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.
