Category: Essays

Did Coronavirus Write This Book?

~ sententiaeantiquae ~ Leave a comment

Introducing Storylife

Storylife comes out officially today January 14th. Here is its amazon page. Here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page. Here’s a link to me talking about the book with Dr. G. and Dr. Rad of the Partial Historians.

Like many others, I spent the first year of the COVID pandemic in an fugue state, trying to maintain some semblance of the life that preceded March 2020 (work, family, relationships) while also living as a relentless voyeur of the things going on in the world: the early news reports of the virus, our rapid and misunderstood shutdowns, the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the wake of endless police violence and judicial exoneration, the spectacle of a president both incompetent and insufficiently concerned, and the added drama of a political campaign that was always going to be important, but whose urgency seemed newly inescapable.

At the time, I was preparing for the release of a book I had spent the better part of a decade researching and writing on psychology and the Homeric Odyssey. Much of the theoretical groundwork for this book rested upon cognitive approaches to narrative, perhaps best typified by the work of Jerome Bruner, Mark Turner, and the psychologist Michael White. The paralysis I felt made me think more about the trauma-studies side of my work, how narrative can be used to address traumatic experiences (but also how narrative can produce trauma on its own).

Observing the world as it changed from the vantage of social media while writing to promote The Many-Minded Man, led me to ask a basic question that has no clear answer: does knowing you’re being traumatized provide any benefit against the long-term impact of trauma? This may seem a histrionic question in isolation, but my thoughts were ranging to the cultural level: communities can suffer trauma together and it can fundamentally shift their identities, their relationships to power and language, and their ability to respond to future challenges.

The Many-Minded Man

I don’t believe I have sufficiently answered that that question for myself, partly because I went in a different direction. I found myself overwhelmed by the shifts that the stories we were hearing and telling about the world were taking and how they impacted our actions: from our public health response to COVID (which included a broad range of denial, quack-science, and conspiracy theories) and our shifting communal responses to state-sanctioned violence against black people, our real world responses with life-and-death consequences were (and are) informed by ways of viewing the world that can simply be framed as stories (to avoid, for a moment, the issue of fact and fiction).

For years in teaching myth, I had already used DNA as a metaphor for trying to get students to think about how the same kinds of stories were continually reused. My primary emphasis in teaching myth has long been to downplay any notion of which version of a story is ‘correct’ or ‘first’ and instead to encourage students to think about why some details may have been important in one context and not another. Why, for example, is the story of Oedipus in the Odyssey is rather different from the one canonized by Sophocles while still being recognizable the ‘same’? The answer I often have given only partly as an evasion comes from the Muses themselves, when they tell Hesiod at the beginning of the Theogony that “we know how to tell lies that sound like the truth but we can speak the truth when we want to”: fact and fiction are not meaningful categories of narrative. What matters it what a particular narrative says and what it does in the world.

So, for a long time, I had approached the category of myth—a field long dominated by patterns and repetitions—by asking students to entertain the idea that story patterns contain potential meanings like genes in strands of DNA that adapt to the needs of their audiences. Witnessing the impact of counter-narratives during COVID while also working on multiple tasks-forces at my institution where we learned about COVID mutation, transmission, and mitigation, I came to see our communication about the virus as a kind of narrative that was also changing through transmission and having an equal—if not greater—impact on the world. I was already primed to see story in everything, but the ‘new’ thing I saw was that narrative’s negative potential was as great as its redemptive power. This was not really a novel idea for me—I include chapters on the negative impact of Odysseus’ narrative power on marginalized people in the Odyssey in The Many-Minded Man. But I think even this was too limited.

COVID did not, has not ended. And the stories that were shaping our world in 2020 have certainly not abated. I started talking about some of the ideas that eventually showed up in Storylife with Heather Gold in Fall of 2021. We were discussing various possible books and I had offered up some pretty stale proposals when she asked me just to tell her what I had been thinking about. I started to tell her an idea about comparing the structure of Homeric poetry and mythical narrative to DNA and using biological analogies to decenter authorship and design to show how complex narratives can develop from basic structures. I told her that story functions like a virus and is always changing and has no agent driving it and added some examples I had written about before (especially the tale of Kleomedes the Astupalaian). And she, miraculously, asked me how long it would take me to write a proposal and sample chapter.

CDC Museum COVID-19 Timeline | David J. Sencer CDC Museum | CDC

Storylife certainly would not have been written without the COVID pandemic; It might not have happened at all if I hadn’t gotten COVID too. My family avoided getting sick until the Omicron phase of COVID. We stayed pretty isolated for 2020 and 2021 once we found out my wife was pregnant with our third child. We kept our kids home from school when their classmates returned, saw very few people, and tried to avoid any exposure. I was the first to show symptoms and was sick the longest, needing the 10 days home to be able to leave the house and showing symptoms for months after (it was over three months until I stopped feeling the impact of aphasia daily; I went from running under an 8-minute mile with ease for over an hour to struggle to finish one under 10).

I wrote the sample chapter (most of what is now chapter 5) while recovering from a fever and convalescing at Homer. To be honest, I remember the story of writing the chapter that I told after far more than the actual writing itself. (But this doesn’t concern me overmuch: in retrospect, my recall of writing anything seems to be pretty limited. My unconfirmed theory is that the focused activity of writing itself may limit how memories of around it form.) I’ve joked before that the novel coronavirus should be credited as a co-author, but I definitely wrote other chapters in various degrees of health. Once the manuscript was accepted, I wrote in hour or two blocks carved out of the day—producing quickly, but still delivering the manuscript a half-year late.

I started Storylife as a provocation to address both our blinkered view of poetic creation and our willful denial of the impact that narratives have on our lives together. Nothing I have seen since I finished Storylife has changed my essential convictions. The most recent presidential election, our inaction on climate change, the assault on higher education, our inability to acknowledge the truth of the horrors unfolding around the world to support our interests—everything we do together is framed and mediated by narrative. Narrative is steroidal in the information age. It moves faster than we can handle, and twists the way we understand. But it also allows us to see a different world, to imagine something better. Story retains the potential to help us realize a far kinder world with grander expectations for lives of meaning and comfort for every human being. But we need to be the kinds of audiences who want to hear this tale.

 

Post-script: Communities write books

One of the central theses of the book is that we as human beings are cognitively disinclined to think in the aggregate and to see ourselves as part of collective endeavors rather than individuals sealed off to the world physically and psycho-emotionally. (This is cognitive and cultural too.) The ideas in this book were shaped by countless conversations, presentations, questions, objections, editing, and more. At some level, I can’t take credit for something so many others were involved in. Here are the other creators I can remember.

From the acknowledgements: –

Particular parts of the book were improved in talks given at the Greek Literature and the Environment Workshop, UCSB, the University of Chicago Rhetoric and Poetics, Homer Lecture, and work presented at the Brandeis Psychology department colloquia series… Some of the ideas and passages also appeared in pieces for The Conversation or Neos Kosmos.

I owe a debt to many for help with bibliography and subjects beyond my expertise, including Joseph Cunningham, Sophus Helle, Prasad Jallepalli, Dan Perlman Seth Sanders, Claudio Sansone and Mario Telo. I cannot thank Eric Blum, Becca Frankel, and Talia Franks enough for editing and bibliographical assistance. Among the many friends who have supported my flights of fancy over the years, I would be remiss not to thank Lenny Muellner, Mimi Kramer, Justin Arft, Elton Barker, Celsiana Warwick, Julio Vega-Payne, Anna Hetherington, Paul O’Mahony, Sarah Bond, and Larry Benn, all of whom read drafts of or discussed various parts of this book and provided needed encouragement. Special thanks are due to my editor Heather Gold who provided the focus and the framework to help turn a half-baked idea into a full manuscript. Elizabeth Sylvia also provided invaluable editorial support,, and Susan Laity’s careful eye improved the book’s prose and style immeasurably.

And, as always, my spouse, Shahnaaz, deserves the final word—my belief in the future and any confidence I have starts with her.

Hanson Hate Redux

~ Erik ~ 1 Comment

Any reader of a Victor Davis Hanson book is confronted with two facts which the mind struggles to assimilate: (i) he managed to get this published, and (ii) people are actually reading it. One of the blurbs on the back of his most recent book, The End of Everything, describes it as ‘stupendous.’ Latinist readers know that this adjective comes from the verb stupere, which can mean ‘to marvel at’ but also ‘to be benumbed,’ and insofar as this second definition is applied, I could not agree more. The book wore me down into such a stupor that, before the end of the book, I found myself praying (secular prayers) for the end of everything.

The title is singularly infelicitous, because the book hardly deals in the kind of apocalyptic universal eschatology promised either by the title or the cover art. Instead, Hanson explores the destruction or sacking of four cities: Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan. Conservatives are fascinated by the decline of civilizations, a subject which provides an excellent foothold for intellectual judo maneuvers that allow them to argue that progressive impulses bring about the sorts of changes which undermine the virtuous elements of once glorious cultures. The ancients themselves excelled at this sort of thing: every time Nestor opens his mouth, there’s a good chance that he will fault his contemporaries for their suffering by noting their manifest inferiority to their predecessors.

Hanson begins, inauspiciously enough, by framing his conclusion as a rebuff to a preposterous straw man:

“Its conclusions warn that the modern world, America included, is hardly immune from repeating these tragedies of the past.”

Out there on his farm, Hanson may be touching too much grass. The most cursory glance at the psychic cacophony of the internet would suggest that no one believes that any place in the world, least of all America, is immune from tragedy. Contemporary discourse, regardless of one’s politics, is entirely invested in the idea of civilizational collapse. Geopolitical conflict, domestic disorder, climate change, the loss of cultural values mistily glanced through roseate lenses – does anyone today go to bed easily with the smug reassurance of imagined future stability?

For my own part, I have relied for the past several years on a panoply of somniferous consumables, though I now think that I have wasted thousands of dollars on sleep aids which could probably be replaced by a regular dose of Hanson’s soporific writing. Let’s stop touting the study of classical languages as the royal road to excellent prose. At least we know that Hanson isn’t a killer. (Nabokov: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”)  Observe:

“As the first-century historian Diodorus put it, most in Greece on news of the revolt were sincerely worried about the Thebans. But their sympathy was not the same as their succor.”

I wonder how proud he felt of the apparent rhetorical balance of the alliteration in the second sentence. But the phrase “most in Greece on news of the revolt” is singularly inelegant. Luckily, Hanson didn’t need to activate too many new neural pathways during the drafting phase, leaning instead on well-worn cliches:

“In fact, the timid allies advanced all sorts of flimsy excuses why discretion was the better part of valor, claiming that a century and a half earlier the Thebans had helped the Persian invaders and thus were unworthy of the sacrifice of their brethren.” [Italics added.]

Sometimes the cliche takes the form of unexamined nonsense expressions:

“…quite in contrast to the one-dimensional hoplite phalanxes of old.”
“…the Thebans, like all Greek armies, remained a one-dimensional militia.”

