The Ingenious Language

Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek

Andrea Marcolongo, Will Schutt

• Publisher: Europa Compass
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781609455460
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Ensayos literarios

An Italian journalist pleads her case for learning ancient Greek in modern times. For word nerds, language loons, and grammar geeks, an impassioned and informative literary leap into the wonders of the Greek language. Here are nine ways Greek can transform your relationship to time and to those around you, nine reflections on the language of Sappho, Plato, and Thucydides, and its relevance to our lives today, nine chapters that will leave readers with a new passion for a very old language, nine epic reasons to love Greek. The Ingenious Language is a love song dedicated to the language of history's greatest poets, philosophers, adventurers, lovers, adulterers, and generals. Greek, as Marcolongo explains in her buoyant and entertaining prose, is unsurpassed in its beauty and expressivity, but it can also offer us new ways of seeing the world and our place in it. She takes readers on an astonishing journey, at the end of which, while it may still be Greek to you, you'll have nine reasons to be glad it is. No batteries or prior knowledge of Greek required! Praise for The Ingenious Language "Andrea Marcolongo is today's Montaigne. She possesses an amazing familiarity with the classics combined with the ease and lightness of those who surf the web." —André Aciman, New York Times –bestselling author of Find Me "[Marcolongo's] declaration of love for Ancient Greek does more than celebrate the virtues of its grammar, it shows us modern fools how this language can help us understand ourselves better and live a better life." — Le Monde (France)

THE INGENIOUS
LANGUAGE

INTRODUCTION

The sea burns the masks;

the salt sets them on fire.

Men and all their masks

blaze up on the shore.

You alone will outlive

the conflagration of Carnival.

You alone, unmasked, conceal

the art by which we live.

—GIORGIO CAPRONI, from Chronicle

It is “strange”—very strange—writes Virginia Woolf, “that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say.” Strange because “in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh.”1

I’m strange too—very strange.

And I’m grateful for that strangeness, which has led me to write this book about ancient Greek, having had no plan to—and no plan is always the best plan. I pushed myself not only to increase my knowledge of Greek, but also to talk about it.

To you. From the bottom of the class (naturally) to this; but at least now I have an idea about where precisely we ought to laugh.

Dead language and living language.

Bane of high-school students and adventures of Ulysses.

Translation and hieroglyph.

Comedy and tragedy.

Understanding and misunderstanding.

Most of all, love and hate.

Revolt, then.

Coming to understand Greek is like learning how to live your life: not a question of talent but of determination.

I have written these pages because I fell in love with Greek when I was a young girl. That makes it the longest romance of my life, when all is said and done.

Now that I am a grown woman, I would like to try to kindle (or rekindle) the romance in those who fell out of love with it, in all those who encountered this language for adults when they were just kids in a classroom. I’d even like to make sparks fly in those who have no previous knowledge of the language.

This book is about love: love for a language and, more importantly, for the human beings who speak it. Or, if no one speaks it anymore, for those who study it either because they are forced to or because they find themselves irresistibly drawn to it.

It does not matter if you know ancient Greek or not. There are no exams or pop quizzes attached to this book, though there are surprises. Loads of them.

Nor does it matter whether you studied the classics in school. All the better if you didn’t. Should I succeed in guiding you through the labyrinth of Greek on the wings of my imagination, you’ll arrive at the end of this journey with new ways of thinking about the world and your life—whatever language you use to articulate them.

If you did study it, even better. Should I manage to answer the questions you’ve never asked or that you never had answered, maybe when you’re done reading this you’ll have recovered parts of yourself that you lost growing up and studying Greek without really understanding why, and maybe those parts will turn out to be useful to you now.

In either case, these pages are a way for you and me to take a crack at thinking in ancient Greek.

Over the course of our lives, all of us encounter Greek and the Greeks at one time or another. Some of us with our legs tucked under a school desk, others while watching a tragedy or comedy unfold at the theater, others still in the cool white corridors of the world’s many museums—in each case, what it actually meant to be Greek is no more vivid and alive to us than a marble statue.

