The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  The most comprehensive Ancient Greek–English dictionary was last updated in 1996 and reflects the state of knowledge of Ancient Greek in 1940. Montanari’s Ancient Greek–Italian dictionary was first published in 1995, and expanded and updated in 2004. The third edition came out in 2013, while we were in the later stages of our translation based on the second edition. In other words, this Ancient Greek–Italian dictionary is far more up-to-date than the most complete existing Ancient Greek–English dictionary, and with electronic technology, it’s easier to keep current (revise an entry, or add a new one to the database)—which slows its obsolescence, or even perhaps renders the obsolescence obsolete. The end result of this project will be a unidirectional dictionary translating all known words of Ancient Greek into English, but the whispers of Italian are in the very bones of our creation.

  The beneficiaries of the project are few. Such a comprehensive dictionary would overwhelm a beginner, and whatever the number of beginning students of Ancient Greek—a small crowd no doubt—only a small percentage will become the sorts of experts who would use such an exhaustive volume. But for those few practitioners it will crucially include even obscure and elusive words, thereby validating such words’ existence, and it will give comprehensive histories of the usages of more common words. This new dictionary will verify an unexpected meaning for a supposedly familiar word, and it will show how the meaning of a word has changed over the 1,500-year period of Greek the dictionary covers.

  Covering this span of the language’s life would be like creating a dictionary for English spanning back to before the Normans arrived in the British Isles and began creating the zesty amalgam of Germanic and Romance that makes the vocabulary of English so expressive and easily added to. There are old, pre-Greek words in Ancient Greek too, marked by their peculiar forms, like erebinthos, a chickpea, which shares the -inthos ending with place-names like Corinth, showing the great age of that settlement, showing how ancient is the cultivation of chickpeas—of which, in reality, no variety exists in the wild.

  I’m aware of how oddly my excitement about words of arcane provenance and about the metaphorical nether parts of our own words might come across in casual conversation with a friend in the grocery line, but—for me at least, and I can’t be that rare—these are valuable areas of research. To canvass and explicate the full instrument of a language is to make it alive despite its no longer being spoken, is to capture the vigor of the words and the kind of people who used them: beautiful words; words for objects we have never seen; names for tools we dig up and try to identify; names of aphrodisiac plants gone extinct; words for concepts and metaphors we have never thought of, and some that we also use, coincidentally, in unconscious imitation. For example, the Greeks too used grains of sand on the beach as proverbial for innumerable multitudes, but we probably created the same metaphor independently of them. I can easily say why I am doing this work.

  At the big-picture level, I marvel at the juxtapositions the project presents to me: I work thousands of miles from where the language was spoken between 3,000 and 1,500 years ago; in order to have the required comprehensive list of words, I’m going via Italian into English; alphabetical order is essential and yet arbitrary. At the nearer level, I’m excited—my appetite is stimulated—by the choice snippets of classical literature presenting the context of a given word. I remember a cited play or poem, and in a little room in the back of my head I relive some of its story. I strive to provide the most elegant translation of a disembodied snippet, approving or censuring the Italian translation as I match efforts with it and aim to surpass its example. At the microscopic level, every word of Ancient Greek—how it sounds (or how it might have sounded, since of course we don’t know for sure), and how its set of meanings overlaps or fails to overlap with English and Italian—creates for me an understanding of other ways to approach the world, and thus re-creates my own worldview over and over. As unreal as the physical symbols of words behind the veil of my computer screen may seem, as unreal as may seem words we don’t know how to pronounce and that refer to unknown objects, I feel these words and symbols connecting me to a fierce, distant reality of which I would otherwise have no conception.

  In truth, I’m addicted to the work. Every time I promise myself I’ll take a break when I’ve finished ten more entries, or turn my attention to one of my other jobs, or go stretch my body, I take on ten more. I mark my time against a constantly unrolling arc of words, and the arc is coruscated with tangents and arbitrary transitions, just like my own experience of time and behavior. But the arc is solidified and anchored in the rote movements of my fingers and eyes. Stepping back from my own compulsion, I watch in fascination as I become a grand funnel into which Greek and Italian are poured, and out of which comes English. I like to say I’m a trivium—a three-way crossroads. Instead of two roads intersecting, touching one another and then diverging again like the letter X, the two roads of Greek and Italian intersect, touch one another, and become a single, new road—English out of Italian and Ancient Greek—like the letter Y. This letter exemplifies the process of creating the product, the English version, which exists in real time. I trace it over and over, enact it for each word—different product, same process—with every entry I translate.

