by Mary Norris
GREEK TO ME
Adventures of the Comma Queen
MARY NORRIS
For Miles and Dee
and in memory of our parents,
Miles and Eileen Norris.
It is ever to be borne in mind that though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.
—EDITH HAMILTON,
THE GREEK WAY
CONTENTS
INVOCATION
CHAPTER 1 Alpha to Omega
CHAPTER 2 A Is for Athena
CHAPTER 3 Dead or Alive
CHAPTER 4 Demeter Dearest
CHAPTER 5 A Taste for Tragedy
CHAPTER 6 Swimming with Aphrodite
CHAPTER 7 Acropolis Now
CHAPTER 8 The Sea! The Sea!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
APPENDIX The Greek Alphabet
GREEK TO ME
INVOCATION
SING IN ME, O Muse, of all things Greek that excite the imagination and delight the senses and magnify the lives of mortals, things that have survived three thousand years and more, since the time before the time of Homer, things that were old then and are new now—you know, the eternal. If that’s not too much to ask, Muse. Please?
I don’t know what gave me the idea I was good at foreign languages. I was an indifferent student of French in high school, though I longed to study at the Sorbonne instead of on the banks of the Cuyahoga. When I was in about fifth grade, my father refused to let me study Latin. The nuns had handpicked some students for a Saturday Latin class, and I was keen on it, but Dad flatly refused. My father was a pragmatic man. He worked for the fire department—one day on and two days off—and he could do anything around the house: roofing, plumbing, carpentry, laying linoleum. He grew up during the Depression, when jobs were scarce, so for him security was paramount.
When I asked Dad to let me study Latin, he stamped out that flame like a pro in his fireman’s boots. Was Dad against education for women? Yes. Was he worried I would come too much under the spell of the nuns and join the convent instead of getting married and settling down in the neighborhood? Probably. Had he missed the story of how the father of John Milton, recognizing the lad’s genius, had him tutored in Latin and Greek from earliest youth? Apparently. Had he been scarred by a dead language? Yes! As a teenager, my father, who had been kicked out of three high schools, was sent by my grandmother to Ontario, Canada, to stay with his uncle, who had been educated as a Jesuit seminarian but backed out just before taking his final vows—went over the wall, as they say—and returned to Ontario to farm pigs. Uncle Jim taught my father a few things, and my father passed them on to us at the dinner table, such as the proper way to feed a horse an apple (with the palm flat) and the myth of Sisyphus, whose eternal punishment was to roll a boulder up a mountain and have it always roll back down, so he had to start over again. It sounded like a particularly bleak life lesson. What activity might merit a statuette in the shape of Sisyphus? Renewed effort in the face of certain failure? Undying hope? Persistence in ordinary life? Anyway, my father associated the classics with punishment, the eternal damnation of Sisyphus in Tartarus or the temporary banishment of a juve nile delinquent to the remote home of his maternal ancestors in rural Ontario. So when the nuns invited me to study Latin on Saturdays, Dad said, “No way,” and I missed that first chance to learn Latin while my brain was at its most absorbent.
In college, I continued with French for a year and then dropped it. My junior year, I took a course in linguistics and had a flare-up of lust for Latin. I would soon graduate and have to decide what to do next, and I had just figured out that four years of a liberal-arts education was a delightful absurdity, a legitimate escape from real life, from Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, a deferral of career and responsibility. I would study Latin, a dead language, for the sheer impracticality of it. I would know the joy of being a total nerd. But my linguistics professor, Whitney Bolton, talked me out of it. Latin, he said, would serve only to teach me about English. I didn’t think to ask what was wrong with that. Remember, many linguists believe we are born hardwired to acquire language: I didn’t need Latin to know English. Professor Bolton, whom I liked—he had a round head and a buzz cut, and reminded me of Anthony Hopkins as Richard the Lionheart in The Lion in Winter—told me I would be better off studying a living language, one that I could use in my travels. How did he know I wanted to travel? And Latin was spoken only in the Vatican. So I scratched that itch by taking a year of German. I’ve traveled a lot since then, but not in Germany, where Oktoberfest would no doubt have untied my tongue. Meanwhile, German did teach me a lot about English.
