Ebook: Economy of the unlost: reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan

This book is unusual in many ways. Firstly, it dares to compare Simonides of Keos, a Greek poet of the 5th century BC, and Paul Celan, a 20th century poet who wrote in German. Secondly, it dares to apply economic ideas, in particular those of Karl Marx, to explain poetry.

What connects Simonides and Celan? They share a sense of alienation and an acute awareness of the limits of what "is;" and they are both masters of composition and language. Anne Carson points out that she chose to look at two men at the same time because the attention devoted to one enhances the attention devoted to the other: "Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky." (viii)

A particularly fascinating aspect of both poets' work is their preoccupation with nothingness and negation. "Negation links the mentalities of Simonides and Celan. Words for 'no,' 'not,' 'never,' 'nowhere,' 'nobody,' 'nothing,' dominate their poems and create bottomless places for reading." (9) It is exactly these bottomless places in their poems, invisible to the cursory reader, that Anne Carson knows to locate.

Anne Carson divides the book into four chapters. In the first chapter, "Alienation," Carson uses analogies from the sphere of economics most extensively. She explains how the changing economic situation of poets in the fifth century BC accounts for the fact that Simonides was considered the stingiest person of his time (in addition to being one of the smartest). The "economy" in the title of the book refers to the actual life of the poet as a recipient of gifts and money, and to the act of composing poetry. The "unlost" in the title is a more complex idea and hints at the themes of negation and nothingness explored in the other three chapters.

In chapter two, "Visibles Invisibles," Carson discusses Simonides' philosophy of art ("the word is a picture of things") and how painting a picture relates to "painting" a poem. "Simonides is Western culture's original literary critic, for he is the first person in our extant tradition to theorize about the nature and function of poetry." (46) Carson goes on to show how Simonides and Celan use grammar to "render a relationship that is ... deeper than the visible surface of the language," (52) and how both poets' "language has the capacity to uncover a world of metaphor that lies inside all our ordinary speech like a mind asleep." (58) She points to the exact locations in the poems where poetic language indicates an invisible "reality" beyond the reality of ordinary speech, where poetry arises from words and the (visible) surface of language reflects a deeper (invisible) truth.

Chapter three studies Simonides' epitaphs. "No genre of verse is more profoundly concerned with seeing what is not there, and not seeing what is, than that of the epitaph." (73) Epitaphs are inscriptions on graves. Simonides was the most prolific composer of epitaphs in the ancient world, Carson tells us, and set the conventions of the genre. "Tears of Simonides" were the byword for poetry of lament used by Catullus. Epitaphs have two economic aspects: the economics of remuneration and the economics of composition, as the poet has to use his words economically to fit them on the grave-stone. Epitaphs are also related to the visible and the invisible because they connect the living with the dead: "The responsibility of the living to the dead is not simple. It is we who let them go, for we do not accompany them. It is we who hold them here - deny them their nothingness - by naming their names. Out of these two wrongs comes the writing of epitaphs." (85)

Chapter four, "Negation," focuses our attention on the fact that "nothing" needs close thought. "The word lends itself to scary word play, to unanswerable puns, to the sort of reasoning that turns inside out when you stare at it. Simonides and Celan are both poets who enjoy this sort of reasoning and who orient themselves toward reality, more often than not, negatively." (100) Negation is a very powerful tool, and Carson wants our attention for the difference in implied meaning between, say, "Life is suffering" and "Nothing is not painful among men," as Simonides phrased it. Negation is also something uniquely human because a negative is a verbal event, "a peculiarly linguistic resource whose power resides with the user of words."(102) When you say "this is not that" you need to put something present ("this") and something absent ("that") on the screen of your imagination. "The interesting thing about a negative, then, is that it posits a fuller picture of reality than does a positive statement." (102) Carson then shows with examples from Simonides' and Celan's poetry how much beyond the factual these poets can express by not saying "something" but "not nothing."

"Economy of the Unlost" is truly brilliant whenever Anne Carson dissects a poem because she brings to the task both her qualities as scholar of classical Greece and modern poet. I do not always agree with the way she employs metaphors from economics, but I take it that she uses the terms introduced by Karl Marx to point my attention to noteworthy aspects of the poetry even if by today's standards these terms have turned out to be incorrect. When Carson claims, "what is striking in Marx's analysis of the issue is this insight: that to value a piece of work is to price the mortal span," (107) then she and Karl are obviously mistaken. A doodle produced by Bill Gates during a meeting would definitely fetch a higher price than a doodle by yours truly done in the same mortal span of time. But these are quibbles of an economist; they should not detract from my praise of Carson's work.

The bottom line is: this is an outstanding work that brings the best of academic scholarship to the interpretation of poetry. It deserves every of its five stars.