Notes from Source: This chapter considers Anne Carson’s work on Greek lyric poets Sappho and Stesichorus, whose songs were roughly contemporaneous, and whose reception histories are both characterized by profound damages to their poetic corpora. It traces thematic webs across Carson’s lyric receptions in order to draw connections between Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet , If Not , Winter , and Autobiography of Red . The chapter argues that Carson’s work on Sappho is preoccupied with temporal paradoxes in the erotic experience of the lyric subject, and the temporal paradoxes function as a piece of thematic connective tissue between her work on Sappho and her work on Stesichorus’ Geryoneis. In both Sappho’s Greek and Carson’s translation, desire is a process that deforms and defamiliarizes the human experience of being in time, on the axes of immortal/mortal self‐identification. In Autobiography of Red , Geryon’s dilemma itself takes shape in Geryon’s elongated anxiety about his experiences of time.

Further Notes: DOI: 10.1002/9781119122661.ch34