My taste for dead languages lay dormant until circa 1982 AD, at which point I had been working at The New Yorker for about four years, doing my best to master the Major Arcana of New Yorker style for a job on the copydesk. I had worked my way up to the collating department, where I basically got to see what everyone else did and study various editorial biases and skills. Collating, which has long since been replaced by the word processor, might be described as the liver of The New Yorker’s editorial process. Proofs arrived from a piece’s editor, the author, the editor-in-chief (then William Shawn), Eleanor Gould (The New Yorker’s famous grammarian), proofreaders, fact checkers, and the libel lawyer, and we collators copied the changes the editor had accepted onto a clean proof for the printer, filtering out the dross, and sent the collated proof via fax (state of the art at the time) to the printer. Overnight, a revision appeared. The big excitement was being able to flag a mistake and save embarrassment. Once, coming back from lunch, I found the editor Gardner Botsford at my desk, taking refuge from a demanding author, who was just then on her way down the hall, calling, “Gardner?”
One weekend, I saw Time Bandits in a theater on the Upper East Side. In the film, directed by Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and starring John Cleese and Michael Palin, a band of time-traveling dwarves plunder treasure from the past. One scene, set in ancient Greece, featured Sean Connery in a cameo as Agamemnon. He was dueling with a warrior who wore the head of a bull and looked like the Minotaur. The landscape was so stark and arid, and so enhanced by the mighty figure of Sean Connery in armor, that I wanted to go there right away. It didn’t matter that the Minotaur was from Crete—his labyrinth was at Knossos, near Heraklion—and that Agamemnon was famously from the Peloponnese: he and his brother Menelaus were sons of Atreus, who was the son of Pelops, for whom the peninsula was named. The glory of Sean Connery blinded me to the screenwriters’ twist on mythology. I was also unaware that the scenes set in Greece had been shot in Morocco.
The movie brought back to me some research I had done in grade school for a geography project. I was paired up with a boy named Tim, the class clown, and assigned a report on Greece. We (mostly I) made a poster that featured the main products of Greece, and I was impressed that a land so dry and stony—as in the movie, no grass, no green, more goats than cows—yielded olives and grapes, which could be pressed into oil and wine. It amazed me that such an austere land produced such luxuries.
The day after seeing Time Bandits, I told my boss at The New Yorker, Ed Stringham, that I wanted to go to Greece. Ed was the head of the collating department. He was famous at the office for his eccentric schedule and rigorous course of studies, and for his genius in suggesting books to people. He came in at about noon and held court from a tattered armchair by the window (kept firmly closed), smoking cigarettes and drinking takeout coffee. His friend Beata would come in—Beata had known W. H. Auden (she called him Wystan) and Benjamin Britten in Amityville. Alastair Reid, the Scottish poet and translator of Borges, would stop by to talk. Ed typically stayed at the office reading till one or two in the m
orning. My little brother, who was studying music, had a night job cleaning the floors in the business department and would come up and talk to Ed about Philip Glass and Gregorian chant.
When Ed heard that I wanted to go to Greece, he got all excited. There was a map of Europe on the wall, and he showed me where he had gone on his first trip to Greece. He’d taken a cruise, he said, apologetically, to get an overview: Athens, Piraeus, Crete, Santorini (or Thira, on the inner edge of a caldera that tourists rode up on donkeys), Rhodes, Istanbul. He went back many times: Thessaloniki and Meteora, to the north; Ioannina and Igoumenitsa, to the west, on the way to Corfu; and the Mani, the middle member of the three peninsulas that hang off the Peloponnese, where blood feuds raged between clans for generations. He pointed out Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, a peninsula reserved for Orthodox monks, where no female, not even a cat, was welcome. Then he plucked a slim paperback off the shelf—A Modern Greek Reader for Beginners, by J. T. Pring—bent over it till his eyes were inches from the page, and started to translate.
