Rebecca Anne Carson's Epitaph
Copyright by Rebecca Anne Macmillan
2013
The Report Committee for Rebecca Anne Macmillan
Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report:
The Languages of Nox:
Photographs, Materiality, and Translation in Anne Carson’s Epitaph
APPROVED BY
SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:
Supervisor:
Ann Cvetkovich
Coleman Hutchison
The Languages of Nox:
Photographs, Materiality, and Translation in Anne Carson’s Epitaph
by
Rebecca Anne Macmillan, A.B.
Report
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
The University of Texas at Austin
May 2013
Dedication
For my family
Acknowledgements …show more content…
I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101.
(Carson 7.1)
8
Carson theorizes translation as a practice analogous to that of understanding and memorializing another person, which requires repeated labor. In the case of the Catullan elegy, as with her brother, no amount of attention will be enough to fully communicate its multitudinous meanings. No matter the translator, no matter the language, no one can totally replicate the poem’s constitutive contradictions. The work of complete translation is, in a sense, unattainable by definition. The translator attempts and fails to precisely transcribe meaning, settling instead, and at best, on a sense of imperfect nearness. As Gregory Rabassa writes, “It is my feeling that a translation is never finished, that it is open and could go on to infinity” (Rabassa 7). 5 In Nox, Carson demonstrates how the process of coming to understand and memorialize her brother is perpetually unfinished. She writes,
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. (Carson
2013
The Report Committee for Rebecca Anne Macmillan
Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report:
The Languages of Nox:
Photographs, Materiality, and Translation in Anne Carson’s Epitaph
APPROVED BY
SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:
Supervisor:
Ann Cvetkovich
Coleman Hutchison
The Languages of Nox:
Photographs, Materiality, and Translation in Anne Carson’s Epitaph
by
Rebecca Anne Macmillan, A.B.
Report
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
The University of Texas at Austin
May 2013
Dedication
For my family
Acknowledgements …show more content…
I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101.
(Carson 7.1)
8
Carson theorizes translation as a practice analogous to that of understanding and memorializing another person, which requires repeated labor. In the case of the Catullan elegy, as with her brother, no amount of attention will be enough to fully communicate its multitudinous meanings. No matter the translator, no matter the language, no one can totally replicate the poem’s constitutive contradictions. The work of complete translation is, in a sense, unattainable by definition. The translator attempts and fails to precisely transcribe meaning, settling instead, and at best, on a sense of imperfect nearness. As Gregory Rabassa writes, “It is my feeling that a translation is never finished, that it is open and could go on to infinity” (Rabassa 7). 5 In Nox, Carson demonstrates how the process of coming to understand and memorialize her brother is perpetually unfinished. She writes,
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. (Carson