WhenAndrea Marcolongo’s book “La Lingua Geniale, “subtitled” 9 ragioni per amare il greco ”(“ Nine Reasons to Love Greek ”), came out in (*******************************, I bought it, in Italian, and took it with me to Greece. I flashed it at a meeting with some highly accomplished multilingual women. “You read Italian?” One of them asked. Slowly, at a very low level, without full comprehension, I should have said. I had brought the book with me to the island of Rhodes because I thought it would be good practice in both Italian and Greek. I was writinga bookon Greek myself, and the difficulty of Greek made Italian seem transparent in comparison. I had made it to page of the first essay, on aspect — a property of verbs by which the ancient Greeks distinguished between the “how” and the “when” of an action — when I got distracted by a sidebar on Greek wine and decided that I really ought to get out more: take a walk in the Old Town, with its streets named after Socrates and Plato, and check to see if that bar called Beer Paradise had opened for the season.
Still, Marcolongo, a journalist who grew up in Livorno, Italy, and has a degree in classics, did something I had very much wanted to do: she wrote about classical Greek while she was young and freshly enamored of the beauty, economy, and subtlety of the language and passionate about how it can change your life. The book stayed in my luggage — it went to Texas, Auckland, Abu Dhabi, and Cambridge, England, and crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2, where I was sure I would get to it — and at last, three years later, it has been translated into English, by Will Schutt, as “The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek” (Europa Compass). The word “epic” in the subtitle may have been intended to clarify that we’re talking ancient Greek here, the language of epic poetry, and also to convey the excitement of the contemporary usage, as in, say, “an epic boxing match . ”The Italian title,“ La Lingua Geniale, ”may have been inspired by“L’Amica Geniale, ”the blockbuster novel by Elena Ferrante, translated into English by Ann Goldstein as “My Brilliant Friend” (also published by Europa).
One of the things I most admire about “The Ingenious Language” is that it does not spoon-feed the reader. From the first chapter (though they are not really chapters but essays that can be read in any order), Marcolongo serves up healthy portions of Plato in raw Greek, without apology. She provides translations, of course, but insists that “it does not matter if you know ancient Greek or not.” In fact, if you don’t, “all the better” —you can still play with her at “thinking in ancient Greek. ”A subject that I devoted the whole first chapter of my book to — the alphabet — Marcolongo dispenses with in less than a paragraph, in the penultimate essay. “The alphabet is a means of communicatingalanguage, notthelanguage, ”she writes. “All it is is a writing system for getting the sounds of words down on the page.” Yet she acknowledges that “the alphabet barrier” seems “to cloud our view of resemblances between Greek and our own language.”
The nine reasons make for a spread worthy of a symposium. Besides aspect, they include gender, number (Greek famously has not just the singular and plural but also the dual, for things that come in pairs, such as twins or lovers), mood, and diacritical marks (Greek words tend to come front- loaded with flecks over their vowels). In “Cases, or an Orderly Anarchy of Words,” Marcolongo writes eloquently, “Capable of indicating the exact function of words without ambiguities, the ancient Greek case system makes for a formidable spectacle: word order does not follow a logical pattern but an expressive and, therefore, personal pattern. ”Marcolongo loves etymology and often uses it to approach and elucidate a subject. The chapter on case begins, “Inflected, from the Latinflectere, ‘to bend or curve . ‘Meaning’ to change direction. ‘. . . The syntactic role of words is entrusted to changing, or bending, their case endings. ”The chapter on the optative mood, which might be described as a refinement of the subjunctive — it is used to express wishes that may not come true — begins, “Desire. In French désir, in Spanishdeseo, in Portuguesedesejo. From Latindesiderium, from the phrasedesidere, ‘from the stars.’ To gaze at some attractive person or thing as if gazing at the hieroglyphic stars at night. ”Is it just me or is that kind of sexy?
Marcolongo, who looks more like a yoga teacher than a classics professor — she is in her early thirties, with straight blond hair, direct blue eyes, and tattoos, including one of the word “Sarajevsko,” for a brand of beer brewed in Sarajevo, on her left arm — is writing primarily for students of the classics. She tries to allay their fears by telling tales out ofliceo classico, such as the one about the time she bungled a Latin exam by translatingrattoin “Il Ratto Delle Sabine” – “ The Rape of the Sabine Women ”—as“ rats. ”(She was fifteen and did not know the story of how Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome, carried off the Sabine women in order to populate their city. The memory still smarts.) In the chapter on gender, she describes the indignities of growingup with a man’s name. In Italy, “Andrea” is masculine and even comes from the Greek for “man” (andros); at eighteen, Andrea received a draft notice in the mail. In an essay on translation, she assures her students that their study will pay off: “The satisfaction, pride, frustration, and disappointment that learning this language entails make it easier to manage the joy and heartache of adulthood.” She mentions in passing that translating Greek may have saved the semicolon: the Greeks used it in the form of a raised dot; translating complex sentences requires it. The last essay, “Greek and Us: A History,” might well be read first. It traces Greek from its Indo-European prehistory through Homeric Greek, classical Greek, Koine (Greek after Alexander), and modern Greek. In a reversal of history, Marcolongo suggests that the Spartans could have learned a thing or two from the bitter, unending rivalry between Livorno and Pisa. The chapter culminates in the insight that “Greek is the only European language that never evolved into anything other than itself.”
Those of us who live in the United States and speak English are a step further removed from Greek than citizens of Europe, because Latin and the Romance languages absorbed a lot of Greek vocabulary, and English acquired its Greek-derived words through them. Still, the influence of the Greeks is all around us. I have only to go outside to see a truck emblazoned with “Hermes Waste” or “Hercules Laundry” and take a train to midtown to see a show called “Hadestown.” The impeachment drama unfolding in Washington invokes the Framers of the Constitution, who thought long and hard about democracy — rule (kratiaof, by, and for the people (demos– an invention of the Greeks.
It can’t have been easy to translate an Italian book on Greek into English, and Will Schutt deserves a medal for valor. For the quotations from ancient Greek (I assume Marcolongo did her own translations into Italian), Schutt (or his editors) made the sensible decision to rely on the Loeb Classical Library’s dual-language editions. My little bit of Italian made me curious about some of the translator’s other choices. The word “weird” crops up a lot, which is. . . weird. The original has “strano” (strange, peculiar), “curioso“(odd, curious), and”strambo”(eccentric). The phrase “to deal the killshot” also sent me back to the original, where I found “dar loro il colpo di grazia.”In this case, French would have been more idiomatic than English for an American reader:“ deliver the coup de grâce. ”
While checking the translation against the original, I made the happy discovery that my Italian seems to have improved during the three years that I carried around “La Lingua Geniale.” I can read the sidebars — digressions, as in a travel book, on topics such as animal sounds, taboo words, the color blue — and even get a flavor of Marcolongo’s prose: she is charming in Italian. (In a sidebar on “Liceo Classico,” added expressly for the English edition, she mentions that one of the heroines of Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” studies the classics and knows that “the one way to gain independence — as an individual and from your social class — is an education. ”) Marcolongo’s“ La Lingua Geniale ”was a best-seller in Europe, and the author, who now lives in Paris, has since written two more books, the latest on etymology (“ Alla Fonte delle Parole- “At the Source of Words”. Of course, it’s possible that my ease of reading in Italian is a side effect of having studied the translation: once you know what it means, it’s easier to see what it says. So Schutt’s translation does exactly what a trot, or literal translation, does for students of classical Greek: it helps them read — and fall in love with — the original.
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