That’s when I started to think about the word flotage. It was like a winter sky, high, thin, restless, unfulfilled. Every time I tried to fill in what happens between the file cards, I lost the story. A guy told me what happened to him at the border. Something like this perception is at work in a section of Float where Carson uses a series of bullet points to disconnectedly tell a story about a border crossing. This mind was one that Freud’s psychological theories had only recently identified as being fragmented itself. She said that inside her she had a frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments.” This destabilising use of fragmentation is one of the primary features of modernism because writers were attempting to capture how the early 20th-century world, be it James Joyce’s Dublin, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin or John Dos Passos’s Manhattan, overloaded the human mind. It is more typical in literature that the fragmented narrative indicates something broken.įrantumaglia, a memoir from Elena Ferrante (fictional or otherwise), is named for a word used by her mother “to describe how she felt when she was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart. To present what is missing from a fragmentary text not as a lack, but as an opportunity to put the imagination to work, shows an uncommon adventurousness of thought, and helps explain why Carson should structure her latest book in a way that provides similar “free spaces”. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp – brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure”. “Brackets,” she writes in her introduction to the poems, “are exciting. As Carson writes in Float of one work by Sappho: “Half the poem is empty space.” Her translations communicate this fragmentation to the reader, using brackets to convey where the source texts are torn or disintegrated. In 2002, Carson published her translations of Sappho’s poetry, a body of work that, bar a single poem, only exists in fragments because the papyri on which they were written are so damaged.
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