Mourning Remains: an impossible elegy

Abstract

The present article deals with the idea of mourning as an (im)possible act of translation in the book (box) of poems: Nox, by Anne Carson. It analizes the way in which that particular literary artifact serves the purpose of both remembering and mourning the death of a lost brother through offering hospitality (in Derrida's take on the term) to other languagues: the language of foreign poetry, the language of pictures, of souvenirs, of remainders and reminders. The body of the dead brother (Michael) is replaced by a corpus (of works, of
letters, of language) and as such it is mourned by the poet/translator, thus revealing how mourning remains an impossible elegy no matter how hard one tries to fill it with light.