Hello, Word Lovers!
What if the ancient Greek poets you studied in school could still teach us something new about writing today? That idea sits at the heart of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.
The winner is a Canadian writer Anne Carson who weaves ancient texts, poetry, philosophy and modern ideas into works that defy easy categorisation. Her speciality is making centuries-old voices speak to the present in unexpected ways — a reminder that great writing doesn’t just preserve the past; it gives us fresh ways to see it.
🌀 Weekly Word Wonder: PALIMPSEST
Pronunciation: PAL-imp-sest
Part of speech: Noun
Definition: A manuscript or scroll on which the original writing has been scraped off and overwritten, but of which traces remain. More widely: a thing whose earlier layers still show through the later ones.
Origin: From Latin palimpsestus, from Greek palimpsestos — "rubbed smooth again" — from palin ("again") and psen ("to rub"). Medieval scribes reused expensive parchment by scraping off old ink and writing new text on top; the older layer often resurfaced over the centuries. First attested in English in the 17th century.
Usage:
1. The oldest missal in the archive is a palimpsest — a 9th-century psalter written directly over an older Greek gospel.
2. The city itself feels like a palimpsest: Roman walls under medieval churches under modern cafes.
📜 What's Special?
Some writers pick a genre and stay in it. Anne Carson picks two or three and welds them together. Her novel Autobiography of Red retells the Greek myth of Geryon as a queer coming-of-age in verse. The Beauty of the Husband, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, tells the entire arc of a marriage in forty-four short poems. Decreation braids poetry, prose essay, and prayer into a single book about grief and the divine. And her translation of Sappho's fragments — If Not, Winter — keeps the Greek on the left-hand page and the English on the right, so the reader can feel the original trying to get through.
Carson calls herself "a sort of poet/historian," and the books read that way. They are not quite poetry, not quite criticism, not quite memoir, but something that needs all three. The Nobel committee, perhaps, agreed: literature has been growing forms to fit its new questions, and her hands are on the wheel.
More About Anne…
Anne Carson invented a reading method almost nobody outside literary studies knows. She calls it the B-model of reading: every line of poetry must be read two ways at once — literally (B-1) and figuratively (B-2) — and the meaning lives in the spark between them. She wrote it up in her short critical book Economy of the Unlost (1999). The Swedish Academy, in citing her "forging new forms," was partly naming this trick of doubled reading.
She turned the same trick on her readers. Float (2016) is nineteen chapbooks sold in a deliberately random box, so the reader assembles the book in any order they please. A literal literary palimpsest — and a hint that she works the way she reads: in fragments, on loose paper, twice through.
🧩 Community Puzzle
Jumbled Letters: Unscramble these words.
1. CIYRL (A short poem that often expresses strong personal feeling.) →
2. LYDIL (A short, often pastoral poem with a dreamy, peaceful mood.) →
3. TCONA (A numbered section of a long poem [think Dante].) →
4. EPORT (A recurring image or figure of speech.)→
5. KUIHA (A Japanese form that counts syllables, not feet or rhymes.) →
Last Week's Answers (Edition #46)
Jumbled Letters
1. ERBORD — BORDER
2. FEUREG — REFUGE
3. CRIEBS — SCRIBES
4. PURAPSY — PAPYRUS
5. SYEABMS — EMBASSY
Until next week, keep playing.
— The Lexulous Team