As Kingsley Amis noted, the standard journalese description of characters as “one-dimensional” reflects muddled thinking. Only a point in abstraction is properly one-dimensional, but somehow “two-dimensional” has never really caught on as a suitable replacement. Sed hae sunt nugae.

Consider this paradox:

“The Thebans were within a single day completely defeated. Their army was routed and erased from history.”

It’s one thing for a group to be “swept into the dustbin of History,” as Trotsky had it, but one might well wonder how an army erased from history finds itself discussed in what is billed as a work of…history. There is much in antiquity which has been entirely effaced from history, but it all takes the form of Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns.” Anything erased from history is ipso facto not discussed – it’s gone.

Speaking of expressions featuring facto, brace yourself for pedantry: Hanson has a singularly irritating tendency to use the phrase post facto throughout the book, which makes agrammatical nonsense of the phrase ex post facto and seems rather unbecoming of a man who wrote such an impassioned polemic about the value of rigorous training in classical languages. Not that Hanson is afraid of a nice bit of pedantry himself. There is a four-page stretch featuring the use of the rather finicky ultimata where most writers would happily settle for the Anglicized ultimatums.

You might think that Hanson was a millennial blogger in light of his fondness for the adverb apparently. A lot of statements get qualified thus in this book, as in this ghastly little performance:

“That sum was the equivalent of paying more than seven thousand of his soldiers together a year’s worth of wages, apparently a far preferable proposition than providing sustenance for thousands of the helpless in the occupied city.”

What to make of this? “Apparently a far preferable proposition than…”? Have you ever observed the way in which people speak with fawning reverence about Ivy League education? Did you know that Hanson went to Stanford?

If it appears (apparently) that I am belaboring Hanson’s faults as a stylist instead of discussing the content of the book, it’s because there isn’t much there. We have potted histories of four cities, linked only by the fact that they were sacked or extirpated and serve as a synecdoche for broader civilizational collapse. No one with a passing familiarity with any of these narratives will find anything novel or surprising in their treatment here, as this contains no real original scholarship. By itself, this is not a damning criticism. But the theme which binds the tetralogy of destruction together is weak, uninteresting, and not particularly well-managed.

I made two great sacrifices to write this post: I added a few extra cents of pocket lining to America’s most famous raisin farming reactionary and sank some irrecoverable hours into reading it. At some point in the past, Hanson set himself about the task of becoming a classical scholar, but found his real metier in Fox News punditry. He may have once done illuminating work on the phalanx, but even his historical work now savors of Rupert Murdoch’s tailpipe. It turns out that the mind, too, can dry up just like those raisins.

Hoover fellow Victor Davis Hanson on the type of men who become savior generals

Reading Books and Dreading Death

~ Erik ~ Leave a comment

Martin Amis once suggested that Philip Larkin was afflicted by ‘early death awareness syndrome,’ an obsession with his own personal eschatology that sapped him of vitality and turned him into the sad sack who, for all of the straitened confinement of his personal life, composed some of the finest verbal expressions of the sorrow of drab quotidian existence. A cursory search through the archives of this blog will remind the casual reader that the ancients (and what a ridiculous abstraction that term is!) were similarly afflicted by this view to the end, though it seems rather to have animated them to search for alternative immortalities. Reader, you are no doubt already anticipating my next point: from Achilles on downward through the stream of time it’s a long series of grappling matches with that still unresolved problem. Achilles settled for KLEOS as fair compensation for an early end. Centuries later, Horace saved his own life by taking Archilochus not only as a poetic model, but the inspiration for an act of life-saving cowardice (or prudence). It afforded him the chance to compose his monumentum aere perennius (a monument more lasting than bronze) and he lives on in print.

But let’s get real: posthumous glory is worthless, a lesson which Achilles learned and imparted. As scholars, we are tempted to think that the work, not the life, is of chief importance, but most work has gone the way of most lives – utterly forgotten.

A few days ago, I did something that I do with ungentlemanly frequency: I went to the bookstore. Anyone who frequents used bookshops is aware that the chief attraction of such places, beyond the fact that they’re troves of esoteric treasures that simply have no home in algorithmically-stocked emporia is the residue of life to be found in every volume. Is that a five dollar bill used as a bookmark? Does this receipt from the tire shop dated 1985 a sign that someone was reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for an improving couple of hours in the waiting room? Most of this contains mere hints at a person’s life because, generally speaking, it is contained in one volume. But occasionally you will find an entire collection of books and acquire, in one expensive sweep, a sizable chunk of someone’s library.

This has happened to me on three notable occasions. About 14 years ago I acquired something close to 100 volumes of Teubners, OCT’s, a number of commentaries, and even a load of uncut Belles Lettres editions of Greek texts for about $500. Given the store’s proximity to the University of Texas, I could only infer that this was the collection of some recently deceased classicist, but I had no real lead as to whose it was. Right before the pandemic, I snagged about 40 Greek Loebs from the collection of Hobart Huson.And just a few days ago, I stumbled into that same Half Price Books that offered up that initial accession of classics and walked out with several of Karl Galinsky’s books. Galinsky

Galinsky followed a practice which I have always found fascinating: not just inscribing his name on the pasteboard or flyleaf of each volume, but also noting the date when he acquired each volume. More than the stray receipts sandwiched between pages, this gives the new owner some indication of the diachronic course of their previous owner’s intellectual interests (or compulsions). Student editions with commentary in the 1960s at Princeton yield to uncribbed Teubners and OCTs in the following decades. Later still, he was reading Cassius Dio in a Loeb edition. (Those of us who refuse to yield to the old impulse to feel dirty about consulting Loebs will be happy to learn that the English half of the text is liberally sprinkled with marginalia. I recall hearing that Shackleton Bailey, too, liked reading the translations before bed.)

Such knowledge always imparts a sting to the usual thrill of acquisition. Professor Galinsky was reading Propertius with commentary in 1964, but now he is gone. I’m reading that Propertius volume now, but I too will soon enough be just as dead as Galinsky or Propertius.

My house is full of books – rooms full of shelves only loosely organized because of the constant influx of new material. I’m often asked why I don’t simply check things out from the library and cease living from paycheck to paycheck in thrall to tsundoku. I’ve always feared that, no matter how much I feel enriched by any given reading experience, there would be something inherently ephemeral and unstable about it if I didn’t have some physical monument to it, even when I know that I am not likely ever to read through the book again.

We all labor under silly compulsions which our rational minds can reject readily enough. For all of the vivacity of great books, they are ultimately dead. By the time that any thought is committed to the page, it belongs securely in the unreal and vanished world of the past, printed on dead material, lifeless and inert except when reanimated through readerly attention. But somehow their presence feels to me like a bulwark against mortality. Here’s a paradox: an assurance of stability fostered by the words of long-dead people laid out on fragile, inert matter. Or so I feel until I glimpse those names and dates on the flyleaf and realize that book ownership did nothing to prevent the deaths of the previous owners.

Though I am a material beneficiary of such an act, the post-mortem parcelling out of a beloved personal library strikes a ghoulish and unfeeling note. Thomas Jefferson was able to maintain the integrity of his collection (and escape some inconvenient debts) by making it the seed of the Library of Congress. In George Eliot’s Romola, one of the chief drivers of the plot is the Bardo de’ Bardi’s desire to keep his library together after his death:

“No, Romola,” he said, pausing against the bust of Hadrian, and passing his stick from the right to the left that he might explore the familiar outline with a “seeing hand.” “There will be nothing else to preserve my memory and carry down my name as a member of the great republic of letters—nothing but my library and my collection of antiquities. And they are choice,” continued Bardo, pressing the bust and speaking in a tone of insistence. “The collections of Niccolò I know were larger; but take any collection which is the work of a single man—that of the great Boccaccio even—mine will surpass it. That of Poggio was contemptible compared with mine. It will be a great gift to unborn scholars. And there is nothing else. For even if I were to yield to the wish of Aldo Manuzio when he sets up his press at Venice, and give him the aid of my annotated manuscripts, I know well what would be the result: some other scholar’s name would stand on the title-page of the edition—some scholar who would have fed on my honey, and then declared in his preface that he had gathered it all himself fresh from Hymettus. Else, why have I refused the loan of many an annotated codex? why have I refused to make public any of my translations? why? but because scholarship is a system of licenced robbery, and your man in scarlet and furred robe who sits in judgment on thieves, is himself a thief of the thoughts and the fame that belong to his fellows. But against that robbery Bardo de’ Bardi shall struggle—though blind and forsaken, he shall struggle. I too have a right to be remembered—as great a right as Pontanus or Merula, whose names will be foremost on the lips of posterity, because they sought patronage and found it; because they had tongues that could flatter, and blood that was used to be nourished from the client’s basket. I have a right to be remembered.”

I can consider with some equanimity the mere fact of nonexistence, but the mind recoils in horror at the thought of all of my books being dispersed and disposed of, whether in the thrift store or the scrap heap. Right now, they form a cohesive whole: a visible record of all the things that ever interested me. Later, they will be little more than pieces of junk, an inconvenient heap that some survivor has to deal with. Some of them may form pieces of another’s collection, but once my own life is over, so too the loose narrative and contextual bond that united them all will be dissolved. As a corpse decays and returns its fragments of materiality to the world, so does a personal library dissolve into its disparate parts which may have significance of their own but will never mean the same thing again.

Like all reflections on mortality, this will all seem either entirely trite and uninteresting unless you’re in one of those moods to wax maudlin about the terror of death. Ancient poets seemed happy  (or miserable) to harp on about it at length, so I have granted myself some space to do it here. Quod Homero mihi quoque licet. These last few days have convinced me that my entire course of classical reading over the past twenty years has really just been a search for stability in a world of Heraclitan flux. These dire intimations of mortality suggest that I was too busy thinking of books as objects to internalize their lessons. I had collected them for their material heft and apparent permanence, but the inscription ‘Galinsky – 1963’ reminded me that we are closer to 2063 than to 1963, and now these volumes are nothing but reminders of universal impermanence. To return to Larkin: “Get stewed – books are a load of crap.”

Becoming Nobody: A Classics Nostos

~ joegoodkin ~ Leave a comment

A reflection on almost 400 Odyssey shows across all 50 U.S. States and More

In book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus famously recounts the story of how he came across Polyphemus the cyclops, who trapped the trespassing Odysseus in his cave. The titular hero tells the cyclops that his name is οὔτις, or “Nobody.” When Odysseus stabs Polyphemus in the eye with an olive tree trunk, the other cyclopes hear Polyphemus’ distress and run to help him. Polyphemus proclaims that “οὔτις (Nobody) blinded him,” the cyclopes think Polyphemus is a delusional lunatic, and Odysseus is eventually able to escape the cave and be back on his way.

This isn’t the only time in the poem that Odysseus takes on an alternate identity: He routinely uses other names and backgrounds as he tries to find his way back to the island of Ithaka and reestablish himself as the ruler of his household, a journey that spans twenty years from the time he left to fight the war at Troy to when he becomes the final Greek warrior to make it home.

