The Best American Essays 2016 (15 page)

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, underneath 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 sound 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
.

Life
is words. It is Heraclitus’s pun on
bios
as life versus the
bios
that, differently accented, means the death-dealing blow. It is that
life
is an anagram of
file
, which can be a spice mix, an abrasive tool, a row of people or objects, or a place where words can be collocated on a computer or in a paper folder.
Car
is a yellow Matchbox toy with flappy doors, but
automobile
brings to mind insurance companies and roadside assistance, backup. I feel emotion stir when I’m choosing whether to say
word list
or
lexicon
,
catalogue
or
litany
. My heart is in the choice between
the fleet
and
all the ships
.

When I say that last, I’m thinking of Sappho’s sixteenth fragment. The poem opens “Some say an army of horse and some say infantry / and some a fleet of ships is the most beautiful thing / on the black earth, but I say it is / whatever each one loves.” An army of ships, a collectivity of ships, a fleet. In Sappho, the “army of ships” is one of three different kinds of army, neatly collocated with cavalry and infantry. If I say “fleet,” I tend to think of something military, with that punny flavor of swiftness special to English. If I say “all the ships,” I see sails in different shapes, ships with high-polished wood and boats with flaking paint; I review in my mind all the names for floating vessels in Greek and English, and I savor their sounds and images. These lip-smacks of words, their savors, the snatches of poetry they evoke—they feed my heart as well as my brain.

As I work, embodied, in time, I am never conscious of the dictionary
as a whole
, as a book, as an entity out in the world. I work on it in fragments, I translate cutouts and pieces. I might translate hundreds of words in a day and barely cover a half-dozen pages of the tome. No one will
read
this dictionary. People will consult it, looking up separate entries in separate places, based on the logic of the sentence they are trying to puzzle out. That logic is every bit as logical (or illogical) as the alphabetic sequence that is the filing system of all these words. The arc of alpha through omega vanishes in the use of the thing. The initial letter of the word that enrolls in its proper place on the grand arc is arbitrary, and so is its meaning, without good explication. People will read what they can find about a word fragmented from the other words that give it life, or brought to life in a fragment of poetry out of its own context. Who was demanding a ransom, and did they receive it? Why is a
clepsydra
, the ancient hourglass, etymologically a “thief of water”?