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Modernism/Modernity 7.2 (2000) 322-324



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Book Review

Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan)


Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan). Anne Carson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. viii + 147. $29.95 (cloth).

I wrote a book on general literary aesthetics called Complex Pleasure, and if there was ever an example in the high sense of the word of such a thing, it is this magnificent and lovely essay by Anne Carson. I dare to include myself because Carson begins by arguing generally and by example the inescapable subjectivity of writing. In her arresting image, writing is a clearing and sorting of your own windowless room; and to pretend such writing as hers was made "out there," "in the landscape of science and fact where people converse logically and exchange judgments," is just "a notion" (vii). (With "clearing" she is thinking of gathering, reading, opening.) Opening the Economy of the Unlost, which means "reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan," is to begin walking a tightrope: you are as much interested in seeing how it will be done, as much concerned that it be done, since you are caught up on this rope-bridge with her, as you are absorbed in the (marvelous) things being said--: on sails, grace, cash, etchings, epitaphs, distichs, alchemy, Yes and No, sand art, snow art, death.

To start with the title: the "unlost" are those who are saved by the grace of the poet. "Economy"--that is a riven thing: it is the cash economy that came to replace the economy of grace, friendship, and hospitality, the "equivalent," if this might be said of a thing without equivalents, of poetry. The argument of this book is its own agile economy; it teaches economy to be a new name for a new thing (Carson's own writing on economy).

Despite the private "dashing back and forth," the pace of Carson's exposition is calm (vii). What's daring and inspired is modulated into lakes of fact and explanation: wit--the startling image or phrase--into scholarly exposition of, for example, the xenia, the gift and grace economy in Greece preceding the fifth century, whose turn into the cash nexus Simonides witnessed and professed--and Marx's description of alienation and commodity exchange, of whose nefas (sin) in technically-applied terror Celan was the victim and distinguished witness. The terms of grace, gift, and cash are key because it was Simonides with whom the idea arose that a poet should be paid in coin; with him arose the peculiar imbrication of the economies of verse and money. It is not irrelevant that Simonides excels in riddles, "an innately stingy form of discourse" (23); and Celan is the most parsimonious of poets: he will use the same line two or three times in the same poem. Carson's images remain calmly in the mind like sculptures seen in the Greek wing of the museum: the two aristocrats--one a poet, Anakreon, and one a tyrant, Polykrates--lying beside each other, holding discourse: "We can only imagine its delicate internal workings" (15).

This is a work of comparative literature in the original sense: pieces of poetic language in Greek and German are put together in oscillatory vibration, and you can feel the delay in translation. It is not only or chiefly that the strangers Simonides (556-467 B.C.) and Paul Celan (1920-1970) are translated, and interpreted, side by side; but that, before they are translated and interpreted, they are held together in the mind and allowed to resonate together in a space vacated by one's "native" language--a space akin to the "pure language" (celebrated by Walter Benjamin) whose capture is "the tremendous and only capacity of translation." 1 At first Carson has no language to articulate her intuition of kindred; and then there is language that rises up from her work of clearing in this dim carrefour--like Simonides' own, full of "movement, light, and unexpectedness" (85)--and it...

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