[it] shakes my whole breathing being: Rethinking Gender with Translation in Anne Carson’s “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways”

Authors

  • Adrienne K. Ho Rose University of Iowa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.10.0.4513

Abstract

Anne Carson’s “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways” expresses new possibilities for the contemporary retranslation of ancient Classical texts. My article argues that Carson’s powerful, ground-shifting retranslation enlists significant procedural constraints to offer a progressive re-reading of the heteronormative, conventionally gendered garden in Ibykos Fragment 286. Carson retranslates Fragment 286 six times using only vocabularies from selected topical and literary source texts with contexts remote from the original. As a result, vocabularies and scenarios shift—from Romantic love to microwave operations—but the structural and rhetorical gestures of the fragment are retained. Conventional gender roles are not merely reversed nor is the garden simply transformed. Carson’s six versions transcend the emphasis on gendered textual signals by leaving gender aside to investigate performative reading and translation practices more closely.

Author Biography

Adrienne K. Ho Rose, University of Iowa

Adrienne K. H. Rose earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa in 2016. Her dissertation, titled The Perfect Translation (once more / with feeling), is a critical study on the work of Anne Carson, Brandon Brown, and the 85 Project in respect to experimental retranslations of ancient Classical poetry from Greek, Roman, and Classical Chinese lyric traditions.

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Published

2019-01-08

How to Cite

Rose, A. K. H. (2019). [it] shakes my whole breathing being: Rethinking Gender with Translation in Anne Carson’s “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways”. Konturen, 10(1), 126–151. https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.10.0.4513