But of these alternate identities, it’s the Nobody trick that feels the most telling and significant. There’s a piece of being a traveling storyteller (as Odysseus is) that makes you aware of both who you are and who you aren’t, something in you that is devoid of identity, which comes untethered when you are away from home. It’s both a freedom and a burden.

I know this feeling. For over twenty years I’ve traveled the world performing an original 24 song one man folk opera of the Odyssey. And I think I’m the only person since, well, Homer’s time, who can say that. 

I’ve played in all 50 US states. I’ve played in Athens and Rome. I’ve played in lecture halls at formal educational institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge, and I’ve played in a muddy field in Jackson, Mississippi. I’ve played for audiences of elite academic specialists and I’ve played for high school freshman English classes. I’ll let you decide which of those is scarier. 

In total I’ve played my Odyssey almost 400 times. I’m a guy who goes around telling stories about a guy who goes around telling stories.

In this essay, I’d like to share my journey to create my bardic folk opera and what I’ve learned in sharing my work with audiences around the world.

Like Odysseus’ nostos, it’s been anything but a straight line.

παλίντροπος άρμονίη: “ a harmony of opposites”

I remember staring at those words my senior year of high school in the book “Myth of the State” by Ernst Cassirer, drawn to them, frustrated I couldn’t sound them out, break them down, understand them. They were magical. My life had no antecedent for interest in Ancient Greek and I had no idea why, but the words called to me.

So I chased that feeling and took Ancient Greek my first semester at University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by classes in Classical Mythology and Greek Archaeology my second semester. Quite suddenly (and altogether accidentally) I was a Classics major, a major I previously had no idea existed.

I read Homeric Greek in my fourth semester language class. Like those Greek words my senior year of high school, I vividly remember my initial engagement with the Iliad though I still struggle to describe to my audiences what I felt as this text washed over me and I saw and experienced the poetry for both how it was organized and what it meant.

Sometimes I call it being surrounded by a living breathing organism. Sometimes as being inside the words and feeling a landscape around them. Sometimes as having my head and heart explode at the same time (in a good way I mean…). Sometimes as having my brain rewired. 

All these are good approximations of my first encounter with Homer in Greek but maybe the best way to describe what I felt was connection. Connection to humanity. Connection to the tens of thousands of voices that sang these stories as songs three thousand and more years ago before they were texts, voices which left their residue in and around the words that finally got written and passed down for two and half millennia, improbably landing in front of me, a twenty year old undergrad in an upper Midwest public university who took Ancient Greek because of two words he saw in a book in a public high school in west suburban Chicagoland. 

It was a connection unfacilitated by intellectual calculation.  Academic analysis came later and fleshed out my understanding of perhaps exactly what I was connecting to and how but that initial flash was a pure emotional reaction to a force embedded in the text that was above or below or beside cognition. The text was acting on me and the result was emotional and visceral connection.

For the rest of college, I chased that feeling. I read Homer in translation. I read more Homer in Greek both for class and on my own. I took as many Greek classes as my schedule allowed and loved them all, but none lit me up in quite the same way Homer did. I took the equivalent of two years of Latin in 8 weeks the summer between my sophomore and junior years and survived it (screw you, Wheelock!) but found it didn’t do the same thing for me that Greek did. 

More significantly, I took a Comparative Literature class in which we read the Odyssey and a number of what I would learn were called “receptions,” works inspired by or in response to the original, as well as works that shared some of the themes of the epic. 

The primary theme we considered in that class was the relationship between home and identity. We read (in translation) the Aeneid and the Argonautica. We read Ulysses the novel by James Joyce and Ulysses the poem by Lord Tenneson. We read Omeros by Derek Walcott. We watched movies about journeys to or the search for home: Planet of the Apes (Spoiler alert: they were home all along!), the Wizard of Oz (Spoiler alert: there’s no place like home!), and Waterworld (Spoiler alert: uh… jetski biker gangs are even worse than Scylla and Charybdis?).

It was, in retrospect, ahead of its time: in the year 2024 there are many classes that engage ancient sources alongside modern receptions, receptions in literature, film, music, and other media, but in 1997 this type of framing and syllabus was rare.

What the class did was open my mind and heart to the idea that epic was a tradition not a fixed artifact. And that tradition is open for all to participate in. The stories of the Odyssey and Iliad originated as ephemeral oral performances and for a very long time there were no definitive versions. The truth of the stories was (and is) the sum of all the performances and in particular how tellings inspire retellings.

And the connection that I felt, the connection in which I wanted to participate, was a connection to this chorus of voices that told and retold this story and the audiences that collaborated on the meanings of the tellings.

So after I graduated college in 1999 with a BA in Classics, I went wading in the wine dark sea of epic tradition and wrote my own original 24 song bardic retelling of the Odyssey. I performed it for the first time in my parents’ living room on March 17, 2002, to a score of family and friends.  The journey from performance number one in March of 2002 to performance number 366 (yes, exactly a leap year’s worth of shows) on November 8, 2023, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the 50th and final US state, could fill 24 books and then some with stories and adventures that rival Odysseus’ in nature and variety but one of the questions I’ve been asked after almost every one of those performances is: 

Why the Odyssey? 

My initial experience with Homer was through the language in the Iliad.  But I chose the Odyssey as the source for my first folk opera (and waited until 2018 to create my Iliad song retelling, The Blues of Achilles). Why?

That same shock of human connection I got from feeling the dactylic hexameter of the Iliad wash over me, I got from thinking about the experiences of the characters in the Odyssey. Thinking about what they were going through and why. Thinking about why a culture found these characters and experiences important enough to preserve in songs and then texts that preserved songs.

Did I identify with Telemachus? Sure. In some ways. But even when I was Telemachus’ age, I felt a pull towards Odysseus. 

A lot of attention is paid to the word πολύτροπον, that untranslatable epithet that modifies ἄνδρα (“man”) in the first line of the poem. But what struck me as more intriguing than πολύτροπον was the whole third line of the epic:

πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω

“He (Odysseus) saw the cities and knew the mind of many men”

From the very beginning, Odysseus is presented as a seeker, a collector of experience. Why? How does he use it and what does he get out of it? Why does he want to hear the Sirens’ song? The tension between his desire for experience and his wish to get home moved me even before I was a traveling bard and got to feel it firsthand as the itinerant bards who told Odysseus’ story surely did as well. 

Current cultural norms are not kind to Odysseus. And I should say that any scorn heaped on his behavior and performance as a leader is fair and apt. But I think that the power of the story and its timelessness lie not in the morality of the characters (certain aspects of morality presented in the poem are clearly culturally determined) but in the power of the text’s portrayal of human behavior with respect to identity, which is complicated (or one might say πολύτροπον) for all of us.

I suspect that some of our discomfort with Odysseus is that we understand there is a little bit of him in all of us. Hopefully not the killing or getting people killed but the tension between our stated beliefs and our behaviors, how that resonates or doesn’t resonate with our identities, how we fit or don’t fit into the homes and societies that formed and produced us.

And nothing will make one feel this tension like becoming Nobody out on the wine dark sea.

A final thought: 

My odyssey is a story of chasing things that moved me even when I wasn’t sure why. It’s one of reintegrating text into its vestigial form of experience to explore how musical elements impact storytelling. It’s one of trying to create the very feeling of connection that inspired me: connection to my own identity and myriad connections between humans who attend my performances, listen to my songs about Nobody, and take the feelings from these performances forward in their own lives to create more connection. 

To participate in this far-reaching chain of human connection, to be even the tiniest part of it, is humbling and beautiful. Becoming Nobody allowed me to become Somebody.

Joe Goodkin is a modern bard who performs original music based on epic poetry and other subjects.  He can be seen and heard at http://www.joesodyssey.com http://www.thebluesofachilles.com or http://www.joegoodkin.com and emailed at joegoodkin@gmail.com about bookings or anything else. He has written about his work on SA before.

Translation, Authority, and Reception 4: Race and Translation

~ imaanansari19 ~ Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: This is the third of a four-part essay on  reception of minoritized translators of Classical Epic Poetry by Imaan Ansari.

The question of race is ever-present in the Classics and is certainly applicable to the scene of the enslaved women that Emily Wilson points out within the Odyssey. There is a constant distinction between suitors and herders throughout the Odyssey and within ancient social strata. The suitors are the men who attempt to pursue Penelope while he is away. Jackie Murray, in “Racecraft in the Odyssey,” defines the herders to be a “group socially constructed as the racial opposites of the heroes.”[1]

This idea of “proto-racism” that Murray picks up on highlights the fact that “otherness” in terms of ethnic and cultural differences in ancient Greece differentiated “races,” however, enslaved people generally shared the same skin color as their enslavers.[2] Murray goes on to say that “Heroes treat the herders as having alienated humanity.”[3] Race as justification for dehumanization, segregation, maltreatment, and violence is a common theme throughout history, from which the Classics are by no means exempt. Murray brings up a double standard when Odysseus kills the suitors and the enslaved women.[4] The death of the suitors needed to be masked by a celebration so that a civil war, between Odysseus and other powerful families, would not erupt. Race precluded proximity to power, wealth, and status. The herders did not have the access that the suitors would, so, in the words of Jackie Murray, “they can be murdered without consequence.”[5] Racially charged scenes such as these within the Odyssey planted seeds for modern racism and constructions of race.

Race may affect the way in which Classicists of color frame their scholarship and interaction with Greco-Roman culture, literature, and society. The diversity within translation lies not only in the logic that different translators will choose different words—ultimately producing their respective and unique translations—but also the fact that the choices a translator makes are due to their own judgment, tendencies, and even bias, all of which are affected by lived experiences. In the cases of marginalization and racism, the status of translated Latin and Greek works by scholars of color are less likely to be accepted into the modern literary canon, since these Classicists are often questioned for their motivations to engage with the Classics.

Jhumpa Lahiri, recipient of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is an author, translator, and Classicist of color who now teaches at Princeton University. Lahiri is currently working on  a new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses alongside Yelena Baraz, a professor of Latin literature in Princeton’s Classics Department. Lahiri and Baraz share significant experience in reading, analyzing, and educating others on Classical literature and civilization. They will join Stephanie McCarter as women who have published translations of the Metamorphoses into English.[6] There is also a forthcoming translation of the Metamorphoses by C. Luke Soucy, who labels himself the first biracial person and queer man to translate this epic into English.[7] He subtitles his scholarship of the Metamorphoses as “A New Translation, confronting the sexuality, violence, and politics that so many previous translations have glossed over.”[8] Soucy’s cognizance of the lack of recognition for these themes in translation, coupled with his own experiences of having been marginalized, are among the many reasons that motivate him to illuminate the power dynamics of epic and their relationship to sexuality and proto-racism.

