


This is why her works in translation continue to be revelatory she approaches translation with an artist’s eye. Carson is infatuated with the possibilities of fragments: how the void of those empty, missing spaces might be, or become, full with meaning. Anne Carson doesn’t think of fragments as a roadblock to translation neither does she simply take them for granted as an occupational hazard.

While an apple with a chunk taken out of it is obviously still an apple, a poem with missing lines is a far more mysterious object, for there’s no telling how that missing piece would transform the whole. Any translator of ancient literature confronts the challenge of fragments: works that are only partially preserved.
