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“... There are numerous small literary quotations in Sparrows on the Stone – passages from Auden, Anne Carson, William Gass – but none of them are quite so peculiar as Marten’s own style, whether in prose or in polished Jesmonite.In an essay on the word ‘and’ in his Habitations of the Word, Gass writes: ‘To the logician, who is at least patient ...”

“... the silence associated with her own. In the film, Antigone is played with great fierceness by Anne Carson, whose own obsession with Sophocles led to a poem, ‘TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2)’, which is incorporated in the spoken text. Oedipus is played by Stephen Dillane, who limps across blasted landscapes – Bodmin Moor, Wyoming, Yellowstone ...”

“... from one claw. Both scholars and creative writers have made much of Sappho’s fragmentariness. Anne Carson’s new translations, with facing Greek text, make effective use of blank space and brackets to convey the feeling of a torn or burned scrap of papyrus. Carson loves the spaces almost as much as the words: she ...”

“... You can’t just carry over the words of a poem into a different language, across that space Anne Carson describes as ‘like no other’, nor can you just re-create the thinking or the experience in the poem. Both Proust and Valéry described writing itself as an act of translation: translation, equally, is an act of writing, and at its best can ...”

“... That joke isn’t possible without earnest literary pilgrimages to mock. In Economy of the Unlost Anne Carson gives a persuasive account of the nexus between poets and death, and goes back not to Orpheus’ loss of Eurydice, or Sappho’s apocryphal leap off a cliff, but to the fifth-century Simonides of Keos, the first poet crass enough to write poetry ...”

“... Mallo writes at one point, and gaps such as these allow the fragments to ‘drift’, as Anne Carson put it in ‘Merry Christmas for Hegel’, ‘in gentle and mutual redefinition of one another’. ‘The so-called obra fragmentada,’ Mallo has said, is ‘usually understood as a collage of more or less erratic ...”

“... do the work? Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt, Alice Munro, Jeanette Winterson, Anne Carson. Why am I even making this list? By the end of the book, I felt for Flaubert. ‘The humid element’, the ‘tears, chatter, breast-feeding … menses’, was too much for me, too. I was more comfortable in Part 1, where the ‘veil of ...”

“... Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History’ but ‘Interested in:/the psychology of lying/Anne Carson on the death of her brother/French writers admired by Proust/the poems of Catullus/translations from the Serbian.’ This is perhaps no more than an upmarket version of Liking things on Facebook, but that too, as advertisers understand, is ...”

“... of those images that seems to demonstrate the soul is real, like spirit photography. My study of Carson McCullers began when I was a teenager, as any study of her should. On one of our family outings to the bookstore, I picked up a mass-market paperback of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, with all the characters swept together on the front in a sort of soap ...”

“... literary reputation? In the Forties and early Fifties, such disparate, talented young writers as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Flannery O’Connor were perceived as kindred; there was a highly publicised vogue of American Southern Gothic writing, abetted by photographs of the very camp Truman Capote reclining on a chaise-longue like a delicious dream ...”

“... the sign that the subject is most himself? Or herself: here are Susan Sontag (1972) and Carson McCullers (1946), each raising a dark gaze to us under a brow tense with thought each reaching to poise a cigarette over an ashtray. Giacometti (1961) stares nose-to-nose into the face of a bust he has made, his big foreground hand intimately cupping its ...”

“... Creon’s edict and bury the corpse. And so she does. When asked to deny the crime, she says, in Anne Carson’s 2012 translation of Sophocles: ‘I did the deed I do not deny it.’ She does not seek to justify her actions within the terms of Creon’s law: she negates the law by handing it back to him, intact – ‘If you call that law.’ Antigone ...”

“... and won’t do either. The longest English version of the sparse ten lines of Catullus 101 is Anne Carson’s Nox (2009), which is both a translation and a meditation on translation and on the loss of her own brother. This is extended through a single sheet of paper which stretches out, by my rough measurement, to 25.6 metres, into which ...”

“... the Northern women writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth, Amanda McKittrick Ros, Frances Browne and Anne Crone, whose varieties of Unionism and feminism would have been intriguingly disruptive of the meta-narrative. Northern writing is otherwise well-represented. Tom Paulin edits a section on ‘Northern Protestant Oratory and Writing 1791-1985’, which ...”

“... had in the Thirties. The way in which poets as diverse as Heaney, Muldoon, Longley, McGuckian, Carson and Mahon are to a certain degree sustained by a single symbolic world is something that poets like Armitage and Maxwell are trying to copy. In Maurice Riordan’s first collection, A Word From the Loki, the title poem reflects the practice, which Northern ...”