Emily Wilson on Anne Carson: WTF?

 I WAS TAKEN aback by Emily Wilson's dismissive, mean-spirited, and inappropriately personal review of Anne Carson's Wrong Norma in June 2024 Nation. 

Wilson opens by comparing Carson to Rupi Kaur and Margaret Atwood because Carson is Canadian, often writes in short declarative sentences about her own feelings, and has a large audience. This is neither perceptive nor helpful--and then seven paragraphs in Wilson acknowledges "And yet Carson is a very different kind of writer from either Kaur or Atwood, or indeed anybody." True...so why make the comparisons in the first place? They seem to have no point but to gratuitously diminish Carson's career.

Among the ways Carson differs from Kaur and Atwood is that she is a classicist and in her work draws extensively on her familiarity with ancient literature. This seems to be a point that particularly annoys Wilson; one can almost hear her snort, "pfft! Her, a classicist? Give me a break!" Wilson is a genuine classicist (she is famous for her Homer translations) and in a position to ding Carson for the incorrect lunate sigmas in the Greek text of If Not, Winter and to let us know that "Carson, for all her literary fireworks, did not get tenure at Princeton." So there! Again, why mention this? Most poets don't even get hired at Princeton, so here too Wilson seems to be aiming to humiliate.

Wilson also seems ticked off at Carson's popularity, as reflected in sales, Goodreads comments, and the existence of such merchandise as an Anne Carson hoodie. Given the popularity of Wilson's translations of Homer, I don't see why she has to begrudge anyone's commercial success, or be snide about authors who are popular enough to get their image on a t-shirt.

Or, for that matter, be snide about how people prepare themselves for going onstage. Apparently Carson likes to say "I am Anne Carson" repeatedly to herself before she does lectures or readings. "It's the kind of line that many public speakers, even those of us who are socially anxious or shy, would not feel the need to practice," Wilson tells us. True enough, but why bother mentioning it? Ridiculing anyone's private preparations for public speaking sounds like middle-school badgering.

The whole review--quite long, by the way, seven pages in the print edition--seems motivated by spite. Left a nasty taste in my mouth. I am sorry The Nation gave Wilson so much space in which to vent.