  The scale of this dictionary is so grand that when I’m in there working lemma by lemma (literally, leaving, from the Greek; the technical term for “dictionary entry”), it’s like being on the ground of the “flat” earth. I can’t see the curving arc. But my snail-like, step-by-step momentum charts the route of my own life. When I enter the private room of each entry in the database, for a moment I have the word and its lemma to myself. Eventually I will leave the room by hitting SAVE. Or else it’s a much briefer visit—the entry merely redirects the reader to another entry, and the abbreviation “v.” is automatically translated to “see”—and I exit via the BACK button. These series of finger-clicks that get me in or out, this rhythm, the way whole sequences of words are sometimes so similar—all could contribute to monotony or rote behavior, to one word blurring into the next. But what happens in the middle is what matters. There are moments of anarchy when I type a nonsensical joke-definition containing a bad pun or doggerelesque alliteration, or when my fingers are misaligned by one key and for comes out as got or order as iesewe or one as ibe. Scary moments in the privacy of the lemma’s room. I correct the mischief quickly and move on. No one will ever know—but haven’t we all, at one time or another, wanted to be in charge of what words get to mean or say?

  During this series of middles, of visits, life continues outside. I might be about to leave for an appointment, or the library whose Wi-Fi I’m using might be about to close. My bladder’s demands might finally be unignorable; I’m drumming my knees. Someone might call on the phone, or come up and start talking to me. I might continue to translate while giving them some of my attention. Sometimes I catch myself making strange monsters like desiderable when overwriting Italian with English.

  At home, I can’t see the output of my oil heater unless the sun is hitting a shadowless spot on the hardwood floor, yet the heat spreads to my body nonetheless; just so, something in the essence of each lemma, and in the process of looking at it and changing it, kindles my body. Just as I seek and revel in heat, I crave and go after this connection with words. I have marked hours of sleepless nights in mania, grappling with my teeming self from one word to the next. I have stretched out hours of fasting, one word to the next, avoiding food for yet more drip-drip moments of sustenance I find in language, even though these are uneven.

  Sometimes the satisfaction is just a matter of transcribing someone’s name and noting that it is a name. Sometimes a name is an ambivalent descriptor, hinting at word-stories: strongman Ajax, constantly referred to as “son of Telamon”—why was his father called Telamon, i.e., baldric, strong belt? Common nouns smuggle in stories as well. The Ancient Greek word halcyon means “kingfisher”—in English too that’s what halcyon still means, underne
ath it all—but in Italian alcione means “seagull.” Look more closely, and the Greek hal- is “salt (sea)” and kyon is “the one who incubates.” Kingfishers were thought to hatch their young at sea; perhaps the Italians thought seagulls did so too.

  Sometimes a highly complex word, or a preposition with multiple meanings, takes up a whole three-column dictionary page, or even more; its “private room” on my screen requires scrolling and scrolling no matter how big my monitor and is rich with illustrative quotations from hundreds of years’ worth of evolution of the word that showcase its action. I’m a thrill-seeker for these voyages of definition but feel warmed even by the less interesting or less expansive tasks such as one-to-one explications of word and object: “pole,” “an unknown plant,” “a type of meter,” “to sell,” “wrasse” (a type of fish). Yes, these short entries teach me about the world too.

  The editor in chief for the project metes out access to the database a few hundred entries at a time. I don’t always realize I’ve run out until it is the middle of the night in the Netherlands, or, worse, Friday night. When I need to wait for him to send more, the rest of my day is blankly empty—although there’s always plenty else I should be doing. I can’t imagine what my life will be like without this series of words and their demands—their juxtapositions with one another like jostling elbows, reinforcing, undermining—their stories, their vistas, continually unfolding before me. The passage from one word to another has served as a lifeline at times when my experience outside of the dictionary was a battle: the next word always draws me on. Diving in is what I do when I receive more entries, but perhaps even more accurately, a new cache causes language and story to dive into me.

  A good dictionary entry will disambiguate a word with examples in context, and it will indicate the ways the word’s set of meanings does and does not correspond to the meanings of similar words in the target language. Pen means something very different in a school than it does on a farm. Diverting a stream is an activity different from diverting someone’s attention, although their similarity might give you the insight that attention is like a stream. And what is a sake, a dint, or rather? Except in the very simplest word-object or word-action correspondences, a good dictionary doesn’t simply line up two columns of words, one for each language shaking hands across a table, representing a common intent, because that’s not how language works. Not every language will use the same word for diverting both streams and attention. English-speakers keep prana, chi, karma—or amok, kamikaze, and the like—because English lacks native words for those concepts, requiring a phrase instead, and so we borrow the Eastern words as a shortcut.

  As I make crosses of Ancient Greek and English, ostensibly I’m overwriting and translating from the Italian, which disappears in this process. But like all the translators on this project, I’m a classical scholar, not an Italianist, and I think this is as it should be. When I read poetry translated by a poet who relies on the translations of others and is unacquainted with the original language, I always miss a certain depth and rootedness, no matter how good this new version is as poetry (and as much as I love, for instance, Coleman Barks’s renditions of Rumi). The same intimacy with the original should go for dictionary entries, where the task must be to choose the best word of English to correspond with the Greek, no matter what Italian word has been supplied—that is, to translate the phrases quoted to illustrate the use of the word in full representation of the Greek. An Italianist might not be able to look at the abbreviated author’s name attached to a quoted phrase and immediately know whether the snippet came from comedy or tragedy or history, philosophy or epic, Stoic or Christian texts, and thereby adjust the tone of the translation accordingly. She or he probably wouldn’t know that shields at the time of the Homeric poems were made of layers of beaten leather, or that the dative case can sometimes express agency, would have no basis for visualizing the complex mechanisms of Greek door bolts or grasping the many nuances of the infinitive and how it can be put into English. To create a translation that brings words vividly to life for the dictionary user, I have to know both how the words exist within the Greek (participating in its grammar) and what sort of world the words describe (how they interact with its objects).

