Anne Carson, poeta canadese nata nel 1950, ha vinto il premio Nobel per la letteratura 2026. In Italia i suoi libri, almeno una parte, sono pubblicati da La Nave di Teseo, Crocetti e Utopia.

Senza pretendere di scrivere qui, su due piedi, copiando da qualche parte, un profilo di Carson, vi propongo un paio di sue poesie. 

In queste poche righe si coglie la profondità del suo sguardo e delle sue parole, e lo stile originale, in alcuni casi al confine fra narrazioni in prosa, poesia e saggistica. Ringrazio la New York Review of books (alla quale per altro pago regolarmente da anni l’abbonamento) per la tacita concessione dei due testi.

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Prima di invitarvi a leggere i due poems di Carson, ricordo che:

Il romanzo di novembre 2026 del gruppo di lettura Grandi libri è Lolita di Vladimir Nabokov

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L’occhio nella gola di Samanta Schweblin è invece la storia di ottobre del gruppo di lettura Un racconto

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E ora le due opere Carson:

What to Say of the Entirety

Anne Carson

a poem

What to say of the entirety. The entirety should be smaller.

Small enough to say something about. Humans. What if

the guy you’re hanging up by his thumbs already has a

razorplague of painapples roaming his chest inside. Do you

regard that as his own fault? Do you really need to make it

worse? Do you think of yourself as a well-loved person? Of

course these are separate questions. Like dead salmon and

coppermine tailings, separate. So these separations, this

anesthesia, we should ponder a bit. Humans. What can you

control? Wrong question. Can you treat everything as an

emergency without losing the reality of time, which contin-

ues to drip, laughtear by laughtear? Where to start? Start in

the middle (and why?) so as not to end up there, where for

example the torture report ended up after all those years

of work. You have to know what you want, know what you think,

know where to go. New York City actually. Here

we are. Trucks crash by. Or was that another row of doors

slammed by gods? They’re soaked, the gods, they’ve tucked

their toes up on their thrones as if they don’t know why this

is happening. Poor old coxcombs.

What to Say of the Entirety è stata pubblicata sulla Nyrb il 25 febbraio 2016

**

War Song

Anne Carson

a poem

1937

Beckett got

stabbed by

pliant spear

of a stranger,

one Paris night.

Just missed

the lungs. He,

lean warrior,

spent two

weeks in hospital,

descended upon by

all the Joyces

(James, Nora, Lucia)

and some Becketts

(mother, brother)

and Suzanne,

the girlfriend nobody

knew about yet

(not even Sam),

whom he would marry

fifty years hence

with a flicker of shyness

still in his eyes—no,

I made that up. But

what he does say,

of the two

ancient (Endgame) enemies:

“that’s Suzanne and me!”

Now don’t you wonder

what remarks passed

from Suzanne to Lucia

or mother to Clov

leaning over the bed

in that battle-bright room?

Well, it isn’t bright

(battle) and

no one is

alive who remembers.

Everything I can tell you

about that room or

those lavish souls

is just my own

fear of death blowing around on the floorboards.

Blowing sand around.

You know,

in the old days,

I, a poet,

would lean back

in my saddle,

recite a poem

of sublime sense,

fill you with ferocity,

then together

we’d ride off

over the black sand,

past moonlit ruins,

to our destination,

with not a thought

of food or drink,

and if I, a poet,

were asked

for details

of battle

I’d quote

‘Antarah Ibn Shaddad—

“the antelopes sprinted right and left”—

wondering could I

smuggle a flicker

of shyness into

antelope eyes

and parley

my own death

one more

mighty

moment.

What to Say of the Entirety è stata pubblicata sulla Nyrb il 20 dicembre  2018