Drawing of a man with a beard and long hair, a handband around his head

Bust-length Study of the Blind Homer, drawing, Paul Buffet (MET, 2013.1122)

Minoritized translators often grapple with and process personal experiences of marginalization by advocating for an institutional push towards equity and representation in translation. McCarter, in “How (Not) to Translate the Female Body,” surveys different translations of Latin poets to demonstrate the pervasive tendency of translators to oversexualize female characters through the double standard that adds a physical description that is lacking from the original. McCarter begins this essay with a lived experience, a story about her daughter, which opened her own eyes to the way in which certain (especially anatomical) words sexualize women despite lacking a specifically gendered denotation, thereby defining the female body, and the female in general, as “other.”[9] Lahiri, too, frames her piece, “Why Italian?,” on her lived experience of feeling as though she must have a valid reason for her interest in the language.

This preemptive justification—that she must rationalize or even apologize for her engagement with European or Western culture—stems from what the environment around her influenced her to believe: that “no one expected [her] to speak Italian.”[10] Her passion for Italian was reduced to an anomaly because of her ethnicity. Being a woman of Indian descent made her interaction with the Classics too to be “unconventional,” as explored in her book chapter “In Praise of Echo: Reflections on the Meaning of Translation.”[11] Lahiri’s story, as a translator who is cognizant of how her translations are received as well as how she is received, shows that even the most accomplished Classicists are questioned due to factors beside the impressive body of their work alone.

Ultimately, the hierarchical stereotyping between power and race exists within the word and linguistic distinction of “Classic” itself. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of the word “Classics” back to the  Latin word classicus, meaning “of the first class and highest rank of importance.”[12] This definition preserves superiority in studying a “Classic,” whether a well known book or an ancient language, over a non-canonical work. I would take the metaphor of “canonization” further to argue that Western society has canonized Latin and Greek. Merriam Webster Dictionary defines “Classics” and the “Classical” as “of or relating to the ancient Greeks or Romans and their culture.”[13] Merriam Webster also echoes the “recognized value” that Classical institutions hold over those without such name recognition.

Stylized painting of the ruins of the Parthenon emerging into the sun

Students of underrepresented and underfunded communities, disproportionately those of color, often lack what is thought of as a “Classical” education. Furthermore, Arabic, classical Chinese, and Sanskrit—to name a few—are among the time-honored languages of the east, however, they are rarely encompassed under the umbrella of Classics, with a capital C, that is reserved in European studies for Latin and Greek. Eurocentrism must be challenged in order to prove that Classics is not a “dying” field, simply by virtue of being conventionally, in the modern day, unspoken. Rather than leaving equally influential ancient languages to drown in the rain of modern disdain for the past, the umbrella of what constitutes a “Classic” should welcome the East with open arms. The conception of “Western” Classics is inherently exclusionary to people of color.

I want to close this series of essays by considering another so-called “first” in the translation of ancient epic, one that is lesser discussed. In her translation of the Ramayana, Sattar demonstrates gratitude for the traditional aspect of translation, ushering in the translator into discourse about how their choices compare to those of other translators. Sattar is deeply interested in the relationship between Ancient and Modern Indian society, in which she uses Sanskrit as a vehicle of connection.[14] Translating the currently unspoken into accessible words allows Sattar to engage in a transhistorical conversation. In this, she gestures towards the thesis of Classical reception: since translations must change as time passes, newer translations are continually needed to reflect newer priorities.[15]

Not only does the original work provoke thought and interpretation, but the many translations that writers put forth are their own ‘originals.’ This means that translations spark a conversation and environment around them with a comparable richness to the work from which they originally took inspiration. Every translation brings something to the table, and in Sattar’s view, the table of translation has infinite chairs. Sattar demonstrates optimism by seeing translation as exciting rather than nervewracking. Vulnerability does lie in translation and its reception; the translator must stand by their work and defend the choices that they have made. In no way does Sattar undermine the difficulty of translating an ancient text; instead, she yearns to take on the challenge that is inter-lingual compromise.

Sattar is by no means deterred by the fact that her language receives less representation in mainstream media through the title of a Classical thread. Emily Wilson’s activism too is fueled by the neglect to recognize the personhood of women as equal to that of their male counterparts. When reading the Classics in translation, the stories of the minorities to which the institution has historically paid and even continues to pay a blind eye tend to be silenced further. Prejudice and inequality is certainly present in the canon, made up of an echelon of books penned by elite writers in their respective “Classical” language. The act of translation reminds us of the importance of being intentional and unpacking the origins of the most taken-for-granted, seemingly  most mundane words. In turn, the words that society adopts are telling of the people whom society favors. Re-examined answers to the question, “What is a Classic?,” must therefore be articulated at the same time that the question itself must be reformulated.

Imaan Ansari is a high school junior at Trinity School in New York City. Her parents immigrated to the US from India, so her experiences as a woman of color and as a first-generation American influence her passion for investigating and amplifying the contributions of minority groups to the Classics. Imaan has taken Latin for six years. She is also fluent in Hindi and Urdu, and aspires to study Sanskrit. At school, Imaan serves on the Student Senate, fulfilling roles such as Chair of Finance, overseeing the student budget, and Speaker, communicating the Senate’s initiatives to students, faculty, and staff. Imaan is the Editor-in-Chief of Diversion, the Modern Language magazine, and the Editor-in-Chief of Symposium, the Classics publication. She is the President of Classics Club and also leads a free peer Latin tutoring service. Outside of Classics, Imaan enjoys playing golf, as captain of the Varsity team, and has been playing violin in various orchestras for over ten years

[1] Murray, J. (2021) “Race and sexuality: Racecraft in the Odyssey,” in: A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity, ed. D. McCoskey. London: Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/55515239/Race_and_Sexuality_Racecraft_in_the_Odyssey (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[2] Hunt, P. (2015) “Trojan Slaves in Classical Athens,” in Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World, C. Taylor (ed.), K. Vlassopoulos (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 128–154. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198726494.003.0006 (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[3] Murray, J. (2021) “Race and sexuality: Racecraft in the Odyssey,” in: A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity, ed. D. McCoskey. London: Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/55515239/Race_and_Sexuality_Racecraft_in_the_Odyssey (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[4] Ibid., 150.

[5] Ibid., 151.

[6] McCarter, S. (2022) Metamorphoses. London: Penguin Classics.

[7] Soucy, C.L. (2023) Ovid’s metamorphoses: A new translation. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

[8] “C. Luke Soucy: Classical translator for the modern day” (2020) Luke Soucy. Available at: https://www.clukesoucy.com/ (Accessed: 23 August 2023).

[9] McCarter, S. (2019) “How (not) to translate the female body,” Sewanee Review. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/729297 (Accessed: 20 August 2023).

[10] Lahiri, J. (2022) “Why Italian?”,  in” Translating myself and others. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 9–23.

[11] Lahiri, J. (2022) “In Praise of Echo: Reflections on the Meaning of Translation,” in: Translating Myself and Others. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 44–60.

[12] Simpson, J.A. (1991) ‘classics’, The oxford english dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

[13] ‘classics; classical’ (1989) The new Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster Inc.

[14] Sattar, A. (2017) “Continuities between Ancient and Contemporary India,” Economic and Political Weekly. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44166821 (Accessed: 23 August 2023).

[15] Martindale, C. (1993) Redeeming the text: Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Translation, Authority, and Reception 3: Epic Interventions

~ imaanansari19 ~ Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: This is the third of a four-part essay on  reception of minoritized translators of Classical Epic Poetry by Imaan Ansari.

Sexism emanates from the canon itself, since the notion of “Homer” as more than one author rarely elicits the conversation that the group may include female Hellenists. Furthermore, three especially canonized texts, the Iliad, Aeneid, and Odyssey, all begin with a similar structure in translation: a discussion of a man and a muse. Of course, female characters and their presence in each story deeply impact the course that the narrative takes. For instance, Dido in the Aeneid is a powerful Queen who prolongs Aeneas’ stay in Carthage before he reaches the Western Land, Hesperia. In the Classical world, power is finite. Why does Dido and Aeneas’ relationship usher in both Dido’s downfall and not, immediately, that of Aeneas? Because Aeneas is the one who makes the decisions, and has control, when they are together.

Classicist John L. Moles cannot prove that Dido is morally culpable for having sex with Aeneas since he subjects Dido to more scrutiny and blame than he does Aeneas, and since he fails to acknowledge the ambiguity concerning whether they are married. The example encapsulates how something ambiguous within the ancient text itself is treated using a double standard. Sexism does exist in the text itself in terms of blame and the translator, Moles, perpetuates the point of view of antiquity. According to Moles, Dido commits a misdemeanor by having sex with Aeneas because she knowingly does so out of wedlock.[1]

Moles clarifies that Dido is not at fault for falling in love with Aeneas; however, he places blame on her for how she responds to that love. Moles construes the passage which follows the cave scene to be Vergil’s demonstration of a moral shift in Dido’s mentality, most probably dictated by love.[2] The line of which Dido is the subject, coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam (Vergil, Aen. 4.172) describes, to Moles, her fatal flaw. Moles interprets the word culpa as representing Dido’s hamartia.[3] Moles explains that Dido hides the state of Aeneas’ and her relationship by calling it a marriage. Moles believes that the implications of the verb vocat, the act of attributing a name, extend to Dido’s intention to justify her sex with Aeneas by saying that they are married. Moles construes the verb that follows, praetexit, to mean that Dido consciously hides truth even though she herself knows, at some level, that they are not married. By isolating line 172, following the censored cave scene, Moles sees “shamelessness” in Dido, a trope of Greco-Roman tragedy often attributed to the woman in an “emotional entanglement.”[4] Moles aligns himself with Vergil’s word choice of nomine, here being a name that Dido imposes on her relationship with Aeneas, to say that even Vergil saw Dido and Aeneas as unmarried, and that Dido uses the label of marriage to justify sex.

Moles does not attribute equal blame to Aeneas and Dido for the misconduct in the cave (even if we grant his assumption that they are not married). He incorrectly places the entire burden of the culpa on Dido by citing the “illicit nature of her love-making with Aeneas.”[5] Although Aeneas and Dido have sex with each other in the cave, Moles refers to Aeneas as a sort of accomplice in Dido’s illicit activities. Moles makes the assumption that Dido initiated, and roped Aeneas into, sex even in his English sentence structure; the word “her” in the phrase is the English equivalent to a Latin subjective genitive, in conjunction with “love-making.” Aeneas corresponds to a Latin ablative of accompaniment, contextualizing the fact that Dido is the focus of Moles’ blame, since she governs the “love-making” out of which Aeneas stems as almost an afterthought.

Because Vergil leaves out the scene in which his audience understands that Dido and Aeneas have sex, Moles can only speculate about who is more at fault. Moles defaults to the (sexist) point of view that women are deemed “shameless” for having sex (outside of marriage), rather than questioning why women are conventionally blamed (and men are not).[6] Why should women harbor the shame within a relationship, and be regarded as shameless if they act outside of that norm, while the actions of their male counterparts are judged with less scrutiny? Moles describes Dido as “over emotional,” undermining her conversation with Anna, consideration of Sychaeus, and careful deliberation over whether to engage in the relationship in the first place.[7] By calling her “over” an acceptable threshold of emotional expression, Moles imposes a standard on Dido to which he does not hold Aeneas. Of course, this is an article considering Dido’s fatal flaw, yet Moles makes no effort to determine that of Aeneas; just as Dido is the focus of Moles’ article, she is the target of his blame.

