Paper Fruit

My Greek instructor sometimes has us write short original compositions in Greek in order to play with verbal forms. This frequently results in hijinks and malarky (at least in the groups I tend to be in) and today my compatriots and I earned some kleos when our humble effort was put upon on the board for everyone to admire. Here’s the transcript of our barbarous yet humorous attempt:

Κάσσιδη φοβοῦμαι μὴ αἱ αἵγες ἀφιστᾶσι τοὺς ἵππους κάτα τῶν ἱππέων.

(Cassidy is afraid that the goats will cause the horses to revolt against the horsemen.)

ὦ Μολλῆ, τίθει τὰς ἄιγας ἐν τῇ χώρα.

(O Molly, put the goats in the countryside.)

Κάσσιδη δίδωσι τὸν Κᾶρλον ταῖς αἴξι.

(Cassidy gives Karl to the goats.)

Μολλῆ φοβοῦμαι μὴ οὐ Δημοσθένης ἀμύνῃ τὸν Κᾶρλον τῶν αἰγῶν.

(Molly fears that Demosthenes will not save Karl from the goats.)

If by some small chance someone who reads Greek finds this post offensive with a misplaced breathing or faulty accent, please know that the Greek font is really tiny on the WordPress screen and I just generally suck at figuring out the acute from the grave on the keyboard. Apologies!

Every time I think I’ve had just about enough of Greek, something pops up that rekindles my joy. Today, for example, I learned that our venerable word tragedy, used so often in our culture, comes (obviously) from the Greek τραγῳδία, the cathartic literary production of so many playwrights. What is interesting, however, is that τραγῳδία, or, in English letters, tragoidia, is a compound of two other words, tragos and aeidein, or “goat” and “to sing.” That’s right, tragedy literally means goat-song. 

There are several theories about this, ranging from the dull (a goat might have been the prize at the Dionysia), to the moderately convincing (goats may once have been sacrificed to choral song, which evolved into tragedy as we know it, like in Antigone, etc.), to the highly impertinent (choral singers were young men much like goats in that they were hairy, smelly, and licentious).

With this in mind I turn to attempting to memorize -μι verb patterns.

I know that’s maybe the wimpiest title ever for a journal entry, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t the truth. But, to my credit, I think old Hansen and Quinn’s Greek: An Intensive Course makes things a little bit harder than they need to be.

For example, their explanation of contract verbs is beyond ridiculous. For the non-Attically inclined, here’s the deal. Once upon a time, Greek verbs that had stems that ended in a short vowel existed in a long forms that had ridiculous amounts of vowel sounds in them. For example, the verb τιμἀω ends in a short alpha, which makes its uncontracted forms in the present tense look something like τιμἀω, τιμἀεις, τιμἀει, τιμἀομεν, and so on. Over time, the vowel sounds contracted and did something to the original vowels, so τιμἀω becomes τιμῶ: the alpha and the omega combine to form an omega with a different kind of accent. So what. So anyhow, there are predictable patterns to how vowel sounds contract. Hansen and Quinn give us eight distinct patterns, such as “alpha followed by an epsilon becomes long alpha, alpha followed by epsilon iota becomes long alpha with an iota subscript,” and so on, for eight impossible to memorize (at least for me) rules. In reality, there are only three real paradigms you need to know to predict the vowel contracts for short alpha contract verbs. Three! And they’re simple as sin if someone like your professor just makes a damn handout. Which, thankfully, mine did.

Anyway this long boring intro is leading up to my story for today, which revolves around another feature of Hansen and Quinn: they include passages from actual Greek texts at the back of each chapter so that you can practice with real Greek writing. All the little translations I’ve been posting come from there. I’ve been doing alright with them in general. Yesterday, however, I decided to try my hand at  a passage from the chorus from Aischylos’ Persians, included at the end of a chapter I did last semester. No problem, I’m thinking. I’ve done tons more complicated stuff since then.

Holy crap. I stared at it for hours, trying and trying to understand what the heck was happening. I ended up turning in a translation I suspected was utter hilarity. This was confirmed when my professor handed it back to me today, covered in ink. I had most of the words right but had the agency of the verbs all wrong. Fortunately for my sanity, however, I happened to look at the bottom of the paper where I had written “I’m not really sure if any of this is even close, for some reason it left me quite befuddled.” My professor’s response:

“In part this is because they didn’t tell you that this passage is not Attic Greek. It is the highly-stylized Doric dialect used in tragic lyric. Many of these words are neologisms.”

Well. OK then. It was kind of not really the language I’ve been trying to learn for the last six months. Good. Hansen and Quinn did provide me with some information, like that the play was produced in 472 B.C. (very helpful for translation, guys), but not that it was not really Attic Greek. 

So, apparently I don’t suck as badly as I thought. Which is nice to know. Hansen and Quinn did, however, give me an awesome cautionary tale to translate as part of my exercises this week:

“Whenever you did shameful things for the sake of your beloveds, o daughters, you were not honored by the prudent and the just because of your reputation. Be thought well of, therefore, by doing just things.”

OK then! Thanks, guys.

More interesting: Jeff Vandermeer asked his readers to post synopses of their current projects, so Jesse (my collaborator) and I put up a few things about Pharmakoi. Check it out, and the projects of other hard-working writers out there!

My exceedingly good friend and kick-ass Japanese student Raechel is listing portions of her translations over at her blog, and I thought that as imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’d follow suit. Raechel, with many years of her language under her belt, is doing far more than I can, but I’ve been enjoying the snippets I can manage at this point in my studies.

The first real Greek I did were some fragments from Menander:

A life without marriage is a life without pain.

Bad friends bear bad fruit.

An ill-timed pleasure gives birth to harm.

The next was from Sophokles’ Philoktetes, lines 792-796. Philoktetes has just discovered he has been left behind on an island and his companions have left without him to go to Troy.

“Oh how awful!

Again, how truly terrible! O my two commanders,

Agamemnon, Menelaos, how after all this time

could you nourish this sickness instead of me?”

Woe, woe is me!”

The final lines of Euripides’ Alcestis (and Bakkhai, as a matter of fact):

Many are the forms belonging to the gods.

and the gods accomplish many unexpected things,

and the things expected are not accomplished,

but of the unexpeted things, the god discovers a way.

This story was of this sort.

Finally, here’s a few of the final lines of Aischylos’ Eumenides (754-756):

“O Pallas! You who have been the savior of my family,

you have allowed me to return to the paternal homeland of which I was deprived.”

Badassery, to be sure. Next I’m working on a selection from Persians. Woo!

Tomorrow I’m back to it, Greek II and a class on Jane Austen as well as teaching. I’m a little nervous– I’m at the really exciting part of Pharmakoi and I know I won’t have lots of time to edit (if any) until the semester ends. Well, I should have at least a few weeks before it goes crazy but I know how much time I have to put into the Greeks to be OK in that class, so. . .

I love the book, though. I really do. Every time I get through a chapter I feel very happy about it. I edited down a slipshod crappy section today that I had just really stuck in as a placemarker in its original state and I think it’s pretty alright now. Every once in a while, though, I get kind of unhappy because I think I’m being really awful to my characters and putting them through too much. It really is in some ways a grueling book, so much bad happens. But I think it is beautiful too so perhaps that’s worth something in the end.