’t. It is Greek and has been dated to c. 470.[viii] A similar diving figure occurs in the Etruscan Tomb of Hunting and Fishing (Tarquinia c. 505 - 500). The Paestum diver is in a tomb made of five limestone slabs with a painting of an all - male banquet. The poem suggests that each of its two sections is related to a detail from the painting. The first section begins with what might be a sketch of the ceiling (or in another interpretation, the underside of the lid of a chest) which leads to Marilyn’s entry into the poem, though at this point only the reader who remembers the songs she sang in Wilder’s Some Like It Hot will realize that the star is in the room: “Through with love she sings Naked except for a.” Two lines later the poet appears as herself—“swimming at noon always reminds me of Marilyn Monroe / Etruscan saying.” I take this as both a personal detail—I’m a Monroe fan and I too am through with love—and as another example of Carson’s humour. First, however, we need to ask, is this an Etruscan “saying” (as in an apothegm) or is it an Etruscan (man or woman) saying something about swimming at noon? Or is it both? If we don’t quite understand the meaning intended, Carson might shrug and remind us that the Etruscans are as “mysterious” as she is, and we have only a partial knowledge of the language. The reader also has only partial knowledge of the poet / speaker and inevitably wonders what is her relationship to Monroe beyond swimming? What aspects of the actress’s life overlap with the speaker’s?
The remainder of the poem is a dialogue between “Etruscans” and “Marilyn,” though these “Etruscans” are more closely related to Queneau’s “Etruscoches” than to Etruria. The doomed movie star confesses that she likes to “go underwater” when “blue,” inquires why the Etruscans bother with language when they don’t write anything, and is about to dive underwater or go under, either literally or metaphorically, as the poem ends. The poem’s colour is blue, the temperature is chilly, and the language is minimalist. Language is needed, the Etruscans tell her, because of inscriptions on tombstones (another Carson smile). I wonder whether Carson and her Etruscans know that at Monroe’s death there was a copy of Etruscan Places in her library of approximately 400 books.[ix] Though Marilyn is “a little blue” and refers to her “pain self,” she also asserts in an echo of Gone with the Wind that “Tomorrow will certainly be.” That may be true, though Hume warned us not to bet on it if we’re doing logic. The diver at Paestum is just a diver and we assume that after entering the water, he will resurface and swim. Monroe and the “Etruscans” are ghosts communing in another dimension. Both went under never to return. Did Carson remember the well - known colour photographs taken in 1962 on the set of the ill - fated Something’s Got to Give showing Marilyn swimming naked? In the most famous one she holds on to the pool’s edge with one leg up against the background of the pool’s water of many shades of blue. A few days later, on June 8th, the studio fired her.  On August 4th she committed suicide. Blue is by far our most popular colour. [x]
The “me” in the “Etruscan saying” suggests the elusive poet who likes to write autobiographically but without showing herself, like a fan dancer of Marilyn’s era, Sally Rand or Fay Bacon or Gypsy Rose Lee. It’s worth keeping in mind Carson’s warning in “Essay on What I Think about Most”—“I am uneasy with any claim to know exactly / what a poem means to say.”[xi]

Laura Ferri's contribution to John Moss 'Finding the Right Words'. Toronto. Iguana Editions, 2025

 

Laura Ferri's contribution to John Moss Finding the Right Words. Toronto. Iguana Editions, 2025

 

TWO FROM OTHER PERSPECTIVES

 SHIFTING IDENTITIES:

A CONVERSATION WITH LAURA FERRI

 

My Conversation with Laura Ferri called “Talking with John Moss” was recorded in Peterborough, 2002 and published in Englishes: Letterature Inglesi  contemporane (Rome), the same year. Laura was cultural coordinator of the Siena-Toronto Centre at the University of Siena. She makes my words more coherent I’m sure than they actually were. She and her husband were gracious hosts when Bev and I visited Siena. Some of that experience finds its way into fiction.

 

Laura Ferri: In "Invisible among the Ruins" you write, “... we are a northern nation. The white of our flag is the winter; the Arctic, a condition of our imagination. As we become increasingly a part of the global community, as our history, written by geography, is rewritten by ethnic diversity, we cannot survive as a people without coming to terms with how we imagine ourselves. The white of our flag is the winter, but the Arctic has seasons. Those who live there know that. For the rest of us, who visit or who read, we must explore beyond winter, find what is there and what we think is there, find what we missed.” The illuminating perception of a postmodern critic and the daring experience of the man who has travelled the Arctic conflate here into a whole vision of Canada’s identity: its multi-ethnic growth, the possibility of its global future. Could you expand on this?

