Plus: Ali Smith; Oleksandr Dovzhenko; Wexford Festival Opera; The Art of Extraction; Anne Carson and Sappho
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Today in The New York Review of Books: Namwali Serpell looks in Ming Smith’s mirror; Regina Marler reads Ali Smith; Sophie Pinkham watches Oleksandr Dovzhenko; Geoffrey Wheatcroft goes to the Wexford Festival Opera; Travis Diehl takes something away from an art exhibit about extraction; a poem by Elaine Equi; and, from the archives, Daniel Mendelsohn on Anne Carson and Sappho.
The artist’s self-portraits seem to say: I am because of us.
Ali Smith’s paired novels Gliff and Glyph are like a set of mirrors installed at irregular angles: themes repeat, flash, and fade, reflecting the afterimages of stories we can’t process or forget.
The great Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko at once played the Soviet game and dealt frankly with human suffering and survival.
The Wexford Festival Opera, now in its seventy-fifth year, has always given enthusiasts and operaphiliacs a particularly warm welcome.
A group exhibition explores humans’ ubiquitous but varied habit of plundering their environments for raw materials and more.
Free from the Archives
Last week the Swedish Academy awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Canadian poet and translator Anne Carson. In the Review’s August 14, 2003, issue, Daniel Mendelsohn wrote about If Not, Winter, her translation of the Ancient Greek lyricist Sappho’s fragmentary corpus. Carson’s poetry, Mendelsohn allows, “represents, to my mind, the most distinguished, original, and successful adaptation and reconfiguration of classical models produced in the past generation.” But, he continues, her bracket-heavy interpretations of Sappho are perhaps too taken with the lacuna of moldering papyrus: “For Carson as a translator of Sappho, the absence, the gaps—the lack of what Sappho actually wrote—become an ‘exciting’ presence.”
“Carson’s new book is as fragmentary and frustrating, ultimately, as the object of its highly idiosyncratic scrutiny. Like so many other products of the recent school of Sappho commentaries, it leaves us with a strange and unsettling feeling that to some, at least, will be familiar: that there, over there, is a woman of beauty, saying enchanting things to someone; but in our excitement at being in her presence, we can’t quite make out her meaning.”
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