Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) (Martin Classical Lectures)

... brilliant in her evocation of what has been lost and gained as the human mind has moved further and further into abstraction and reification... of the oral tradition becoming a written tradition in which poems can become artifacts, objects to be bought and sold ... of an economy grounded in relationship to an economy grounded in money. I very much appreciated the way she brought in Karl Marx as someone who so deeply understood the psycho-spiritual cost we pay for the abstractions of money and the core capitalist orientation of the pursuit of wealth as some sort of abstract absolute beyond the living human experience. And I deeply appreciate her exploring Paul Celan. I have always been more in awe of him than feeling a sense of contact with him, but her exposition of Sprachgitter gave me a sense of his profound commitment to the absolutely stubborn freedom and truth that can arise in and as words. Humans lie with words, but words themselves contain a fierce reality that remains beyond our lies. We can spin the truth with words, but it is us spinning, not the words.

This is a masterpiece of connecting and creating a web of meaning among apparently different silk threads. It is impossible not sit at her feet and expand one’s mind.

Not an easy read, but well worth it for those who delight in Carson's insights and brilliance.

This book is unusual in many ways. Firstly, it dares to compare Simonides of Keos, a Greek poet of the 5th century BC, and Paul Celan, a 20th century poet who wrote in German. Secondly, it dares to apply economic ideas, in particular those of Karl Marx, to explain poetry.What connects Simonides and Celan? They share a sense of alienation and an acute awareness of the limits of what "is;" and they are both masters of composition and language. Anne Carson points out that she chose to look at two men at the same time because the attention devoted to one enhances the attention devoted to the other: "Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky." (viii)A particularly fascinating aspect of both poets' work is their preoccupation with nothingness and negation. "Negation links the mentalities of Simonides and Celan. Words for 'no,' 'not,' 'never,' 'nowhere,' 'nobody,' 'nothing,' dominate their poems and create bottomless places for reading." (9) It is exactly these bottomless places in their poems, invisible to the cursory reader, that Anne Carson knows to locate.Anne Carson divides the book into four chapters. In the first chapter, "Alienation," Carson uses analogies from the sphere of economics most extensively. She explains how the changing economic situation of poets in the fifth century BC accounts for the fact that Simonides was considered the stingiest person of his time (in addition to being one of the smartest). The "economy" in the title of the book refers to the actual life of the poet as a recipient of gifts and money, and to the act of composing poetry. The "unlost" in the title is a more complex idea and hints at the themes of negation and nothingness explored in the other three chapters.In chapter two, "Visibles Invisibles," Carson discusses Simonides' philosophy of art ("the word is a picture of things") and how painting a picture relates to "painting" a poem. "Simonides is Western culture's original literary critic, for he is the first person in our extant tradition to theorize about the nature and function of poetry." (46) Carson goes on to show how Simonides and Celan use grammar to "render a relationship that is ... deeper than the visible surface of the language," (52) and how both poets' "language has the capacity to uncover a world of metaphor that lies inside all our ordinary speech like a mind asleep." (58) She points to the exact locations in the poems where poetic language indicates an invisible "reality" beyond the reality of ordinary speech, where poetry arises from words and the (visible) surface of language reflects a deeper (invisible) truth.Chapter three studies Simonides' epitaphs. "No genre of verse is more profoundly concerned with seeing what is not there, and not seeing what is, than that of the epitaph." (73) Epitaphs are inscriptions on graves. Simonides was the most prolific composer of epitaphs in the ancient world, Carson tells us, and set the conventions of the genre. "Tears of Simonides" were the byword for poetry of lament used by Catullus. Epitaphs have two economic aspects: the economics of remuneration and the economics of composition, as the poet has to use his words economically to fit them on the grave-stone. Epitaphs are also related to the visible and the invisible because they connect the living with the dead: "The responsibility of the living to the dead is not simple. It is we who let them go, for we do not accompany them. It is we who hold them here - deny them their nothingness - by naming their names. Out of these two wrongs comes the writing of epitaphs." (85)Chapter four, "Negation," focuses our attention on the fact that "nothing" needs close thought. "The word lends itself to scary word play, to unanswerable puns, to the sort of reasoning that turns inside out when you stare at it. Simonides and Celan are both poets who enjoy this sort of reasoning and who orient themselves toward reality, more often than not, negatively." (100) Negation is a very powerful tool, and Carson wants our attention for the difference in implied meaning between, say, "Life is suffering" and "Nothing is not painful among men," as Simonides phrased it. Negation is also something uniquely human because a negative is a verbal event, "a peculiarly linguistic resource whose power resides with the user of words."(102) When you say "this is not that" you need to put something present ("this") and something absent ("that") on the screen of your imagination. "The interesting thing about a negative, then, is that it posits a fuller picture of reality than does a positive statement." (102) Carson then shows with examples from Simonides' and Celan's poetry how much beyond the factual these poets can express by not saying "something" but "not nothing.""Economy of the Unlost" is truly brilliant whenever Anne Carson dissects a poem because she brings to the task both her qualities as scholar of classical Greece and modern poet. I do not always agree with the way she employs metaphors from economics, but I take it that she uses the terms introduced by Karl Marx to point my attention to noteworthy aspects of the poetry even if by today's standards these terms have turned out to be incorrect. When Carson claims, "what is striking in Marx's analysis of the issue is this insight: that to value a piece of work is to price the mortal span," (107) then she and Karl are obviously mistaken. A doodle produced by Bill Gates during a meeting would definitely fetch a higher price than a doodle by yours truly done in the same mortal span of time. But these are quibbles of an economist; they should not detract from my praise of Carson's work.The bottom line is: this is an outstanding work that brings the best of academic scholarship to the interpretation of poetry. It deserves every of its five stars.