“You can read that?” I said, astonished. It had never occurred to me that a person could become literate in a language that was written in a different alphabet.
“Of course,” he replied, straightening up and refocusing his eyes, which were blue and wobbled in their sockets.
Seeing Ed unlock a Greek sentence gave me a Helen Keller moment: Greek could be lucid! It did not have to be unintelligible, as in the famous words of Casca in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “It was Greek to me.” Those letters could be penetrated, and here was the proof. I had adored learning to read and write as a child, matching letters to sounds, building words, deciphering signs on restaurants and labels on cans of peas—cracking the code of literacy. After a steady diet of English and American literature through college and graduate school, I still relished the rules of phonics and enjoyed the nuts and bolts of syntax. And now I could get a fresh start with a whole new alphabet. I was incredibly excited. I was back in fifth grade again, and Dad had said yes!
BEFORE LONG, Ed had become my mentor in all things Greek. The first thing he taught me was that there are two major forms of the modern language: demotic, which is the people’s language, and Katharevousa, or puristic Greek, which was devised by some intellectual Greeks in the early nineteenth century to yoke the modern language to its glorious past. Until the 1970s, Katharevousa was the official language of Greece, used in legal documents and news reporting, although people rarely spoke it. I needed to find a class in demotic Greek and an up-to-date modern-Greek–English dictionary.
Of course, I could travel in Greece without Greek, but I kept remembering how on my first venture abroad, on a trip to England, where there is supposedly no language barrier, I felt strangely alienated. In London I didn’t know whether to say elevator or lift, apartment or flat. I felt like a phony using the British terms. And the pronunciation—it made me excruciatingly self-conscious to say “shedule” instead of “skedule.” What was the point? Wherever I went I was conspicuously American. In Greece I would be doubly alienated. So I registered in NYU’s School of Continuing Education for a class in Modern Greek, and The New Yorker paid. The magazine routinely covered the tuition for employees who took a class in some subject with a bearing on their work.
The first words I learned in Greek were ílios, sun, and eucharistó, thank you. To remember words in a foreign language, you make associations with your own tongue, and it thrilled me to realize that the Greek ílios had come into English as Helios. What in English is the sun god is, in Greek, the everyday word for the sun. Greek seemed to exalt the everyday. The same with eucharistó, from which we get Eucharist, the word for the miracle of the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ. In Greece this word—pronounced “efkharisto”—gets tossed around several times an hour. The English “I thank you” does not carry the reciprocal meaning of a gift both granted and received in the sense that glows out of Eucharist: eu, as in Eugenia (well-born) or euphemism (nice, kind, gentle phrase), plus charis, from which we get charisma and charism (which religious communities use to mean a particular vocation or gift). In Greek ευχαριστώ seems to indicate a grace and a blessing at every small transaction.
Along with eucharistó, thank you, I learned parakaló, meaning both please and you’re welcome, like the Italian prego (beg). I associated parakaló with the English word Paraclete, the term used for the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, when the dove descended over the Apostles in the form of licks of flame and gave them the gift of tongues. I did not know there was an etymological source for the association—parakaló means literally to call or summon, while Paraclete is the one summoned. For a mnemonic device, I will take anything. Παρακαλώ! Bring it on!
Under Ed’s tutelage, I also began to read the classics—Homer and Herodotus—in translation, as well as travel books about modern Greece. Ed piled on the books as if to remake me in his own autodidactic image: Lawrence Durrell, who had lived on Corfu, Rhodes, and Cyprus; Henry Miller, who, as a visitor to Greece before the Second World War, was befriended by the country’s greatest living poets; and Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British war hero and travel writer, whose books Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece and Mani, about the isolated peninsula in the southern Peloponnese, had a cult following. To top it off, he gave me two precious volumes of poems by Constantine Cavafy, the Alexandrian Greek poet, the pages still uncut, saying as he handed them over, “You’ll go farther than I did.”