 

John Moss: This is a most difficult question. In effect, in your very astute reading of the passage I articulate my position and feelings in the clearest way I am able to. Canada is evolving as a multi-ethnic society in ways my grandparents, and even my parents, could not have foreseen, and perhaps would not have liked. They were comfortable with British privilege and welcoming to all, so long as outsiders conformed to the standards of the Empire. Curiously, this sure sense of their own presence in the world placed even First Nations people as outsiders, and therefore inevitably subject to assimilation, as the price of belonging. This is reminiscent of Rome, conferring citizenship to people in the provinces in exchange for fealty to the Imperial centre. All that has changed, as Yeats said, changed utterly. It is irrelevant whether the change is good or bad, or from which perspective it is measured. It is what happened. And Canada evolves into a multi-ethnic nation with unknowable prospects. In our time, it is important that we come to terms with the cost of transition, that we accommodate new ways of seeing and being ourselves. There is a tendency, however, to dismantle the past, our cultural and historical heritage, and to see ourselves in the present as simply a holding ground for future development. Ministers of the crown, leading thinkers, sometimes deny Canada’s real presence in the world, perceiving us risen from a past that is irrelevant to most and incapable of a coherent vision into what lies ahead. Perhaps this is why we are governed by political pragmatists. There is no room for ideals, for memories or for dreams. As the world’s nations converge under the cultural hegemony of global economics and as traditional family and communal relations inevitably collapse, individual human beings more than ever will need to sustain a sense of belonging through identity with the nation-state as a cultural home. Place of being will become more important, not less. If Canadians cannot relate to their landscape through history or culture or vision, then Canada will fade away. We will not be destroyed by barbarians at the gates or among us. It will be our own lack of focus that does us in, our inability and lack of desire to see ourselves not through ethnicity or power but as a gathering place, a good place to be.

 

L.F.: Would you consider this passage appropriate for use in an anthology for Italian students, to give them a sound sense of what Canada is? Which others would you suggest?

 

J.M.: Yes I would. I think often students connect more through metaphor and allusion. Just look at the lyrics of popular songs!

 

L.F.: What do you consider peculiar to Canadian literature? Could you offer a statement which may best describe the Canadian literature of the last few decades?

 

J.M.: I think there are many things particular to Canadian literature but, as with all literature, few things peculiar, that is, unique. Culture is infectious. It settles in, where conditions are similar, and assimilates. It seldom expires on its own, or spontaneously springs into being. Canadian literature in the 19th century was largely a delayed response to British literature, in part emulation and in part hybridization. In the 20th century, it came much more under the influence of the Americans, but by the 1960s it was developing a voice of its own, what might be described as the cosmopolitan parochial, exemplified by pride in being the same and yet different from the rest of the world. This quickly gave way to the post-colonial expression of our individual experience in a borderless world; the Canadian reader as ‘Everyman’, the writer as only him or her self.

 

L.F.: Which Canadian authors would you recommend for the teaching of literature in high schools?

 

J.M.: David Adams Richards, Margaret Atwood, Jack Hodgins, Jane Urquhart, Robert Kroetsch.

 

L.F.: You have recently moved from post-modern criticism, through critical fiction, into Borgesian short stories. Could you say something about this turn in your writing?

 

J.M.: At this point it is difficult to comment. When I was writing those stories, that was the only way I could write.

 

L.F.: Is there a risk that critical fiction, as exemplified by your Borgesian stories, for all the power it has to extract responses subversively from those who are widely read, may be too demanding for young students and put them off literature at all? Or do you think that students should be exposed to this kind of maieutical challenge rather than remain subject to prescriptive critical commentary?

 

J.M.: No, yes. I couldn’t have said better. Of course, it is demanding. But liberating, too. Read a story like “Peggy Be Good.” There is more critical thought in response to Atwood’s writing carried in that piece of fiction than in everything else I’ve written, and it is far more accessible. Teaching is sharing, providing access. In this story, the reader is invited to form a relationship with Atwood’s canon and the authorial personality that informs it and holds it together. Students will make the leap if given the opportunity; they will respond to her writing through direct experience in my text. I think prescriptive critical commentary can deaden the sensibility, whereas critical fiction can bring it to life.

 

L.F.: In Being Fiction, in the chapter on James Joyce, relating to the Irish question you sound disappointed by the fact that “The Irish who condemned specific acts of terrorist brutality would invariably wind up their exhortation against the most heinous crime with an explanation of why it was, just so.” Isn’t it ever possible that accounting for the historic origins of a terrible event, rather than a mode to offer violence sanction, may be a way to help the civilized world find the correct, I would say honest, response to it? I am obviously referring to the heinous attack on the Twin Towers and the Western World’s reaction to it: Enduring War.

 

J.M.: Ah, you ask penetrating questions. First of all, it would seem accounting for the historical origins of events has done little in the past to reduce the horrors of which we are capable. Sometimes it seems, those who know history are condemned to repeat it. But what I was getting at had less to do with history than about the confusion of moral and theological context. If the activity of righteous fanatics is perceived on a religious spectrum of good and evil, then response will also be placed on that spectrum, at the opposite extreme. This kind of reductionism immediately degenerates into such dangerous absurdities as "the axis of evil", and Satanic epithets, all of which perpetuate the conflict. It becomes a simplistic Bushite notion of “my God is better than your God.” and “my readings of Scripture are better than yours.” But on the scales of secular justice, all crimes are unconscionable. Then, in a search for right and wrong, the pathology of an act of terrorism may both be evaluated in absolute terms as unacceptable, and seen, in relative terms, continuous with the conditions that brought it about, conditions that may be addressed. Human beings can far more easily agree on what is right and wrong than on what is sacred and what is profane. The Twin Towers tragedy is wrong; that is why it was deemed a holy achievement, precisely because it was a theologically justifiable wrong. Both sides agree, although those of us outside the sphere of religious zealotry regard it as a profanity. I would rather humanity struggles to right wrongs than to justify action through deference to an infinitely malleable God.