Carson has published nine books: two collections of literary criticism, two translations from Ancient Greek verse, and the rest hybrids of theory and poetry, prose and verse. Among her awards are the 2001 Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry and a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2000. Since receiving her doctorate in 1981 from the University of Toronto, she has held positions at several institutions, including Princeton and the University of Calgary, as well as a lengthy tenure as John MacNaughton Professor of Classics at McGill University in Montreal. She currently serves as Professor in three departments (Classics, Comparative Literature, and English) at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Within Carson’s writing there is a general trajectory away from the moments of personal confession prevalent in her earlier work. Excluding her critical works, Economy of the Unlost (1999) and Eros the Bittersweet (1986), the first shift comes with the verse novel Autobiography of Red. The protagonist Geryon’s narrative is personal and intimately conveyed, yet retains the distance inherent in a third-person voice.

Geryon’s quirky, sustained voice combines the best of Carson’s metaphysical queries and poignant imagery. In her subsequent works Men in the Off Hours (2000) and The Beauty of the Husband (2001), she retains a continuous and complicated interest in the loved male. Her latest publications, a translation of Sophocles’ Electra for the stage (2001) and If Not, Winter (2002), a translation of Sappho’s lyric fragments, turn toward women—women with objects of love, yes, but women first.

The excerpt reproduced here is from Carson’s forthcoming translation of Euripides’ Hippolytos. It begins as Phaidra declares her love for her son—a curse set upon her by jealous Aphrodite. In Carson’s rendering there is a strong sense that one mind sits behind several speakers, each enacting for that mind some important conflict as a story. “A woman cannot tell a simple story, my father used to say,” Carson wrote in “The Anthropology of Water.” Also: “Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried.”

One should not be deceived by Carson’s use of the perfect tense. Her attempts to hold water are ever-changing, as “spangled” as the mind of Sappho’s Aphrodite. Her turn to translation, and her choices of text, mark a new resolution to the problem of selfhood. Famous for juxtapositions across time and reality, Carson espouses a woman’s solution: to translate famous tales of women.