I studied for a year before leaving for Greece, at NYU and then at Barnard. Ed saw me off at the airport, where he initiated me into his preflight ritual: get there early, check in, and start drinking. He was afraid of flying, and suggested we pour libations to Zeus, the sky god, to make sure that the plane had plenty of propellers.
During that maiden voyage to Greece, I made up in five weeks for a childhood confined largely to Ohio. While nursing an ouzo on a ship in the Aegean, mesmerized by the sea, I decided that when I got home I would study classical Greek so that I could read everything written by the Greeks who had crossed this sea before me.
On returning to New York, I registered for Elementary Greek at Columbia University and blithely submitted the bill to the new executive editor, Tony Gibbs, who was the son of Wolcott Gibbs, one of the early New Yorker editors. To my disbelief, he turned me down, saying that ancient Greek was not relevant to my job. I had by now moved to the copydesk and I was aghast. I started a dossier of sorts, keeping a list of words from the Greek that cropped up in The New Yorker, everything from pi, which is the Greek letter corresponding to “P” and also the mathematical symbol π—one Greek letter recognized by anyone who had to take geometry in high school—to ophthalmologist, which is often misspelled with a “p” instead of a “ph,” the English transliteration of the Greek letter phi (φ), unless you happen to be fresh from Greek class, where you just learned that the ancient Greek for eye is ophthalmós. John McPhee contributed autochthonous (autos, self, + chthon, earth), which means something like self-generated from the earth and contains a tricky combination of back-to-back diphthongs in the transliteration of chi (χ) and theta (θ). I loved this stuff!
To reinforce my petition, I asked Eleanor Gould, who was like an oracle to the editors, if she would write a letter attesting to the value and relevance of ancient Greek to my job in the copy department. Eleanor wrote that she had not studied Greek in years, so her own knowledge of the language might not be current enough to save us from “ignorant mistakes.” It was extremely generous of her, as her knowledge of everything from hanging drapes to reading Russian was more than sufficient. I showed the document to my friend John Bennet, an editor, who said, “You’re using a cannon to shoot a flea.” Maybe so, but it worked: Tony Gibbs was persuaded that ancient Greek was relevant after all. So it was that in the 1980s I studied classical Greek at Columbia under the aegis of The New Yorker.
IN THE YEARS that followed, I swung back and forth between modern Greek and ancient Greek, cramming modern Greek
before a trip, returning to ancient Greek when I got home. I moved to Astoria, the Greek-American neighborhood in Queens, embedding myself among live Greeks, and there I consumed Thucydides. I studied one summer at an international program for students of modern Greek in Thessaloniki and played hooky to visit Potidaea, where Socrates served during the Peloponnesian War.
Some people discover a Greek island and go back to the same place again and again, but I always like to go someplace new. I have swum in the Aegean, the Ionian, and the Libyan Seas, taken buses around Lesbos and Thasos and Ithaca, driven to Olympia and Kalamata and Sparta, hopped from island to island in the Dodecanese, a chain named for the twelve major islands (dodeka, twelve, + nisi, island) along the Turkish coast. I went to Santorini and Naxos with one friend, visited Paros with another friend and went with her to Antiparos (which means Opposite Paros) and to tiny uninhabited Despotiko. One of the most cosmopolitan islands, Mykonos, I avoided for years, but when I got there I understood why people liked it, even though it was crowded and commercial: it was exquisite, a “cubist” town, in Lawrence Durrell’s description, the white blocks of buildings tumbling down to the sea, with splashy accents of bougainvillea. I hoped to spend a night on Delos, the uninhabited island that is sacred to Apollo and was the site of the Treasury of the Delian League before the treasure became the federal reserve of the Athenian Empire, but to get permission you had to matriculate in archaeology, in French. I’ve also gone to some of the far-flung Greek colonies: Napoli, whose name is from the Greek—neapolis (new city)—and Siracusa, in the southeastern corner of Sicily, which was the home of Archimedes, the one who shouted “Eureka!” (“I found it!”) in the bath when he discovered a way to measure density using what became known as the principle of water displacement.