This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is the Canadian poet Anne Carson: ‘For her bold and innovative work, which, in a humorous dialogue with classical tradition, has created new forms of contemporary literature’. One of Anne Carson’s Polish translators is dr hab. Olga Kubińska, prof. UG, Head of the Division of English Language Translation Studies at the Institute of English and American Studies, Faculty of Languages, University of Gdańsk.

Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, professor of classical literature, and translator. She has worked at McGill University and the University of Michigan as a lecturer in Ancient Greek. ‘In her prose, poetry and academic work, she blurs the boundaries between antiquity and the present day, modernism and postmodernism, Canadians and Americans. Secrets, and the arbitrary concealing and revealing of them, form a central theme in her work. The secret of Carson’s success lies in her overt, albeit enigmatic, appropriation of the works of other literary luminaries. Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Emily Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Sappho and Catullus – they all feature in her work: they serve as a unifying thread,’ reads the introduction to ‘Autobiography of Red’.

One of Anne Carson’s Polish translators is the poet, literary scholar and translator, Head of the Division of English Language Translation Studies at the University of Gdańsk, dr hab. Olga Kubińska, prof. UG, who translated the collection of poems The Beauty of the Husband: Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.

‘The Beauty of the Husband by the Canadian poet Anne Carson is a poetic narrative about love, marriage and life after betrayal. Its sparse, minimalist language inscribes a personal experience into the literary canon, revealing the inseparable link between life and art. This does not mean that the woman recounting her experiences feels like a literary character – rather, literature and art constitute the very essence of her identity,’ reads the blurb of the Polish edition of this volume, published by Słowa na Wybiegu Publishing House in 2022.

We also invite you to listen to a 2024 radio programme entitled “Mów do mnie wierszem” on Radio Gdańsk, which focused on the poetry of Anne Carson. Iwona Demska’s guest was prof. Olga Kubińska: Literary scholar and translator analyses the poetry of Anne Carson – Radio Gdańsk (interview in Polish).