Moles dismisses evidence which suggests that Aeneas and Dido are married by imposing his own criteria of what constitutes a “proper” marriage. The first issue with his argument is the word “proper” in and of itself, since Moles bases his definition of marriage on “Roman law and social practice.”[8] Moles uses Aristotle’s analysis of Greek tragedy to understand Vergil’s storyline and attribute a fatal flaw to Dido, but he makes the mistake of applying Roman standards to two people in Carthage, who have sex many years before Rome is established. Of course, under the assumption that the Aeneid is propaganda for the first Roman emperor, Augustus, the text may then be accepted as intentionally anachronistic.[9] There remains a disconnect between Moles’ argument and the chronology of the epic, since, although both Rome and Carthage may overlap in terms of societal norms, Moles invalidates Aeneas and Dido’s marriage with standards that do not yet preside over their kingdoms or daily lives.

Moles also makes the point that a married couple must live together and that Aeneas and Dido are “not yet cohabiting.”[10] However, once Dido enters her bedroom for the last time before committing suicide, she picks up Aeneas’ sword and stares at the bed in which they slept together. The fact that Aeneas left his belongings in Dido’s room demonstrates that he stayed with her for an extended period of time, suggesting that they are at least “more married” than Moles credits them. Moles equates Dido and Aeneas’ relationship to a one-night-stand by remarking that “they have only made love once.”[11] However, Dido’s tears upon seeing the empty bed and Aeneas’ possessions, without his presence, imply that they slept and spent time with each other beyond Moles’ assertion. Moles would actually strengthen his argument by asserting that Dido and Aeneas may have had sex more than once because under his framework, Dido would be even more culpable for repeating illicit affairs. Instead, he speculates on the events in the cave, which Vergil himself does not narrate, thus, Moles stretches Vergil’s intention for the meaning behind his text. The way in which Moles crafts this argument, to demean Dido and suggest that she exclusively exhibits a fatal flaw, demonstrates how he reduces her to a “trope” or a “token” scorned female character.

Emily Wilson and her newly published translation of Homer’s Iliad. [15]

This idea of a “token” or “the only” female extends into media reception of female translators. Emily Wilson is adamant that she is not the first woman to have translated the Odyssey, so much so that one will encounter that fact in her Twitter bio.[12] Recently, Emily Wilson published her translation of the Iliad, joining Caroline Anderson, another woman to have published a translation of the epic. Emily Wilson is technically the first woman to have translated the Odyssey into English, however, this title of “the first,” tends to minimize both the contributions of women to the Classics and the interactions between women and ancient texts. For instance, Anne le Fèvre Dacier translated the Odyssey into French prose in as early as 1708, but is rarely recognized as “the first female translator or classicist” by Western media, perhaps because she did not write in English.[13]

Wilson’s activism in raising awareness for female translators extends profoundly into the Classical texts that she translates herself, namely, humanizing the enslaved women who sleep with the suitors during the Odyssey. These women are executed by Telemachus at Odysseus’ order (Homer, Od, 22.471-473). The translation of these women from Greek to English perpetuates the brutality and disdain with which they were treated. On International Women’s Day in 2018, Emily Wilson exposed the choices that best-selling male English translations of the Odyssey make about how to render the enslaved women. The wrongdoings and shortcomings of male classicists are often ignored, perhaps because of perceived male domination in the field.

Wilson turned straight to best-selling translated works by authors such as Fagles, Lombardo, and Fitzgerald, all of whom used slurs to describe these women. Wilson embraces alternative knowledge sharing in order to correct these injustices with a wider audience.[14] By choosing Twitter as her platform, she joined a movement of scholars working to demystify Classics as a field—one that younger generations and marginalized groups can, in fact, access. This mission is in keeping with Wilson’s attitude to raise awareness for issues in the Classics, such as gender inequality, in tandem with extending appreciation and involvement in Classical literature to youth. She holds herself and other translators by demonstrating that translation and identity are inextricably interwoven.

The New Yorker presents Wilson as risking her reputation in order to give voice to a more important movement that is women’s rights in the Classics. Dan Chiasson, the contributor of this piece, points out that some of the men whom Wilson critiques cannot respond as they have since passed away. For instance, ten years prior to the publication of her Twitter thread, Robert Fagles died. Fagles, arguably but according to Chiasson, is the classicist whom Wilson most directly calls out. Returning to the scene of the hanged slave women, Wilson believes Fagles to have conflated the death of these women to a forgettable, inconsequential event; Fagles presented what Wilson calls a “childish half-rhyme” between the words “cozy… grisly” to describe the circumstances and appearances of the enslaved women.[16] The mentality of blame the victim–or, at least, disregard the victim–is exacerbated here. Wilson acknowledges the dilemma posed by the heroism and homecoming of Odysseus; certain translators take it upon themselves to regard Odysseus as the focus, protagonist, and essence of the entire Odyssey, however, such a view minimizes the presence of other characters. For example, since Odysseus requests that the enslaved women be hanged, Telemachus obliges. The personhood of these women gets lost, not only in translation, but within the scene itself.

Classical reception makes it deeply vital for translators to have the implications of their words in mind, since their audience is different from that of the original canonized work, intended to be received by, in the case of the Odyssey, a more patriarchal society. It is imperative today that translators understand the platform that they are given: to relay words of the past into the framework of the now. The social justice, inclusivity, and awareness for which Wilson campaigns and champions in translation need institutional recognition.

 

Imaan Ansari is a high school junior at Trinity School in New York City. Her parents immigrated to the US from India, so her experiences as a woman of color and as a first-generation American influence her passion for investigating and amplifying the contributions of minority groups to the Classics. Imaan has taken Latin for six years. She is also fluent in Hindi and Urdu, and aspires to study Sanskrit. At school, Imaan serves on the Student Senate, fulfilling roles such as Chair of Finance, overseeing the student budget, and Speaker, communicating the Senate’s initiatives to students, faculty, and staff. Imaan is the Editor-in-Chief of Diversion, the Modern Language magazine, and the Editor-in-Chief of Symposium, the Classics publication. She is the President of Classics Club and also leads a free peer Latin tutoring service. Outside of Classics, Imaan enjoys playing golf, as captain of the Varsity team, and has been playing violin in various orchestras for over ten years

notes

[1] Moles, J. (1984) “Aristotle and Dido’s ‘hamartia,’” Jstor. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/642369 (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[2] Ibid., 51.

[3] Ibid., 48.

[4] Ibid., 51-52.

[5] Ibid., 52.

[6] Ibid., 52.

[7] Ibid., 50.

[8] Ibid., 52.

[9] ​​Lavocat, F. (2020) “Dido meets Aeneas: Anachronism, alternative history, counterfactual thinking and the idea of fiction,” JLT Articles. Available at: http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/articles/article/view/1111/2549 (Accessed: 22 August 2023).

[10] Moles, J. (1984) “Aristotle and Dido’s ‘hamartia,’” Jstor. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/642369 (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[11] Ibid., 52.

[12] Bao, J. (2019) “Emily Wilson: Not the first woman to translate the Odyssey,” 34th Street Magazine. Available at: https://www.34st.com/article/2019/10/emily-wilson-penn-classical-studies-translation-the-odyssey-macarthur-foundation-genius-grant-fellowship (Accessed: 22 August 2023).

[13] Hepburn, L. (2022) “Anne Le Fèvre Dacier: Homer’s first female translator,” Peter Harrington Journal – The Journal. Available at: https://www.peterharrington.co.uk/blog/anne-le-fevre-dacier-homers-first-female-translator/ (Accessed: 22 August 2023).

[14] Chiasson, D. (2018) “The classics scholar redefining what Twitter can do,” The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-classics-scholar-redefining-what-twitter-can-do (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[15] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09/25/arts/facetime-with-homer-emily-wilsons-new-translation-iliad-brings-zoomer-generation-vibe-classical-war-epic/

[16] Wilson, E. (2018) “@EmilyRCWilson scholia,” Emily Wilson. Available at: https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/emilyrcwilson-scholia (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

Translation, Authority, and Reception 2: The Translator’s Body

~ imaanansari19 ~ Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a four-part essay on  reception of minoritized translators of Classical Epic Poetry by Imaan Ansari.

Who is allowed to make mistakes and deviate from a distilled model of translation? How does one straddle faithfulness to an ancient text and response to or from a modern audience? Where is the balance that a translator must actualize between the pull of the original author and their own, if any, creative license? Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “The Translator’s Task” has long been the canonical text against which answers to these questions are measured.[1]

For instance, “The Translator’s Task” has served as a theoretical blueprint for how a translator should approach balancing both the source and target languages of one’s translation. The difficulty of translation that Benjamin picks up on is balancing both of the languages that are involved in the process.[2] Simply put, leaning towards one language may result in being less faithful to the other. A translation is often thought of as a way of communicating or illuminating a conversation to someone in a second medium if they do not understand or cannot access the first. Benjamin argues that an appeal to the audience is not appropriate for the translator to keep in mind, as it may cloud the integrity of their translation.[3]

The translator’s role is to act as an intermediary between the writer and another reader. Translation in this picture becomes a process by which the translator can bridge a gap. Benjamin clarifies that the nuances of language make it impossible for a translation to line up perfectly with its original.[4] Although a translation may demonstrate a basic resemblance with the source text, the translator often takes creative license.

Benjamin exposes an inherent lack of accuracy that a translation presents even when deeply working to emulate the original. After all, the widely known English versions of “A Translator’s Task” are indeed translations, such as the one I am citing by scholar Steven Randall. Randall renders Benjamin’s words on the relationship between a source text and its translation as the following: “Translation is a form. In order to grasp it, we must go back to the original.”[5] Randall’s word choice is ironic, since through being grandfathered-in by the name of Walter Benjamin, Randall speaks with such authority on the topic of translation, but fails to acknowledge in this sentence that his scholarship on “A Translator’s Task” is translation.

According to Benjamin, the difficulty to be objective lies in the fact that a translator cannot merely parrot the source text but is tasked with choosing words that make it come alive in another language or medium. He writes, “It is clear that a translation, no matter how good, cannot have any significance for the original.”[6] However, this position is paradoxical, given that the translator must pinpoint the first writer’s intention in order to stay true to what both work to connote.

Benjamin believes translation to exist in the “afterlife (Überleben) of the source text,” meaning that there is a separation only in time between the source text and its imminent translations.[7] It is interesting that Benjamin acknowledges the existence of “untranslatability.”[8] Benjamin’s standpoint on translation conflates translation with art.[9] Art fits into the metaphor of untranslatability, as the original artist is often thought to hold the authority and license over their piece, granting them the ability to make and justify their artistic choices. Benjamin, and Randall—through translating “A Translator’s Task”—demonstrate that the translator is also an artist who cultivates their own form of art inspired by an original work.

Benjamin’s original work, titled in German, Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, demonstrates that translators and their translations are compared with scrutiny to the source texts from which they take inspiration. The literature of the Classics that has been “accepted” into the canon is overwhelmingly written by European male writers. The phrase, “be faithful to the text,” then turns into a burden rather than a rule of thumb, especially for female and translators of color, who are underrepresented.