I can't say enough good things about these lectures, which mesh Celan, Simonides and Karl Marx with a grace that makes their union seem inevitable. The way Carson folds together money, language and memory reminds me of Ezra Pound without the shouting. Her insights have a math-like clarity ("Eureka! I've got it!") that brings two extreme ends of our history under the same light. You'll never mistake negation and loss for modern inventions after reading this book. The coins have changed since Simonides's time but the economy's remarkably the same. The funny thing is, after Carson's dazzling treatment, lament never looked so good.

Full of interesting insights--gets right down to savouring the texture of the Greek text. Extremely well written and engaging.

アン・カーソン女史はカナダ人の詩人兼古典学者。この方の英訳でエウリピデスを読んだついでに女史のエッセイなぞ買ってみた。本書は古代と近代の二人の詩人を巡る瞑想的文章。死と無についての瞑想、巨大な喪失を生きた人々、故郷を追われた人々、それら全ての人間たちの伝わらなかった慟哭と哀歌を二人の詩人に代表させて瞑想する…てな感じ。俎板に乗る詩人は二名。まず、ケオスのシモーニデース（紀元前556年頃 - 紀元前468年）。テルモピュライの戦いの碑文で有名な古代ギリシアの抒情詩人（「旅人よ、スパルタ人に告げよ。我々はその命に従い、ここに横たわると」）。次に、パウル・ツェラン（1920年 - 1970年）。オーストリア領ルーマニア、現在はウクライナに属する土地で生を受けたドイツ系ユダヤ人で、二十世紀ドイツ語詩を代表する人。この両者には一見共通点がない。シモーニデースは絶望と死を拒否して長生きした。パウル・ツェランは五十を迎えずに自死。シモーニデースはエピグラム系の詩が有名で、内容も割とすんなり理解できるタイプ。ツェランはドイツ語を解体して秘教的、象徴主義的な詩を書いた。使用単語も造語連発のシュール系で、まさに現代詩人。カーソン女史は両者とも死を見つめることを読み手に迫る詩人だという点で共通点を見出している。シモーニデースはエーゲ海のケオス島生まれ。ギリシアは古代から不毛の土地である。大昔から大量移民を発生させて地中海に植民地をザクザク作ってきた。現代ギリシア人が税金払わんのも、民族意識ばっか高くて市民意識が低いのも、反トルコだけでは徒党を組むが内輪で啀み合いと足の引っ張り合いしかせんのも、土壌から発する古代からの継続だとアテクシは思っている。さて、ケオス島はその中でも最高に不毛で、ナント、砂漠気候だったりする。当然、住民全員を養うのは不可能。古代には、六十歳まで生きちまったケオス人は毒人参で自殺するというしきたりがあった。逆に言うと、住民に「追ん出てくれ」言ってるんである。新世代にリソースを譲る為に去れと。そんな土地に生まれたシモーニデースは島から出て彷徨い出す。ツェランは強制収容所で両親を失い、ホロコーストから生還するも共産主義者に祖国ルーマニアを奪われ、フランスに逃れる。しかし四十九歳でセーヌ川に身投げする。カーソン女史によると二人を繋げるのは「否定の精神」だということだ。「No」という言葉の精神。「Not」という一音節による否定。Never、nowhere、nobody、nothingという否定形のヴァリエーションが両者の詩の通低音だと。元より「無」なら失われることもなく、元より虚空であるが故に無限に満たされ、元より場所を定めぬが故に永遠なる何処かに手を伸ばせる…そんな感じで、カーソン女史は言語の隙間に潜んで囁やく死者の声を拾っていく。で、感想だが、奥深い洞察と魅惑的な飛躍に溢れているとは思いつつ、シモーニデースとツェランが繋がる意味に最後までいまいちピンとこなかった。ま、それは詩人ならざるアテクシ自身の限界である。