Elizabeth

“Because our conversations were few (he phoned me maybe 5 times in 22 years) I study his sentences the ones I remember as if I'd been asked to translate them.”
― Anne Carson, Nox

“Yet, the fruit of a consideration of tragedy is not a sense of life’s hopelessness or moral resignation, as Schopenhauer thought, but—I think—a deepened sense of the self in its utter dependency on others. It is a question of the self’s vulnerable exposure to apparently”
― Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

“I want to explain about the Catallus poem (101). Catallus wrote poem 101 for his brother who died in the Troad. Nothing at all is known about the brother except his death. Catallus appears to have travelled from Verona to Asia Minor to stand at the grave. Perhaps he recited the elegy there. I have loved this poem since the first time I read it in high school Latin class and I have tried to translate it a number of times. Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind. I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.”
― Anne Carson, Nox

“Everything in my life, from flat tires to late appointments, is conspiring to make sure I am perfectly on time for another moment of contact. Not on time for human events, but for those truly important convergences between species.”
― Sophie Strand, The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human