A Passion for the Classics, and Well, Passion

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — In the first episode of "The L Word," the Showtime cable network's new series about lesbians, two women flirt at a party. "Have you read anything by Anne Carson?" one asks, referring to the Canadian-born classicist-poet.

" `The Autobiography of Red,' " the other answers, blushing and naming Ms. Carson's best-known work, a retelling of the myth of Herakles' slaying of the red-winged monster Geryon as a gay teenage love story. The woman has also read "Eros the Bittersweet," Ms. Carson's essays on love in ancient Greece. "I think," she says, dreamily, "those books practically changed my life."

Over the years Ms. Carson, whose work deals with extremes of passion and eroticism and who creates verse and prose embedded with references to classical scholarship, has acquired a cult following.

The director Mike Nichols and his wife, Diane Sawyer, attend her readings. Mr. Nichols has also discussed directing her translation of Euripides' "Hippolytus," about the cursed youth whose stepmother, Phaedra, falls madly in love with him.

On Monday Ms. Carson's new translation of Euripides' "Hekabe," also known as "Hecuba," will have a staged reading at the 92nd Street Y, with a star cast that includes Kathryn Walker, Kate Burton, Larry Pine, Paul Hecht, David Strathairn, Mary Beth Hurt and Maeve Kinkead.

The idea for "Hekabe" came from Ms. Walker, who will also direct the reading. It was written by Euripides sometime in the mid-fifth century B.C., at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, which pitted the Spartan and Athenian alliances against each another. The war engulfed the entire Greek world on and off for a quarter of a century and eventually brought about the downfall of Athens.

Ms. Walker said she sees parallels between that war and America's war in Iraq. "The Greeks were sitting in the Assembly debating how the captive population should be treated and what traditional values needed to be compromised," she said. "We're in wartime and facing the same questions."

In "Hekabe," Euripides used the old story about the Trojan War as a way of commenting on the war raging during his own time. When it opens, the Greeks have defeated the Trojans. Hekabe, Queen of Troy, is a slave. She has witnessed the slaughter of her husband, Priam, and of all but one of her sons. Her daughter Polyxena is dragged off to become a human sacrifice; then she discovers the corpse of Polydoros, the one son she thought had survived the war. Polymestor, the friend she had left him with for safekeeping, murdered him for his money. Hekabe persuades the Greek king, Agamemnon, to let her set a trap for Polymestor and blinds him while the Trojan women kill his children.

"Strange how mortal events converge," the chorus sings. "Necessity defines us,/making friends of our worst enemies/and enemies of those who served us well."

Ms. Carson, 53, described the play in her typically elliptical way, "Euripides had his Quentin Tarantino days." She is standing in her austere living room, which has almost no furniture. In one corner is a chair, in the middle of the room, a wooden box. On top of that box is a metal box, wrapped in ribbon, containing a silver ear. "A votive object," she said. Tall, lanky and shy, Ms. Carson seems surrounded by an aura of isolation. "I like being a mode of resistance," she said, explaining why she refuses to drive a car.

She teaches half time here at the University of Michigan and spends the rest of the year in Montreal.

Often called a "poet of heartbreak," her cultural references span the ages and range from scholarly essays on, for example, the Greek concept of women as unclean, to poetic musings on Akhmatova, Tolstoy and Catherine Deneuve in her collection "Men in the Off Hours." She has written an opera, "Decreation," combining a Greek myth of Aphrodite with stories by two French mystics, Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake as a heretic during medieval times, and Simone Weil.

Ms. Walker said Ms. Carson was the perfect translator of ancient Greek for modern audiences. "She has this incredibly personal, hip voice," she said. "She's able to bring this into the contemporary world in an unimaginable way."

In "The Autobiography of Red" Ms. Carson transformed the Greek poet Stesichoros' account into a modern tale of a red-winged schoolboy called Geryon who is bullied by classmates because he is different. "This would be hard/for you if you were weak," his mother says, sending him off to school, "but you're not weak, she said and neatened his little red wings and pushed him/out the door."

Ms. Carson's translation of Sappho, "If Not, Winter," is a post modern tour de force. Sappho's poetry exists mainly in fragments of papyrus, some minuscule. Instead of creating her own linkages where words are missing, as other translators have, Ms. Carson marks them with brackets, and leaves the emptiness to be filled in by the reader's imagination. ". . . if not, winter/] no pain . . ." one line reads.

The Independent in Britain called the translation "heartbreaking and uplifting."

For all this, Ms. Carson said, she is not a poet. "Homer's a poet," she said. "I would say I make things."

Ms. Carson was born in Ontario, and her work evokes a lonely childhood: "My mother's kitchen is dark and small but out the window/there is the moor, paralyzed with ice./It extends as far as the eye can see/over flat miles to a solid unlit white sky."

Her father was a bank manager, her mother a homemaker. The family moved around. Her father eventually developed dementia. "He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived./He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top./Not only because it was a hot July afternoon/but the look on his face."

Her older brother, Michael, abused drugs and vanished. He died in 2000. She said her childhood had been redeemed when she discovered the classics and her high school Latin teacher gave her private Greek classes, reading Sappho with her. "She really changed my life," Ms. Carson said.

She had a marriage of eight years to a man she calls only "an entrepreneur." The break-up haunts her work. "I feel so lonely, like childhood again," she writes in one prose poem in her collection "Plainwater."

In another book, "Glass, Irony and God," she writes searingly of sex without love: "Everything I know about love and its necessities/I learned in that one moment/when I found myself/thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon/at a man who no longer cherished me."

Today Ms. Carson lives by herself most of the time, but says she does not mind loneliness: "Loneliness is not an important form of suffering," Ms. Carson said. "It's undeniable, but it's just not significant."