Nox

The experience of moving through Anne Carson’s Nox, a collection printed on one continuous sheet of paper folded over and over into the dimensions of a book page, accordioned inside a box, evokes the archeological dig of personal, familial, and cultural memory.

After the death of her estranged brother, Carson, whose author bio always notes “teaches ancient Greek for a living,” turns, returns, to translation. A photograph of a Latin poem, Catullus’ 101, an elegy for his brother, begins the book. The unfolding text provides a winding path for translating the famously untranslatable Latin poem into English via a series of dictionary entries and etymological histories, interwoven with familial ephemera and Carson’s memories. The resulting work moves how grief moves—in a spiral, a flock of fragments, each present moment broken by the invisible and bleeding history.

Nox asks me to consider how reading, and remembering, are always acts of translation. It asks me to consider how my history (personal, familial, and cultural) shapes the text in front of me, and the me standing before the text. There is a vulnerability, and generosity, in baring and preserving the process of composition: the insistence on the tactical, the material artifacts orbiting an elegy; and the hand behind the book, the one that scores a word (DIES) into paper, that tears preserved letters into ragged scraps, that cuts family photographs.

Carson reminds me that asking questions, about history, memory, and language, is the work of the poet and the work of the historian: “It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.” At the moment I am writing this, in the second year of a global pandemic, I have, so far, survived. Many have not. This poem, this book object, shows one way to carry, to fashion a thing that carries.