Let loose your longing: erasure, citation, and lesbian matter in Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s poetry

Abstract This paper argues that Anne Carson’s 2003 translation of Sappho’s fragmented poetry, If Not, Winter, is a work that both critiques the Western artistic canon for its systemic oppression and erasure of queerness and expands that canon to include disruptive and nonproductive lesbian identities and texts. Using gender studies scholar Judith Butler’s concept of disidentification and queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s expansion of the term, I explore how If Not, Winter both identifies with hegemonic knowledge systems and simultaneously disidentifies with them to create a lesbian remattering of the text. Importantly, it is largely the lesbian claiming of the Sappho-Carson connection that rematters If Now, Winter as a lesbian text. Carson’s fragmented, bracket-riddled translation and discursive citations ripple with a queer affect that holds particularly important weight for lesbians, who are mattered through similar fragmented means as Carson’s translation. Lesbian bodies resonate with the queer—especially lesbian—affect of Carson’s translation, claiming it for themselves as a lesbian text. Carson’s translation rematters Sappho’s fragments as a piece of contemporary lesbian reception largely because it matters to bodies that don’t matter under hegemonic, productive heterosexuality.