This “faithfulness” that Benjamin and many other translation theorists call upon is almost always attributed to Robert Fagles. His translations, namely of the Aeneid and the Odyssey, are viewed as classroom standards, although he does not preserve every aspect of what makes these ancient texts “epic”: for example, the meter in which each work was written. Of course, maintaining meter is a stylistic choice, but one with which he is not met with scrutiny for forgoing. On the other hand, Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, translator of a new version of the  Aeneid published in 2021, held herself to maintaining the dactylic hexameter through keeping every English line of her translation to six feet.[10] Her faithfulness to the text takes another dimension by bringing the meter back to life, in spoken English.

Image of Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer and her translation of the Aeneid.[11]

Yet, Fagles is the one whom society deems synonymous to translation.. The Los Angeles Times opens a 1991 article, commemorating Fagles’ translation of the Iliad, with the words, “Robert Fagles’ translation of the Iliad opens with rage–the word he’s certain is perfect, the English equivalent he believes Homer would have chosen to launch his epic poem.”[12] The title of this article, “Practicing the Art of Losing Nothing in Translation,” also implies that Fagles is an artist who transcends barriers between languages.

The Los Angeles Times supports a 20th century translator, Robert Fagles, as being on par with Homer. Even the identity of Homer is often debated, as part of the so-called Homeric question.[13] The possibility that the name may stand in for multiple people further plays into the reverence of Fagles and his “Homeric swagger,” a phrase posthumously attributed to him by the New York Times.[14] Such a claim has yet to be made about Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, demonstrating the ways in which male translators have been widely and more readily praised while female translations have been largely ignored.

 

Imaan Ansari is a high school junior at Trinity School in New York City. Her parents immigrated to the US from India, so her experiences as a woman of color and as a first-generation American influence her passion for investigating and amplifying the contributions of minority groups to the Classics. Imaan has taken Latin for six years. She is also fluent in Hindi and Urdu, and aspires to study Sanskrit. At school, Imaan serves on the Student Senate, fulfilling roles such as Chair of Finance, overseeing the student budget, and Speaker, communicating the Senate’s initiatives to students, faculty, and staff. Imaan is the Editor-in-Chief of Diversion, the Modern Language magazine, and the Editor-in-Chief of Symposium, the Classics publication. She is the President of Classics Club and also leads a free peer Latin tutoring service. Outside of Classics, Imaan enjoys playing golf, as captain of the Varsity team, and has been playing violin in various orchestras for over ten years

notes

[1] Benjamin, W., and Randall, S. (2012) “The Translator’s Task,” in The Translation Studies Reader, L. Venuti (ed.). Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 69–75.

[2] Ibid., 75.

[3] Ibid., 76.

[4] Ibid., 77.

[5] Ibid., 76.

[6] Ibid., 76.

[7] Ibid., 71.

[8] See also Apter, E.S. (2006) “Nothing is Translatable,” in The Translation Zone: A new comparative literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 85–94.

[9] Nabugodi, M. (2014) Pure language 2.0: Walter Benjamin’s theory of language and Translation Technology, Feedback. Available at: https://openhumanitiespress.org/feedback/literature/pure-language-2-0-walter-benjamins-theory-of-language-and-translation-technology/ (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[10] Demanski, L. (2021) “A New Aeneid translation channels Vergil’s ‘pure Latin,’” University of Chicago News. Available at: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/new-aeneid-translation-channels-vergils-pure-latin (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[11] https://thevisualist.org/2021/02/shadi-bartsch-the-aeneid/

[12] Sandomir, R. (1991) “Practicing the Art of Losing Nothing in Translation,” Los Angeles Times, 6 January. Available at: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-01-06-vw-10476-story.html (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[13] West, M. (2011) “The Homeric Question Today,” JSTOR. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23208780 (Accessed: 21 August 2023).

[14] McGrath, C. (2008) “Robert Fagles, Translator of the Classics, Dies at 74,” New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/books/29fagles.html (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

Translation, Authority, and Reception 1: Facing up to Racism and Sexism in Classical Epic

~ imaanansari19 ~ Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a four-part essay on  reception of minoritized translators of Classical Epic Poetry by Imaan Ansari.

Being a translator without being an interpreter is close to impossible. The following entities are only examples of the factors affecting the decisions that a translator makes: the author of the original work, the respective audience for which this author wrote in mind, and the audience that receives the translation upon publication. No translator is completely impartial—otherwise, all translations would be the same.

When it comes to ancient literature, the progression by which translations are differently received throughout time can be understood through the prism of  “Classical reception,” a phenomenon that also crafts the archetype of the accepted or ideal translator [[1]]. Perceived legitimacy has its own allure within the Classics since authority as a classicist or translator is often less affected by the content of a person’s contributions, but rather, their identity and background. Classical reception, in conjunction with perceived legitimacy, allows us to interrogate the ways in which a person’s gender or race affects their reputation as a translator. The media and institutions of higher education promote literature of the Greco-Roman or “Western” Classics, which are then overwhelmingly analyzed and translated by authors of the same backgrounds. These texts become canonized, and in turn, so do their authors, but only a few translators are met with the same respect and reverence. 

Classical reception is a double-edged sword, as the reaction which a piece of literature elicits pertains to both the original and translated work. Because the Classics look far back into antiquity, the authors of well-known works, such as Homer of the Odyssey or Vergil of the Aeneid, have passed away though their works have not. Although some may see “the death of the author” as a relinquishing of control over their work, the translator very much has the integrity of the original author’s work in their mind, whether by choice or because of the pressures relating to  reception [[2]]. “Faithfulness” to the text then becomes a tough pill to swallow, since what if the lessons taught in the original piece would not be well received or even inappropriate for the present day and age?[[3]]

The decisions that a translator must make concerns the reception of their translation in addition to the threshold acceptance of the original work. Trevor Ross asserts that the “stewardship of an established authority or institution” drives the loftiness of the canon forward[[4]] An elite class of literature and authors grandfather in translators who then assume a spot in the hierarchy of the many people who have interacted with ancient text. The translator always has to straddle faithfulness to the text in the larger context of faithfulness to the canon, as they are entering a conversation about texts that have stood the test of time. 

In this first post, I will focus on how classicists grapple with the racism and sexism present within ancient epic and the history of translating epic. The experiences of translators influence either implicitly or explicitly the way in which they choose to render a story. Using comparative analysis and recourse to translation theory, I will discuss how a growing group of marginalized translators and translators in Classics emphasize the political valences of their craft in order to  stand in solidarity against marginalization. They have shown that, while no translation is perfect, certain translation choices can perpetuate outdated dynamics. Ultimately, by exploring these dynamics, I intend to show that adopting this mindset allows translators to more effectively grapple with the multiple levels of marginalization that may be present both within the texts and in their own careers.  

Image of Arshia Sattar, 2017

Arshia Sattar, translator of the Ramayana from Sanskrit to English, has spoken on the traditional and almost ritualistic aspect of translating the Classics in a recent interview [[5]]. Sattar states that one is “rarely” the first translator, but is extremely definitive with the phrase “[one] will certainly not be the last” [[6]]. The so-called “first” translator from a certain background—the first female translator of a specific work, the first translator of color of a specific work—is often met with the response of making a person or their accomplishment out to merely be a symbol. The reduction of the“first” translator into a symbol ushers in societal acceptance to undermine previous scholarship and interaction with the original work, often from the demographic that the “first” person is alleged to represent. When they are recognized, women and people of color in the field of translation are often labeled as the first person of their respective minority to have completed such a commendable task.

The industry of translation then falls into a trap of representation: that a certain individual person speaks for all who share their background, undervaluing and discouraging subsequent contributions with the fear that they do not have the stamp of validation that is “being first.” If translation is not a transaction or a competition, shouldn’t being the “first” translator in whatever respect be irrelevant? Yet, if there were no more “first” translators, the industry of translation would cater to a smaller audience due to the more conservative elements of its history in the Classics especially. Translation would not live up to the global and diverse medium on which the industry prides itself. 

The act of making someone a “first” permeates into the media’s reception of translations. The earlier quote from Arshia Sattar is from an interview that solicited the contributions of three notable female translators of different classical traditions. Words Without Borders, the publication that conducted this interview, strives to represent and give voice to those that are traditionally marginalized or silenced in literary fields [[7]]. The interviewer, Alta Price, curated responses from Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Odyssey, and Sholeh Wolpé, translator of Sufi poet Attar’s The Conference of The Birds, in addition to Arshia Sattar. Words Without Borders works to dismantle the influence of tokenism in translation by discussing a wide variety of works and allowing many different women to share their experiences, to work against the notion of a “female translator.” Price has therefore called for a Women in Translation movement, which is driven by the fact that there should be a standard in which society should see women: the same way as everyone else [[8]].

Tokenism, “the practice of doing something only to prevent criticism and give the appearance that people are treated fairly,” deeply relates to the representation, and often lack thereof, of women and people of color in respected echelons of the Classics. In an interview conducted at Vanderbilt University on tokenism in the corporate world, a member of the panel made the statement, “Intent is important,” encapsulating the difference between an organization that circulates tokenism versus one that advocates sincerely for equal representation [[9]] Applying logic to the premise of the interview at Words Without Borders, three women were chosen, besides the fact that they represent different languages, because they each grapple with the way in which society views them, in addition to and often more so than their translations. In turn, minoritized translators are more likely to fear how they will be received than how their translation will be received. Samia Mehrez (“Translating Gender”)[[10]] and Sherry Simon (“Gender in Translation”)[[11]] are among the many female scholars who have theorized gender in translation as well, having to bear in mind the skewed expectations for a female translator within the field of Classics. 

Imaan Ansari is a high school junior at Trinity School in New York City. Her parents immigrated to the US from India, so her experiences as a woman of color and as a first-generation American influence her passion for investigating and amplifying the contributions of minority groups to the Classics. Imaan has taken Latin for six years. She is also fluent in Hindi and Urdu, and aspires to study Sanskrit. At school, Imaan serves on the Student Senate, fulfilling roles such as Chair of Finance, overseeing the student budget, and Speaker, communicating the Senate’s initiatives to students, faculty, and staff. Imaan is the Editor-in-Chief of Diversion, the Modern Language magazine, and the Editor-in-Chief of Symposium, the Classics publication. She is the President of Classics Club and also leads a free peer Latin tutoring service. Outside of Classics, Imaan enjoys playing golf, as captain of the Varsity team, and has been playing violin in various orchestras for over ten years

[1] Martindale, C. (1993) Redeeming the text: Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[2] Barthes, R. (1967) The birth of ‘the death of the author’ – JSTOR. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24238249 (Accessed: 14 August 2023).

[3]  Irigaray, L. (2002) “On Faithfulness in Translating,” in Luce Irigaray presents international, intercultural, intergenerational dialogues around her work. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 32–41.

