Anne Carson’s Best Books

“I came to think of translating as a room,” Anne Carson wrote, in her illustrated book of poems “Nox,” “where one gropes for the light switch.” When the Swedish Academy awarded Carson the Nobel Prize in Literature this month, they continued a long tradition of recognizing the superior art of poet-translators, from Rabindranath Tagore to Pablo Neruda, Czesław Miłosz, Seamus Heaney, and Jon Fosse. In her essays and poems—as in her translations of Sappho, Euripides, and Sophocles—Carson lays down each word as if it were arrived at after a suspended period of searching and testing, of slowly gathering a language to illuminate half-sensed, mysterious thoughts and feelings. As I noted earlier this month, her great theme is eros, and her truly exceptional books let us inhabit the longing and loneliness of desire. Merve Emre, The New Yorker