The Best American Essays 2016 (14 page)

They will want to suck at the siphon hose and taste whatever you taste. They will laugh and smack their lips and assure you that the wine is very good. When you leave the cellar they will insist on carrying the bottle to the dinner table . . . And as they cling tightly to the bottle, with all the elaborate care of which little ones are capable on such occasions, you may possibly glimpse a comforting symbol—the child drawing closer to the father.

ELA HARRISON

My Heart Lies Between “The Fleet” and “All the Ships”

FROM
The Georgia Review

F
OR THE PAST
several years, my friends have known it as “my translating job that I love.” When asked for specifics, I start by saying I’m employed as a translator for a Dutch publishing house, preparing an English version of an Ancient Greek–Italian dictionary. At this point, the person’s eyes may glaze over (“She said
Ancient Greek
!”). Or I see the wheels start to spin—
Dutch . . . English . . . Ancient Greek . . . Italian . . . translating—a dictionary?
Or
Dictionaries usually involve one, or at most two, languages. Not three.
Or
Ancient Greek is a dead language—why does it need a new dictionary?

How can I explain the allure of rapid passage from one word to the next—one world to the next—as I work word by word through an amassed list so long I can perceive no horizon? Sometimes, whole dictionary pages, 7-by-10-inch, two columns per side, fine print, are filled with compounds based on a single concept or word:
recently wealthy
(
nouveau riche
);
fresh from war; of recent appearance; freshly killed
(twice, from two different words for “kill”);
recently grown; freshly poured
. Then I encounter, perhaps, a couple words having to do with even numbers, whose base is a sound-alike of the word for “recent”—and next maybe on into the “bread” words, another sound-alike:
To give bread, giver of bread, bread seller, bread basket, piece of bread, bakery, to be a baker, pertaining to a baker, baker . . .

Conversely, sometimes each successive entry is a leap of worlds. A word for a poisonous plant will be followed by a verb that, in its different manifestations, can mean
to raise
or
to rise
, and can also refer to the sun, a sail, or growth into adulthood. Every time I save one such entry and move along to the next, I enter a new sphere of thought and sound.

To gather and explicate all the words of a dead language is to build on the work of others. I can’t go to the newspapers or listen to how things are said on the radio, can’t assay a sample of Internet verbiage or pull words out of current bestsellers. A comprehensive alpha-through-omega requires a grand scavenger hunt through the best literary sources—Homer, Plato, the New Testament, the historians and dramatists and orators of centuries past—as well as the mass of texts engraved on stone or written on papyrus, to say nothing of official and private documents, letters, graffiti, tombstones.

Greek words carved on rocks, penned on papyrus carbonized by volcanic eruption, or wrapped around a mummy are still unearthed every year. Once the words are gathered—and literally cleaned up by archaeologists and others—they must be presented in snippets of sentences showing off their most flattering profiles if they are to make useful dictionary entries. The size of the lexicon is immense, what with all the objects and concepts that need words and descriptors, along with the great propensity of Greek to bud adjectives off nouns and verbs, to derive nouns and verbs out of adjectives, to form adverbs out of past tenses of verbs, to borrow words from other languages, and to make up new ones completely. Alpha alone—the letter with the greatest number of entries by far—comprises 406 pages in three columns of tiny print, with up to fifty entries per page depending on the length of the individual entries.

Here is another dimension of my wonder: as I move from one entry to the next, I am not only shifting sound and thought gears, I’m skipping across centuries and social strata. For example, I may encounter a series of words with essentially the same meaning, but that were each spoken in a different epoch, when one or another suffix was mostly used. One comes from the most highbrow style of classical Athens; another is a colloquial form found only in texts from Egypt; another is not attested later than the
Iliad
, and yet another not earlier than Saint Luke.

Four-hundred-plus pages of alpha sounds like a fat wad of print, and it is . . . and there are twenty-two other letters to traverse. But I’m not working on a paper page. These myriads of words are filed in a database I access over the Internet, sitting thousands of miles away from where the language was spoken at a time when the fastest computer was the human brain with an abacus. Five other translators are also at work (over the duration of the project there were a total of ten), none of whom I’ve met, and all of whom are located in different states or countries. We are totally dependent on electronic hardware and optic fibers, web browsers, online databases, and specialized software. The voluminous physical book with its light-gauge pages is our anchor, the bridge between the high-tech practicalities of our work and this language that so far precedes high technology—although, in an ironic twist I enjoy, it was to supply so much of the high-tech lexicon.

Paper page . . . web page . . . The Greek words I’m dealing with were written on scrolls of goatskin that were rolled up rather than turned, or they were scrawled on scraps of pottery, or carved on a wall or pillar, or brushed onto papyrus with a reed pen. Of course, many other words of Ancient Greek were never written down; instead, they were spoken in some remote area where writing was unknown, and they disappeared when no one used them anymore. As I do my small part to preserve these survivors, this “dead language,” in a novel nonphysical context, I wonder about those disembodied words echoing in some word-Neverland. That I am working with Italian as well as English pushes the
echoiness
of words closer to the front of my mind. What I’m doing, essentially, is overwriting the Italian translations of Professor Franco Montanari’s dictionary. The Italian gives me a template and a structure for a given lemma (dictionary entry), but I’m expected to rely on my expertise in Greek at least as much, especially when it comes to translating the snippets of example passages. I’m more apt to notice metaphorical resonances in languages other than my native one—even in other dialects of English—whereas in my native idiom I take such connections for granted, unreflectingly. For instance, the jump from
paper
page to
web
page is easy, but what about
screen
? I never think about computer screens as having a metaphorical relationship to anything else, but when I go into Italian I’m acutely conscious that
schermo
is also a curtain, a veil, even a shield. The Modern Greek word for (computer) screen is—with allowance for change in pronunciation—exactly the word for the veil that in the language of Homeric epic would shroud a modest young woman—and suddenly, working with these three languages, I am aware of the delicate balance of hiding and self-revelation I’m granted by the (screen of) computer and Internet—of the connection, even, between
revelation
and
veil
in my own language.

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?