Anne Carson's Nox

Anne Carson's brilliant long poem, Nox, is an exquisite elegy for her dead brother.  Encased in a tomb-like box (the death mimesis is startling), this powerful book, daring to challenge the limits of the bound book, unfolds in accordion-pleated pages.  The design is a bit of distraction:  I have to balance the book on a clipboard so it doesn't fall off my lap and unfold across the living room floor.  But the dazzling language and the originality of the concept transcend the overly-elaborate design.

Carson is a classicist, a professor at the University of Michigan. The title of her new book, Nox, which means "Night" in Latin, is used interchangeably with mors, "death."   Carson's elegy to Michael, who died in 2000, is inextricably entangled with  Catullus' stunning elegy to his dead brother (Poem 101) . In fact, Carson's poem is a homage to Catullus and an exploration of  the difficulties of translation of language, grief, and  customs honoring death across time and cultures.

The poem opens with Catullus' Latin poem 101-- no translation.  It appears in the book as a crumpled scrap  with blurry letters, pasted into the book (that, of course, is an illusion, and I could do without the blur).  But I love her assumption that people are classically educated.  One has to hope that those who haven't read Catullus will do so.
Carson boldly expounds on the meaning of elegy, alternating long dictionary definitions of each word in Catullus CI (as if breaking up the words will lessen the grief) with scraps of biography and memories, cut-up bits of  letters, childhood photos, and meditations on the relationship between history and elegy. There is also plenty of Greek here (translated) for those who love language.

In 7.1  of Nox, Carson muses on Catullus.

"I want to explain about the Catullus poem (101).  Catullus wrote poem 101 for his brother who died in the Troad.  Nothing at all is known of the brother except his death.  Catullus appears to have travelled from Verona to Asia Minor to stand at the grave.  Perhaps he recited the elegy there.  I have loved this poem since the first time I read it in high school Latin class and I have tried to translate it a number of times.  Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy.  No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind.  I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101.  But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown rom, where one gropes for the light switch.  I guess it never ends.  A brother never ends.  I prowl him.  He does not end."

She eventually translates the poem--sorry, there is no page number.  It resonates and recreates her own experience:  she crossed the sea for inadequate funereal rites after her brother died in Amsterdam. She recreates the word order of the poem:  almost impossible.

It is a beautiful poem:  one that could be taught with Catullus.