Anne Carson

The Sun sits on the last nineteen arcminutes of Gemini at noon, so without a birth time the Sun's own sign is not settled: it is either the last of Gemini, which holds two accounts of a thing without choosing, or the first of Cancer, which counts what is still being held. Those read nothing like each other and this chart cannot say which. Air takes four of the ten planets, earth three, water two and a single one fire. The record says Carson is a Canadian writer and translator of Sappho and the Greek tragedians, and that Autobiography of Red is a novel in verse.

A record that pairs translation with a novel in verse is itself two accounts of one thing without choosing between them, which is what the Gemini half of that undecided Sun would say if it were the right half. The honest position is that the chart offers both readings and the record happens to suit one of them, and that is not evidence for it.

The Moon sits square Mercury at a third of a degree, the closest contact here, and its sign is certain. The reading is what is felt and what is said pulling apart: anxiety, talking oneself out of a valid instinct, and the particular frustration of not being able to explain something that is perfectly clear internally. In a translator, that is the working condition of the job. A T-square closes on that Moon and Mercury with Jupiter, so the figure presses on both of them and has no outlet. Mars sits square Uranus at just under a degree.

Jupiter came back to its Pisces birth degree on 1 February 2022, at seventy one, and five laps precede it. Pisces draws no line of its own, so a return there asks what was carried across rather than what was built, which for a body of published work made largely out of other people's sentences is close to the whole question.