‘Float’ Adrift But Grounded

“Float” is the 20th work published by Anne Carson—classicist, essayist, poet, critic, playwright, translator, professor, and all around polymath. Her jack-of-all-trades approach to art typically manifests in both her works themselves and the variance between them, and “Float” is no exception. As both a critical and creative piece, the collection allows Carson to approach her subject, translation, from two different directions. Her writing gives rise to fantastic insights about what can be achieved through translation and what must, by the very nature of transference, be left behind. Her medium here is as important as her message: Different forms, levels of speech, and links fully flesh out her concepts.

Having won many awards, including the Pushcart Prize and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Carson often speaks at events. Out of these lectures and performances, Carson created around half of the 12 chapbooks that comprise “Float.” Arranged alphabetically, these books are meant to be read in any order. Given that “Float” contains essays, thematically connected poems, and combinations thereof, the amount of consistency in the piece becomes exquisitely impressive. All of the pieces expose different facets of the same obsessive but fruitless pursuit of capturing and speaking the truth of individual perception.

The issue of translation forms a focal point for the work’s psychological occupations, most clearly evident in an essay on the issues of translation called “Variations on the Right to Remain Silence.” The poem’s examination of the reasoning behind adopting foreign words into English is especially thought-provoking; as Carson writes, it is “an acknowledgement of the fact that languages are not algorithms of one another, you cannot match them item for item.” Thus, Carson highlights a central problem of translation: it will never be exact, and the English language, to some degree, has accepted that. This essay ends with an exercise in interpretive translation, with five different translations of a fragment of the Greek poet Ibycus, all wildly different. The piece itself further explores the way translations may diverge dramatically yet still be correct in reference to Joan of Arc’s trial, Francis Bacon’s paintings, and Friedrich Holderlin’s Greek translations. Carson uses this technique of exploring a concept relative to surprising sources throughout the collection—a metafictive way of “translating” one context into another.

While the essays do much of the conceptual legwork, the poems embody it in a more intimate way. The poetry in “Float” is highly fragmented and characterized by postmodern free organization, which is often clinical or inconsistent. Here, though, it masterfully demonstrates Carson’s personal perception of translation. In “Wildly Constant,” which chronicles a walk in Iceland, Carson contemplates icebergs as inaccessible libraries, natural history unable to be effectively “translated” into human understanding. This gives rise to a more psychoanalytic concern: “I have no theory / of why we are here / or what any of us is a sign of.” This preoccupation resurfaces in “Reticent Sonnet”: “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.” Here Carson highlights her firsthand worry: the personal failure of being unable to translate fully, of her entire life work coming down to pursuing the impossible. Carson avoids the pitfall of over-intellectualization by inserting a vital humanity through interruptions to convey the fragmentation she herself feels.

This alienation from ability leads to a connection between translation and mental perception. Carson combines the two most explicitly in “Nelligan,” which contains eight translations of Émile Nelligan poems. Carson’s translations enliven the work with their refreshing disregard for the forms and formal language of the originals and thereby introduce her central conceit: Translation only works on an individual basis. To choose a different structure, to say that another form is better for the communication of a range of desperate emotions of these poems, is to bring in models that have meaning only for a certain few who would have, reading and understanding the originals, thought of them exactly as she did. Thus, Carson subtly points out the personal color present in every translation.

The word choice of Carson’s translations serve to drive the point on perception home. In “Hospital night dream,” she compares her translations of French poems to those of Cogswell, who translated them in the early ’80s. She substitutes “one of those paintings” for Cogswell’s “those oils of hers”; Cogswell’s “mysterious blaze of chandeliers” becomes “sudden mystic flare of big lamps.” Cogswell’s language maintains more fidelity to the original, while Carson aims to render these poems entirely in her own idiom, thus destroying the originals. Her essay, “Cassandra Float Can,” with its side-by-side translations of the prophecy in Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon,” invokes the etymology of the name Apollo, god of prophecy: “Apollo’s name is cognate with the Greek verb apollesthai, ‘to destroy utterly, kill, slay, demolish, lay waste.’” Still, Carson’s ever-present point is that all these translations, in their different forms and takeaways, are correct. Thereby Carson smartly exposes the different levels on which language works and is understood.

Furthermore, “Float” is a revolutionarily expansive text: Its essays, plays, poems, lists, and translations include topics from the ancient Greek prophet Cassandra to Brigitte Bardot. Carson’s tone shifts just as dramatically, at one moment deeply philosophical and the next modest and humorous. Still, Carson never deviates conceptually, focusing with complete clarity on the space between original words and their transference into other languages so that contemporary structures don’t necessarily have any more reality than the structures that produced the source material. Which is the original then becomes relative, and there cannot be a tether to the historical first. Carson admits to the reader a terrifying truth: To be cut adrift from your own context may be the modern—or oldest—definition of madness. Perhaps, Carson suggests, there is a kind of sanity to be found in delusion.