[4]  Ross, T. (1996) “Dissolution and the making of the English literary canon,” JSTOR, Renaissance and Reformation. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43445609 (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[5] Price, A. (2018) “Women Translating the Classics,” Words Without Borders. Available at: https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2018-08/women-translating-the-classics-emily-wilson-sholeh-wolpe-arshia-sattar/ (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[6]  ibid.

[7] Words Without Borders. (2003) Available at: https://wordswithoutborders.org/about/mission/ (Accessed: 23 August 2023).

[8] Ibid.

[9]  Sherrer, K. (2018) “What is tokenism, and why does it matter in the workplace?” Vanderbilt Business School. Available at:

[10] Mehrez, S. (2007) “Translating gender,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/97559176/Translating_Gender (Accessed: 20 August 2023).

[11] Simon, S. (1996) “Taking Gendered Positions in Translation Theory,” in Gender in Translation. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis.

Prophet of Evils

~ sententiaeantiquae ~ Leave a comment

Reading Iphigenia Into and Out of the Iliad

At the beginning of the Iliad, Agamemnon refusers to honor the ransom request of Chryses for his daughter Chryseis and this prompts the “rage of Apollo” and the plague that initiates the epic’s conflict. When Achilles calls an assembly after nine days of suffering, the poem introduces the seer Calchas:

Homer, Iliad 1.69-72

"Kalkhas the son of Thestor, the best of the bird-men readers
who knew what is, what will be, and what was before,
and lead the ships of the Achaeans to Troy
through the power of prophecy Phoibos Apollo granted him.

Κάλχας Θεστορίδης οἰωνοπόλων ὄχ' ἄριστος, 
ὃς ᾔδη τά τ' ἐόντα τά τ' ἐσσόμενα πρό τ' ἐόντα,  
καὶ νήεσσ' ἡγήσατ' ᾿Αχαιῶν ῎Ιλιον εἴσω 
ἣν διὰ μαντοσύνην, τήν οἱ πόρε Φοῖβος ᾿Απόλλων·

The scholia to this passage suggest that Calchas led them to Troy and prophesied that it would take 10 years (a story told by Odysseus in Iliad 2). After Calchas speaks, however, Agamemnon’s aggressive response has prompted many questions:

Iliad 1.106-9

"Prophet of evils, you've never said anything good for me!
It's always dear to your thoughts to prophesy wicked things--
you never utter or complete any kind of noble word!"

μάντι κακῶν οὐ πώ ποτέ μοι τὸ κρήγυον εἶπας· 
αἰεί τοι τὰ κάκ' ἐστὶ φίλα φρεσὶ μαντεύεσθαι, 
ἐσθλὸν δ' οὔτέ τί πω εἶπας ἔπος οὔτ' ἐτέλεσσας·

Schol. T. ad Hom. Il. 1.106b

“The poet does not know the name Iphigenia. Since it is not known, then this is not an issue of a falsification, but [Agamemnon] is speaking his slander because of the delay of the victory.”

τὸ γὰρ ᾿Ιφιγενείας ὄνομα οὐδὲ οἶδεν ὁ ποιητής. ἐπεὶ οὖν οὐ κατέγνωσται, οὐ ψευδῆ αὐτόν, ἀλλὰ κακόφημόν φησι διὰ τὴν ἀναβολὴν τῆς νίκης·

The D Scholia (to lines 108=109b) insist that the “younger poets” (neoteroi i.e., later accounts) tell the story of Calchas’ prophecy at Aulis. Whether or not ‘Homer’ ‘knew’ the tale is immaterial, I think, because later audiences certainly knew it and could have attributed the tension in book 1 to that event. The Homeric Iliad is perfectly capable of suppressing details that serve its own ends; and ancient scholars are equally capable of taking Homeric poetry at its face value. The question for me is how does it change our reading of the Iliad to imagine that we could be thinking about Iphigenia.

At one level, this might be too much: there’s already a sufficient thematic pattern in a leader (here, a king) at odds with an expert with unwanted knowledge (here, a prophet). Consider, for example, the similar beginning to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. However, it seems to me highly unlikely that audiences of the fifth century did not think of Iphigenia at the beginning of the poem. Homer “not knowing” the name Iphigenia could mean simply that; or, it could be one of many examples of Homeric poetry downplaying details that are not convenient to its plot. A clear allusion to a sacrificed daughter might change the way we think of Agamemnon when he refuses to return a daughter at the beginning of the poem.

The sacrifice of Iphigenia is a pivotal moment in the tale of the House of Atreus—it motivates Agamemnon’s murder and in turn the matricide of Orestes—and the Trojan War, functioning as it does as a strange sacrifice of a virgin daughter of Klytemnestra in exchange for passage for a fleet to regain the adulteress Helen, Iphigeneia’s aunt by both her father and mother. The account is famous in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and the plays Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia among the Taurians by Euripides. Its earliest accounts, however, provide some interesting variations:

Hes. Fr. 23.13-30

“Agamemnon, lord of men, because of her beauty,

Married the dark-eyed daughter of Tyndareus, Klytemnestra.
She gave birth to fair-ankled Iphimede in her home
And Elektra who rivaled the goddesses in beauty.
But the well-greaved Achaeans butchered Iphimede
on the altar of thundering, golden-arrowed Artemis
on that day when they sailed with ships to Ilium
in order to exact payment for fair-ankled Argive woman—
they butchered a ghost. But the deer-shooting arrow-mistress
easily rescued her and anointed her head
with lovely ambrosia so that her flesh would be enduring—
She made her immortal and ageless for all days.
Now the races of men upon the earth call her
Artemis of the roads, the servant of the famous arrow-mistress.
Last in her home, dark-eyed Klytemnestra gave birth
after being impregnated by Agamemnon to Orestes,
who, once he reached maturity, paid back the murderer of his father
and killed his mother as well with pitiless bronze.”

γ̣ῆμ̣[ε δ’ ἑὸν διὰ κάλλος ἄναξ ἀνδρ]ῶν ᾿Αγαμέμνων
κού[ρην Τυνδαρέοιο Κλυταιμήσ]τρην κυανῶπ[ιν•
ἣ̣ τ̣[έκεν ᾿Ιφιμέδην καλλίσφυ]ρον ἐν μεγάρο[ισιν
᾿Ηλέκτρην θ’ ἣ εἶδος ἐρήριστ’ ἀ[θανά]τηισιν.
᾿Ιφιμέδην μὲν σφάξαν ἐυκνή[μ]ιδες ᾿Αχαιοὶ
βωμῶ[ι ἔπ’ ᾿Αρτέμιδος χρυσηλακ]ά̣τ[ου] κελαδεινῆς,
ἤματ[ι τῶι ὅτε νηυσὶν ἀνέπλ]εον̣ ῎Ιλιον ε̣[ἴσω
ποινὴ[ν τεισόμενοι καλλισ]φύρου ᾿Αργειώ̣[νη]ς̣,
εἴδω[λον• αὐτὴν δ’ ἐλαφηβό]λο̣ς ἰοχέαιρα
ῥεῖα μάλ’ ἐξεσά[ωσε, καὶ ἀμβροσ]ίην [ἐρ]ατ̣ε̣[ινὴν
στάξε κατὰ κρῆ[θεν, ἵνα οἱ χ]ρ̣ὼς̣ [ἔ]μ̣πε[δ]ο̣[ς] ε̣[ἴη,
θῆκεν δ’ ἀθάνατο[ν καὶ ἀγήρ]αον ἤμα[τα πάντα.
τὴν δὴ νῦν καλέο[υσιν ἐπὶ χ]θ̣ονὶ φῦλ’ ἀν̣[θρώπων
῎Αρτεμιν εἰνοδί[ην, πρόπολον κλυ]τοῦ ἰ[ο]χ[ε]αίρ[ης.
λοῖσθον δ’ ἐν μεγά[ροισι Κλυτ]αιμ̣ή̣στρη κυα[νῶπις
γείναθ’ ὑποδμηθ[εῖσ’ ᾿Αγαμέμν]ον[ι δῖ]ον ᾿Ορέ[στην,
ὅς ῥα καὶ ἡβήσας ἀπε̣[τείσατο π]ατροφο[ν]ῆα,
κτεῖνε δὲ μητέρα [ἣν ὑπερήν]ορα νηλέι [χαλκῶι.

This fragment presents what is possibly the earliest account of the tale of Iphigenia and contains the major elements: the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter is tied to vengeance against Helen; the daughter is rescued by Artemis, made immortal and made her servant. [In some traditions she is either made immortal or made into a priestess of Artemis at Tauris]. Orestes kills the murderer of his father and his mother.

Note that several details are not spelled out, but assumed: namely, Agamemnon’s agency in the death of his daughter (either in angering the goddess or in arranging her sacrifice) and the murder of Agamemnon. Note as well, the name is different: here we have Iphimedê instead of Iphigeneia. Of course, the situation gets stranger: according to Pausanias (1.43.1) Artemis turned Iphigeneia into Hekate. According to Proclus (in his Chrestomathia, “useful knowledge”; 135-143), the story was told in the Kypria as follows:

“When the fleet gathered a second time at Aulis, Agamemnon struck a deer while hunting and claimed he had surpassed Artemis. The goddess, enraged, kept them from sailing by sending storms. When Kalkhas explained the origin of the goddess’s anger and called for Iphigeneia to be sacrificed to Artemis, they attempted to complete the sacrifice by sending for her with the pretext of a marriage to Achilles. But Artemis snatched her away and settled her among the Taurians and made her immortal; she put a deer in place of the girl on the altar.”

καὶ τὸ δεύτερον ἠθροισμένου τοῦ στόλου ἐν Αὐλίδι ᾿Αγαμέμνων ἐπὶ θηρῶν βαλὼν ἔλαφον ὑπερβάλλειν ἔφησε καὶ τὴν ῎Αρτεμιν. μηνίσασα δὲ ἡ θεὸς ἐπέσχεν αὐτοὺς τοῦ πλοῦ χειμῶνας ἐπιπέμπουσα. Κάλχαντος δὲ εἰπόντος τὴν τῆς θεοῦ μῆνιν καὶ ᾿Ιφιγένειαν κελεύσαντος θύειν τῇ ᾿Αρτέμιδι, ὡς ἐπὶ γάμον αὐτὴν ᾿Αχιλλεῖ μεταπεμψάμενοι θύειν ἐπιχειροῦσιν. ῎Αρτεμις δὲ αὐτὴν ἐξαρπάσασα εἰς Ταύρους μετακομίζει καὶ ἀθάνατον ποιεῖ, ἔλαφον δὲ ἀντὶ τῆς κόρης παρίστησι τῷ βωμῷ.

In the fifth century, the story becomes a little more consistent: Aeschylus’ account is probably the best known (Agamemnon, 229-249) but Pindar discusses it too (Pyth. 11.22-28)

“Was it the fact that Iphigeneia

was butchered far from her homeland at Euripos
that incited [Klytemnestra’s] heavy-handed rage?
Or did nocturnal sex, breaking her to another’s bed,
lead her astray? That is most hateful
and intractable in young wives—but it is impossible to hide
because of other people’s tongues:
Townsfolk are gossip-mongers.”