  Yet the Italian is also essential. For each lemma, the stage directions are in Italian—passive voice; in a positive sense; and; or; philosophical; never found in prose; frequently metaphorical—the kinds of information that clarify the many different uses and sorts of words. And of course there are many words of Ancient Greek that I do not know, that I must learn from the Italian lexicographer. As large as my working vocabulary of English itself may be—and I do need a huge vocabulary in English for my intent to translate the Greek in a manner simultaneously faithful to its letter and spirit and producing idiomatic and beautiful English—I probably do not know half the words in the Oxford English Dictionary and, proportionately, even fewer Greek words. I rely on the original, Italian work for identification of plants, unusual animals, pieces of equipment, obscure characters, and a plethora beyond my imagination of concepts, epithets, and ways to do things to people.

  I’d never heard nor thought of a whip for torture made with flails of small knucklebones, or the sorts of human interactions that would make use of such. A special scraping tool called a strigil was used to cleanse the oiled body, in lieu of bathing, and I imagine how hard it would have been to take showers with so much less available water, how to organize a city of coexisting bodies with no plumbing. An adjective that means “lacking in extension,” i.e., tiny, can also mean “immeasurable” or “infinite.” An adjective that can really refer only to days and other measures of time means “favorable to conception of boys.” Words for plants are often also words for birds: I think of the gaudy orange-and-blue bird of paradise flowers, and of butterflies and bees, and recognize my own multiple associations of flying creatures and flowers. The bird of paradise struggles to raise its orange wing-petals in a damp London yard; carrion butterflies bloom on rotting fruit in Thailand; a shimmering blue bird settles on a cluster of yellow umbelliferous flowers on a parched hillside in Athens one cicada-shimmering afternoon.

  The stylized, larger-than-life sculpture of the ancient Greeks and their scantly surviving portraiture give us no kind of photographic impression of anyone’s face in which to descry a likeness to one of our grandparents or colleagues. Documentaries and movies based on classical literature or myth deal in stereotypes—bearded men with long hair, women in flowing robes, keening music in the background—mysterious a cappella women’s voices, a lute plucked in minor modes. These representations—the ancient Greeks’ own and our culture’s—enforce a sense of remoteness between us-now and them-then. They convey beauty and loss, beyond our ken both; they convey the notion that the characters in the myths, even the histories, are themselves conscious of their ancientry and the transience of their own world and culture.

  The language too is so distant—even from Modern Greek. We don’t know for sure how the sounds were pronounced, but we do know, based on study of Greek metrics, on comparison with related languages, and on the testimony of scholars such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus, that until 200 BCE or even later, the accentual system was based on pitch, not stress—more like Thai or Vietnamese than the familiar European languages, or than Greek itself from that time on. (By the time the Alexandrians introduced written diacritics to indicate pitch changes, in the second century BCE, the requisite distinctions of vowel length were collapsing and the stress accent taking over.) But that flowerlike bird, those birdlike flowers—these connect me to people who interacted with the world in the same ways that I do. The delicious word isthmus refers to a neck of land, and the Greeks knew the same somatic metaphor; an isthmus could be a human neck too. These were people who inhabited a world I recognize. I begin to see and hear myself in the bits and pieces of their lives that surface through the words they used. Their storied Echo and Narcissus offer two different kinds of reflection—sound reflecting s
ound as it hits a solid object, image reflecting image. Narcissus became a flower; Echo haunts rocky places like an unseen bird.

  As a writer, I find my energy frequently turns outward from the poem or essay I’m composing to imagining how what I’m saying may transfer to readers—whether it conveys something of import, whether it will move spirits. This impulse is certainly present too as I take care of the translation of each dictionary entry, sometimes adjusting two or three times before submitting it. I consider carefully whether the context in which a word had been uttered (if said context is available) would better merit a translation of “laudable” or of “worth praising.” I hope I will have enabled a reader of Ancient Greek to puzzle out the sentence she or he is stuck on because I translated a word “divert” and not “deviate,” as it also could have been. Is it better to say “the cavalry” or “all the horsemen” in a given context? Or in another, “one who has absolute power” or “plenipotentiary”?

  Words are the world; my here and now is words. I am unable to cry when someone dies until I’m hit by the memory of how he pronounced used, or how she said criminy when she spilled her tea. When my mother reads a recipe aloud sotto voce, it doesn’t conjure the finished food item—I’m only struck again by her pronunciation of crush as crash and of batter as butter, her still not distinguishing a and u after all these years speaking English—and her being bemused by the oddness of the word treacle.