Silence-the various ways it hangs over the activity of translation, indexing the ever-present failure to deliver language into being-is a question the poet and translator Anne Carson has turned to again and again in her work. “The enormous danger inherent in all translations,” observed the philosopher Walter Benjamin in his famous 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator,” rests in the possibility that “the gates of a language thus expanded and modified may slam shut and enclose the translator with silence.” Yet what makes a translation bad-truly bad, as in unreadable-is not the transfer of inaccurate material or even the inaccurate transfer of material (though these things are bad), but rather silence, or the failure to speak in passing. In other words, ‘traduce’ is a bad translation of a pun on the inevitable badness of translations,” Johnson writes in the 2003 essay “Correctional Facilities.” Always caught in the difference between one language and another, between one literary language and another, translation signifies above all an operation to which the impossibility of having two make one is fundamental. “To translate is to traduce-the betrayal of the original in the process of transmitting it is inherent in translation. What makes a translation bad? According to literary critic and translation theorist Barbara Johnson, everything.

Neither her first nor her most recent translation of an ancient Greek text, Antigonick stands out all the same in Carson’s corpus due to the explicit critical treatment that the activity of translation per se receives throughout the book-an activity which, for Carson, is always embroiled in structures of silence.

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