"Yikes!"...Anne Carson

According to her agent, "Yikes," was her first word on hearing she'd won the Nobel Prize. More decorous than Doris Lessing's first words on the same sort of occasion...

Autobiography of Red (1998) is a verse novel about Geryon, the red winged cattle-herder slain by Herakles as the tenth of his twelve labors. The story was alluded to in the usual places: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book IX about Herakles, or Hesiod's Theogony, but it was retold from Geryon's point of view by the poet Stesichoros (c. 630 - c. 555 BCE) in his Geryoneis, now mostly lost. It's this version that Carson retells, expands, and adapts.

She begins with a short essay on Stesichoros. "He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet." Then come her tranlations of the fragments of Stesichoros that come from the Geryoneis:

XI. Right

Are there many little boys who think they are a

Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the

Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him

Joyfully

 

That's already less translation than adaptation, though there is a dog Geryon is fond of in the Geryoneis.

Then a few short 'appendices' about Stesichoros, mainly his more famous (but also largely lost) poems about Helen, culminating in the Palinode.

The main story is moved from archaic times to the present. It's told in 48 episodes.  

 

In the first couple of episodes, we've already learned Geryon doesn't like going to school:

 

V. Screendoor

 

His mother stood at the ironing board lighting a cigarette and regarding Geryon. 

---

Outside the dark pink air

was already hot and live with cries. Time to go to school, she said for the third time.

Her cool voice floated

over a pile of fresh tea towels and across the shadowy kitchen to where Geryon stood at the screen door

He would remember when he was past forty the almost dusty medieval smell of the screen itself as it

pressed its grid on to his face. She was behind him now. This would be hard if you were weak

but you're not weak, she said and neatened his little red wings and pushed him out the door.

 

That was picked a bit at random as an example, though it is one of the shorter episodes. They all work that way, with a single sentence to open, followed by an anecdote.

 

Geryon becomes a troubled gay teenager. His mother is roughly sympathetic; his older brother has no patience for him. He meets Herakles, with whom he has sex. "Geryon you know we'll always be friends." Not so in the original. He and Herakles travel to South America to see a volcano: 

We are amazing beings,

Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.

And now time is rushing towards them

where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,

night at their back.

 

That ends the main part of the story--Herakles has not killed Geryon--though there's a final interview with Stesichorus.

 

I was just writing about her later work Nox the other day and mentioned she was in the hunt for this year's Nobel Prize. I honestly didn't think she would win, but I'm pleased she did. (If I'd put a fiver on her at 33-1 I could have had a nice dinner out to celebrate...) I opined the other day that Autobiography of Red would be a good place to start with Carson, and having just reread it, I still think that's true, though she's written a lot of good books, notably Eros the Bittersweet or Nox.