… πότερόν νιν ἄρ’ ᾿Ιφιγένει’ ἐπ’ Εὐρίπῳ
σφαχθεῖσα τῆλε πάτρας
ἔκνισεν βαρυπάλαμον ὄρσαι χόλον;
ἢ ἑτέρῳ λέχεϊ δαμαζομέναν
ἔννυχοι πάραγον κοῖται; τὸ δὲ νέαις ἀλόχοις
ἔχθιστον ἀμπλάκιον καλύψαι τ’ ἀμάχανον
ἀλλοτρίαισι γλώσσαις•
κακολόγοι δὲ πολῖται.

Sophokles, who also wrote an Iphigeneia (lost), has Elektra defend her father’s decision by portraying him as accidentally killing the deer and having no choice in the killing of his daughter (Elektra, 563-576).

The situation with the naming of the daughters of Agamemnon is a bit knotty. In the Iliad he declares: “I have three daughters in my well-made home / Khrysothemis, Laodikê, and Iphianassa” (τρεῖς δέ μοί εἰσι θύγατρες ἐνὶ μεγάρῳ εὐπήκτῳ / Χρυσόθεμις καὶ Λαοδίκη καὶ ᾿Ιφιάνασσα, 9.144-145) whereas the Hesiodic fragment cited above lists only two (Elektra and Iphimedê). Some scholars have assumed that Homer suppresses the sacrifice of Iphigeneia (although the events of the epic’s first book seem to rely on that tension). According to Aelian the name Elektra was a pejorative nickname for Laodikê (Varia Historia, 4.26):

“Xanthus the lyric poet—the one who was older than Stesikhoros—says that the daughter of Agamemnon Elektra did not have that name at first, but instead was Laodikê. After Agamemnon was killed and Aigisthos married Klytemnestra and was king, because she was “unbedded” (a-lektron) and was growing old as a virgin, the Argives called her Elektra because she didn’t have a husband and had no experience of a marriage bed.”

Ξάνθος ὁ ποιητὴς τῶν μελῶν (ἐγένετο δὲ οὗτος πρεσβύτερος Στησιχόρου τοῦ ῾Ιμεραίου) λέγει τὴν ᾿Ηλέκτραν τοῦ ᾿Αγαμέμνονος οὐ τοῦτο ἔχειν τοὔνομα πρῶτον ἀλλὰ Λαοδίκην. ἐπεὶ δὲ ᾿Αγαμέμνων ἀνῃρέθη, τὴν δὲ Κλυταιμνήστραν ὁ Αἴγισθος ἔγημε καὶ ἐβασίλευσεν, ἄλεκτρον οὖσαν καὶ καταγηρῶσαν παρθένον ᾿Αργεῖοι ᾿Ηλέκτραν ἐκάλεσαν διὰ τὸ ἀμοιρεῖν ἀνδρὸς καὶ μὴ πεπειρᾶσθαι λέκτρου.

Aeschylus in his Libation-Bearers gives Agamemnon only Elektra. Sophokles and Euripides preserve Khrysothemis. Strangely, according to one scholion, the lost Kypria named both Iphigeneia and Iphianassa as Agamemnon’s daughters. West (2013, 110) concludes that in this tradition (following Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon once had four daughters).

photograph of a wall painting showing the sacrifice of ipihgenia including a nube girl in the arms of three male figures, a woman with her head covered, and a partial image of Artemis with a deer in the sky
Fourth Style fresco depicting the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii, Naples National Archaeological Museum

Sources:
Timothy Gantz. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore, 1993.
Bryan Hainsworth. The Iliad: A Commentary. III: books 9-12. Cambridge, 1993.
R. Merkelbach and M. L. West. Hesiodea Fragmenta. Oxford, 1967.
Glenn Most. Hesiod: The Shield, Catalogue of Women, Other Fragments. Cambridge, 2003.
M. L. West. The Epic Cycle. Oxford, 2013.

Greek Studies

~ mabati24 ~ 1 Comment

Some reflections from a student who took Greek for the first time this summer

“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.” –Aristotle

 

We’ve all experienced times throughout when education feels simply bitter, with the fruits that are promised to come not even on the horizon. In other words, any time a test rolls around or a paper is due. And yet, nearly every time, the relief of being done is a sweet enough fruit, and the realization that at least some significant learning was done is just a cherry on top. In no other area of study have I experienced feelings of bitterness towards education followed by enjoyment of its fruits in such rapid succession than in learning Ancient Greek. 

As a lifelong Latin student, I admittedly thought that the first few classes, and even weeks, of my Ancient Greek course would be a breeze. Sure Latin and Greek were different languages, but they both fell under the Classics umbrella and used similar grammatical structures that are now second nature to my Latin oriented brain. However, I failed to account for a primary aspect of Greek: its alphabet. Most people, especially Classics students, know some of the Greek letters, like alpha, beta, or delta. Those in particular are familiar to English and Latin speakers, given that they closely resemble A, B, and D. It’s the rest of the alphabet that gave me, and most of my classmates, fits. 

Many of the letters were completely foreign shapes that represented unfamiliar sounds. Some contracted sounds, such as ‘th’ and ‘ps’ are simply one letter, with many letters out of order from our standard English alphabet, and some letters like ‘h’ even being shown by an accent mark rather than a letter. So when we were asked to read aloud and translate Greek words, I found myself first transforming the characters into their approximate English counterparts to read them aloud, and then translating them into their English definitions. Not only is pronunciation not stressed at all in Latin, the altered alphabet made each word feel like an enormous hurdle. 

However, as is Aristotle’s golden rule of education, the sweet fruits came not far behind. After a few hours of dutiful practice, both with classmates and alone, I became well acquainted with the formerly alien Ancient Greek letters. I can’t say it has become second nature, because to be frank I’m not sure if it ever will, but my fear of reading Greek words aloud has reduced dramatically. Unfortunately, that relief has been short lived, as our course has carried on to the minutiae of the language: declensions, conjugations, and articles. Yet, the immediate swing from bitterness to sweetness gives hope for further enjoyment of the Greek language. 

“The happy man is the one with a healthy body, a wealthy soul and a well-educated nature” –Thales

Many philosophers throughout human history have spoken to the joy that is necessary to properly learn and live, and that the happiest people are those who are the most educated. While this notion feels at times preposterous, I find that it is especially true when students are allowed to thoroughly learn the material that interests them at their own speed. 

picture of the greek alphabet with upper and lower case letters

By choosing an Ancient Greek course for the first time this summer, I have gone back to the basics of any language: vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. And while I have little memory of doing similar exercises to learn English, I can remember building the foundations of Latin nearly six years ago. However, I have now reached the Latin stage where classes and homeworks are dominated solely by translations– I have a dictionary on hand, because at this point there’s no time to study more vocab, and whenever I see an infinitive verb, I just assume that the author is using some form of indirect speech. To be frank, I don’t think I’ve seen any form of “esse” in years. This ease I feel with Latin has helped me read increasingly complex texts and perform more adept analysis, but the fundamentals of the language have certainly been a bit lost. 

During my experiences with Greek this summer, however, I have made a genuine commitment to understanding each and every aspect of the sentences I translate. I, of course, want to be precise with my vocabulary translations, but rather than simply trying to get through as many sentences as possible, and half-heartedly moving on from any phrases that don’t quite make sense, I’m trying to actually figure out what I don’t quite understand. While these goals have certainly made learning Greek more time consuming than I originally anticipated, it has actually brought considerable joy to me. For the first time in years I feel less of a time crunch to get through material, and therefore increased enjoyment and fulfillment in learning the material.

 

I’ve often heard people discuss the extreme difficulty of the English language, and that, most of the time, it simply makes very little sense. From the spelling of our words to the grammatical structure of our sentences, English is often considered one of the hardest languages to learn. However, I don’t think that I personally understood why that was until I returned to the fundamentals of Ancient Greek.

stylized head of greek philosopher

Latin and Greek are the two foreign languages I have studied the most, and both have a calculated, almost mathematical, structure. Since the case of a noun or adjective determines what the word’s role in the sentence is, we as readers can identify each word’s job purely by looking at the ending. The same is true for verbs, as the ending tells us the person, number, tense, and mood of the verb all within a few letters at the end of the word. And while these rules, of course, have many exceptions, even those exceptions have trends that can be studied and then identified when looking at a sentence. In general, one can learn the languages by studying paradigms and grammar charts, in addition to practicing translating sentences. These paradigms are so accurate, in fact, that often personal pronouns and “to be” verbs can be omitted. The ancient Latin and Greek texts even had no spaces between words, punctuation, or capital letters; however, readers could still understand the material because of the steadfast rules of the languages. 

These immovable, easily explainable rules seem to be what’s missing from English. Most of the reasoning behind why certain words look the way they do or function in a particular manner is because that’s just the way it works (in word order). There’s not a easy declension or case system for all English nouns and adjectives, verbs don’t share common endings that allow one to identify their syntax, and spelling feels, at times, completely arbitrary. We have so many words that are spelled the same with different meanings or have the same pronunciation with different meanings that we categorize them: homographs and homophones. While not everyone has a mathematically-oriented brain, the calculated approach Latin and Greek take to grammar certainly makes them easier to wrap our heads around, in addition to highlighting the outright confusing nature of English. 
screen shot of a greek exercise

screen shot of a greek exercise

Having now completed my Introductory Greek summer course, I am able to reflect on the most impactful aspects that I took away from the class. While learning a new language always provides a new window into how we think about various dialects, grammar, and vocabulary, I find that learning a Classical language gives an additional perspective that modern languages cannot supply. By learning a dead language, I, and all Classics students, are forced to examine how life was when Ancient Greek was the common denominator. I briefly took a Spanish course in middle school, and I recall the translation passages consisting of dialogue between people getting food at a market, or walking down a city street; however, the Greek passages consist of philosophical debates between philosophers of the time, or strenuous journeys across dangerous seas in triremes. In uncovering these events that are so foreign to the modern eye, I am truly taking a history course along with a language course. This multifaceted learning experience certainly gives me genuine interest and enjoyment in translating large volumes of text. 

In addition, as I made my way through the unique, and admittedly odd, stories, I was forced to make somewhat of a human connection with the characters. For example, many of our passages involved a character who lived his life as Homer would, and frequently quoted the great poet. While his antics were at times confusing, I would always become a little more alert and absorbed in the text when he, and his Homeric philosophies, appeared in the passages. These little nuances, that can really be found only in the texts of Classical, dead languages, showcase the human interest that learning Ancient Greek provides. Looking forward, such connections to the text has greatly heightened my fascination with the Classics as a whole, and encouraged me to dive deeper into the field. 

Stylized painting of the ruins of the Parthenon emerging into the sun

My name is Matthew Abati, and I am a rising high school senior at Milton Academy just outside of Boston. I have been a Classics lover since middle school and am very excited to share some of my thoughts on the Classics here on Sententiae Antiquae! When I’m not in school, I love to read all types of books and play all types of sports.