This year's Nobel Prize for Literature has gone to the Canadian author Anne Carson, whose work ranges from poetry and translation to philosophical reflection and the recreation of ancient myths. The Swedish Academy praised her "bold and inventive oeuvre" and its "playful dialogue with the classical tradition" that have produced contemporary literary forms.

Christophe Premat, Professor of Canadian and Cultural Studies at Stockholm University, writes in The Conversation: "This formulation captures a fundamental paradox of her writing: Carson's literary modernity emerges from a persistent return to antiquity, not as a stable cultural inheritance to be preserved, but as an unfinished reservoir of images, voices and fragments capable of unsettling contemporary experience."

Premat gives an example. He cites Carson's long essay, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), a work that combines classical scholarship, philosophical inquiry and poetic reflection, to observe: "Carson begins with the Greek understanding of eros as an experience that combines pleasure and suffering... Carson explores the fundamentally relational character of desire: Desire emerges in the interval separating the lover from the beloved. It is precisely this distance that generates both the intensity of attraction and the suffering associated with absence...

"Carson's treatment of eros also reveals what might be called an archaic drive within her postmodern writing, provided that the term is understood as the persistence of fundamental human experiences that resist closure, not as nostalgia for an idealised past. Desire, vulnerability and the confrontation with absence return through ancient metaphors, while their literary expression is continually renewed by contemporary forms."

Excellently put.

Carson's originality is placed in confirming perspective by literature's recurrent engagement with tradition. I have in mind the Anglo-American Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot's eloquent 1919 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Eliot wrote: "Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.

"It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

"This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."

An excellent example of the artistic presentness of the past is the Irish James Joyce's 1922 novel, Ulysses, which uses the Greek poet Homer's epic, The Odyssey, as an artistic predecessor in the grand European tradition of letters to which Joyce himself belongs. Joyce maps the heroic journeys of classical myth onto a single, ordinary day in Dublin on June 16, 1904. Leopold Bloom recasts Odysseus (Ulysses) as an everyman wandering through the urban labyrinth of Dublin rather than as a ten-year sea voyage across the Mediterranean. The contrasts could not be sharper between the two times; nor could their comparisons be.

What made Joyce's novel punishingly contemporary was that it was banned in the United States, Britain and several other countries for more than a decade because of its in-your-face sexual content, stream-of-consciousness style, and avowed obscenity. Joyce had made Homer (who had suffered no such punishment) his contemporary by drawing the Greek sage into the unsettled times of late-Puritan Anglo-America. That was a historic and artistic achievement in itself.

Joyce was original because he was true to Homer, no matter what the censors thought of him.

What both Eliot and Carson are getting at is that originality in art is not a function of the artist's ego but of time. No artist is free of the tradition which produces him. Certainly, he can and should and will build on the pastness of his genre, but he can do so only because it exists in the first place.

No human is produced ab initio; the world is not a tabula rasa; art does not begin with its latest practitioner. The artist owes his art the highest form of ownership: humility.

All art is an act of humility to time.

The writer is the Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com