With Mute Ash: TFT Review of NOX by Anne Carson

In the year 57 B.C., the Roman poet Catalus journeyed to the distant Turkish pennisula of Troad near the city of Troy, where he stood before a pile of cold ashes and wept, looking firsthand upon the final resting place of his beloved brother. For the occasion, Catalus wrote an elegiac poem, his 101st. Though there are many different translations of the ancient Greek, the basic version includes this line: “I arrive, brother, for these miserable funeral rites, so that I might finally grant the service of the dead, and speak to your silent ashes pointlessly.” The tone of the poem is at once mournful yet practical, an acknowledgment of the finite nature of existence and the irreversible event of passing on. In this translation, Catalus concludes by noting that perhaps all we can do is give a tribute and then say farewell, which, for our own sake, has to be enough. But what of the history of that life that was lost, and what was it worth if it is not remembered or written down?

Over two thousand years after Catalus stood on Troad, the classicist and poet Anne Carson journeyed to Copenhagen to visit the burial site of her own brother, whose actual funeral she had missed by two weeks. Carson had rarely spoken to her sibling—“…maybe 5 times in 22 years,” she surmises—as he had fled Canada in 1978 after a run-in with the law and never returned. His death had been unexpected, muted and intense. Carson deals with her loss in the manner that she knows best; to place the event in the context of the larger scheme of her brother’s life, to ask the questions that create his history, to align her grief with the grief of a kindred historian/poet and finally, to attempt to translate what this event means to her, despite having only a cursory knowledge of the language of grief. The result, Carson’s epic, multi-medium elegy Nox, is a poignant reflection on the nature of death, the recording of history, and the meaning of what is left in a brother’s wake, after his life has ceased to be.

Carson grounds her novel/scrapbook/art elegy—which comes in a coffin-like little book box and folds up like a massive origami fan—in her own laborious and much contemplated translation of Catalus 101. Using the verses she has carefully hewn from the Greek as a focal point for her investigation of her own brother’s passing, she breaks the book into numerically numbered sections, each section reflecting on a Greek word in the poem. She renders her brother’s life in myriad of photographs, snippets of letters, and crude art; though the connections between ephemera and verse meander loosely between the literal and metaphoric, the sincerity of her search for some way to get a grip on what has happened to her brother shines through. “I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds… [But] No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history.”

Carson seems to struggle with the fact that her brother’s life was not a fitting representation of the man—or at least how she remembers him. Carson sees him as a young boy who ran with the older crowd, “He ran behind them… came home with a bloody nose… No one knew him. He was the one who was old.” In a letter to her son, Carson’s mother asks for a current address in Europe, so she can send him a box for Christmas. He never gives one, and Carson’s mother gives up.

On the left hand side of each fold of the fan’s pages there is one word from the poem in the ancient Greek and the copious textual definitions in modern English to illuminate its meaning. Translation itself is a tricky act, requiring not only the literal definitions but the feelings that go along with them, and possibly a sixth sense for what the author was feeling in the moment of creation—the specifics of time and place and thought and situation. Carson shows us the choices she had to work with but only hints at how she made her decisions. There are hidden phrases in these definitions and all seem to point to the endless darkness of night, or nox, the endless searching and questioning of a translation.

“We want other people to have a centre, a history, an account that makes sense,” Carson writes of her brother, “We want to be able to say This is what he did and Here’s why.” It is these affirmations that seem to drive Carson to inquire, to construct a narrative of her brother. Carson notes that she had diary pages from Michael’s travels and the reader wonders why there aren’t more—in fact, desires greatly to see more of this mysterious person, Michael, the lost brother. But Carson is reserved in her representations and physical evidence—”Death makes us stingy,” she writes. It’s as if she wishes to keep some things secret, some things for a separate, more personal history. So why take the time to eulogize some pieces so publicly? Perhaps the answer lies in what seems to be the most tragic and important event of her brother’s life: Anna, his first love, dies mysteriously while he sits helpless in jail. In a letter to his mother Michael writes, “I have never known a closeness like that… I went crazy.” Carson tries to piece together Michael’s itinerant and alcoholic life after Anna but many events and later marriages overlap and she finds herself lost in the translation, much like her life long quest to find the right words for Catalus 101. It is this idea of infinity, endlessness, of the great expanse of words and meaning—maybe the fact that one might take the fanned pages of Nox and stretch them out, looping them all the way round and touching the beginning page to the end page, creating the never ending circle, that points to the reasons behind the shape of this book. Carson writes, “I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101…I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.”

No matter how the reader chooses to view and interpret the why’s, how’s and who’s behind Nox and its ambitious format, it is irrefutable that Carson is deeply troubled by the fact that although she has asked the questions that create a history, she is still confused by what she has found, and will never truly reach the answer she seeks, as noted in Carson’s version of the Catalus line above: “I arrive at these poor, brother, burials; so I could give you the last gift owed to death; and talk (why?) with mute ash.”

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Photograph by James Yeh.