When I tell people I’m an experimental poet they always have questions. What does an experiment on the page look like? What’s the point? Isn’t all poetry experimental? Sometimes you need to engage with experimental poetry to understand. Anne Carson’s work is a great doorway into experimental poetry. In her poems and translations, she broadens the scope of what we might consider poetic language.
Of the many fantastic books Carson has produced over the years, my absolute favorite is Float, comprised of 22 discrete chapbooks “bound” by a plastic case. There is no fixed order and the chapbooks are meant to “float” around. Reading Float is an interactive journey, with no fixed end point.
In one chapbook she takes up Ibykos [an early Greek lyric poet], initially translated through the lens of the Poetae Melici Graeci. This looks and feels like a standard translation of Greek lyric poetry from the Greek into English. Then the essay presents another translation, using words from “Woman’s Constancy” by John Donne. The third translation uses only words from Bertolt Brecht’s FBI file #100-67077. The fourth is translated using words from pg. 47 of Endgame by Samuel Beckett. The fifth is translated using words from Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch, pp. 136-37. The sixth veers away from text printed on the page and takes translation cues from stops and signs from the London Underground. The final translation uses words from the owner’s manual of her new Emerson 1000W microwave oven. Anything can become source language for an experimental poet! Comparing the first lines of these Carson translations looks like this:
Line 1, translation 1, from: Poetae Melici Graeci
In spring, on the one hand,
Line 1, translation 2, from: “Woman’s Constancy”
In woman, on the one hand,
Line 1, translation 3, from: Bertolt Brecht’s FBI file
At a cocktail party attended by known Communists, on the one hand,
Line 1, translation 4, from: pg. 47 of Endgame
In your kitchen, on the one hand,
Line 1, translation 5, from: Conversations with Kafka
In the end, on the one hand, all those who sit behind us at the cash desks,
Line 1, translation 6, from: the London Underground
At the excess fare window, on the one hand, the king’s bakers,
Line 1, translation 7, from: Emerson 1000W microwave In hot snacks and appetizers, on the one hand, the soy, barbecue, Worcestershire or steak sauce,
When you look at the first lines this way, patterns seem to emerge. Translations 1, 2 and 4 are strikingly similar, as the words spring, woman and kitchen all pretty comfortably occupy the same space on the line. As the sources get stranger, the translations get somewhat richer, more descriptive. Reading Anne Carson, the reader begins to wonder what she herself might translate, and what unconventional frames she might make use of for her own alternative translations. Experimental work is liberating. Forget the rules. Have fun with language! Play!
Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire.