From Library Journal
It's hard to imagine two poets farther apart in time and space than Simonides, who lived in fifth century B.C.E. Greece, and Celan, a 20th-century Romanian Jew who lived in Paris and wrote in German. Yet Carson connects them through the idea of economy, the management of resources that determines the nature of one's poetry as well as one's life. Carson is an acclaimed poet herself (her Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, was nominated last year for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry), and if her subject is daunting and her style elliptical, at least she counters scholarly woolgathering with lapidary anecdote: of Simonides leaving a banquet after being told by a stingy host that his fee would be halved only to witness the collapse of the roof and the death of everyone inside; of Celan fleeing before Nazi exterminators and returning to find his house sealed and his parents taken to the camp where they would die. In their work, both writers not only measured off the area "within which word holds good," writes Carson, but also discovered that "it is a limited area." For academic collections only.ADavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) FROM THE PUBLISHER
The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities.
In Carson's view Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. Economy of the Unlost begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of fifth-century b.c. Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the "negative design" of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences--Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair--as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the virtuosic interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility.
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