Sooner or later, each one of us is told, “Everything beautiful and unparalleled that has been said or done in the world was said or done by the ancient Greeks first.” And, therefore, said or done in ancient Greek. Told may be the wrong word, since, at least if you grew up anywhere in Europe, for more than two millennia this idea has been embedded under our skin and in our minds.

Almost no one has direct knowledge of ancient Greek; the one thing we can be certain of is that there are no more ancient Greeks who speak ancient Greek. We have only heard that it was spoken and never heard the language itself. That’s how things have stood for centuries.

Meaning, this apparent Greek cultural inheritance has been generously handed down to us by an ancient race that we don’t understand in an ancient language we don’t understand.

How extraordinary.

It is terrible to be told you must love a subject that you don’t understand; you immediately hate the subject.

The sight of the Parthenon marbles or the Greek Theater of Syracuse fills us with pride, as if these ancient Greek relics were the work of our ancestors, of our distant great-great-great grandparents. We like to imagine them under the sun on some island, busy inventing philosophy or history, or attending a tragedy or comedy at a theater on the side of a hill, or admiring the starry sky at night and discovering science and astronomy.

Yet deep down we always feel like we’re on shaky ground, as if we were being tested on something quite foreign to us, as if we had forgotten some important chapter on ancient Greece. And that chapter that now seems foreign to us is the Greek language.

“A Greek,” writes Nikos Dimou in all his unhappy glory, “a strange, absurd, tragic moment in the history of humanity.”

Not only do we approach our ancient Greek cultural inheritance as a dispossessed, ill-equipped people, but if we try to claim a shred of what “Greekness” has handed down to us, we become victims of a backwards and obtuse education system (in my “bottom of the class” opinion, which, after this book, might earn me an F and expulsion).

The classics, at least as they’re taught in Italy, appear to have no other goal than to keep the Greeks and their Greek as inaccessible as possible, high up on Olympus, mute, glorious, and clouded by a reverential awe that often turns into divine terror and very earthly desperation.

Current teaching methods, with the exception of those practiced by a handful of enlightened teachers, guarantee that anyone who dares to approach Greek will hate the language rather than love it. The result is total surrender before a heritage that we no longer want to know, because as soon as we bump up against it, our confusion has us running for our lives. Most of us set fire to the ships behind us as soon as we’ve fulfilled our course requirements.

Many readers will shudder to recall their fear and exertion, their anger and frustration with ancient Greek, and recognize their own struggles in mine. Yet this book was written with the conviction that it makes no sense to know something that you don’t remember, especially after five-plus years of sweat and tears.

This book is not, therefore, your conventional guide to ancient Greek. It is neither descriptive nor prescriptive. It makes no claims to be academic (that breed of book has been around for millennia).

Sure, it does demand passion and a willingness to be challenged. It’s a literary (not literal) tale about a few particular aspects of the magnificent and elegant ancient Greek language—its concise, explosive, ironic, open-ended modes of expression, which—let’s be honest—we unconsciously pine for.

Whatever you’ve been told (and more importantly not told), ancient Greek is first and foremost a language.

Every language, and every word of that language, functions to paint a world. And that world is your own. It is thanks to language that you can formulate an idea, give voice to a feeling, communicate how you’re doing, express a desire, listen to a song, write a poem.

In an age where we’re all connected to something and almost never to someone, where words have given way to emojis and other modern-day pictograms, in this increasingly precipitous world where reality is so virtual that we now broadcast our daily lives as we live them, we no longer understand one another, not in deed and not in word.

Language, or what’s left of it, is becoming boring. How many of you have placed a call today, I mean actually dialed a number to hear a human voice, for love? When was the last time you wrote a letter, I mean actually put pen to paper and licked a stamp?

With every hour, the gulf between the meaning of a word and how it is interpreted grows in direct proportion to our regrets and failures, as do our misunderstandings and silences. We are slowly losing the ability to speak a language—any language. The ability to understand and make ourselves understood. To put complex things into plain, honest, simple words. Abilities ancient Greek had in spades.

It might seem strange (I said at the outset I was strange) but reading this book about Greek could come in handy for your daily lives (and not just on the occasion of some long overdue class assignment; leave it to life to take care of that). Yes, I mean that ancient Greek. Approached fearlessly (and with a healthy dose of folly), G...