Not Lost in Translation
Lessons Learned From Teaching Outside My Comfort Zone
The first time I heard about someone writing a translation from a translation, I was horrified to the core of my pretentious philological soul. Such a thing, I believed, was simply a work of fiction by someone too lazy and clueless to devote their life to mastering Latin or Greek; a silly fraud, mimicking the relationship between a Chicken McNugget and coq au vin; maybe even — dare I say it? — intellectually dishonest. Real scholars, I had been taught and accepted as gospel, never read anything but original language, and translators (something I am not and never will be) were creative helpers that would bring our secret language to the masses just enough to make them want to learn the original.
And then the Hellenists retired.
As professors of Classics, many of us, especially those at non-elite schools, teach a variety of subjects, including those we have no expertise on: the scholar trained in Pindar teaches Roman history, the scholar of Greek numismatics teaches Vergil, and the late antique archaeologist teaches elementary Latin. This is part of our job, and it speaks to the versatility of training in the Classics that we are able to develop courses for undergraduates that draw on our broad knowledge of Greek and Roman culture and focus it in a particular direction. Some of us also end up with a new level of expertise that we would not have anticipated during our training: I trained as a Roman historian and documentary papyrologist but became one of my department’s Latinists. I teach courses from elementary to graduate levels and publish articles in Latin pedagogy, although in graduate school I took only perhaps three or four courses in Latin.
As a classicist first in a very small department, and then in a larger department but hired as a “Roman generalist,” I have taught a remarkable range of classes including Latin, history, archaeology, literature in translation, and reception. Some of these were forced on me (I flinch when I think about the Greek tragedy in translation course I once taught), and others were topics of interest that I was more than willing to develop (my course on Cleopatra comes to mind.)
And then the Hellenists retired. All of them.
The Hellenists, all three of them, representing 50% of the faculty of my department, all retired within a few years of each other. State budgets and administrative whims kept us from replacing them. But the graduate students were still there, and most of them were primarily interested in Greek.
Hellenists. Alive and well and needing classes.
One of the graduate students noticed that because of a mix of 4- and 3-credit classes, he was going to end up one credit shy of the total he needed for his degree. He approached me to take a directed study, something, he asked, about women in antiquity. I’m not a fan of directed studies, because, honestly, I lack the focus to keep students on track. After much discussion, we agreed instead on a 1-credit class, which would include two other graduate students, and that we would study Sappho.
Sappho? But I’ve never read Sappho!
Yes, that’s right. I have read translations of Sappho, but I’ve never read her work in Greek, nor does the current state of my Greek allow me to. I am a whiz at the syntax and vocabulary of tax receipts, but I have really never taught Greek and read very little poetry when I did. The only non-papyrological Greek I have read in the past decade or so was Plutarch, and he was not going to help me read fragmentary archaic Aeolic Greek.
Now what?
The first thing I did was tell the students, in all honestly, that I could not and would not be reading the Greek. Yes, I could have put a few months into refreshing my skills, but I had too many other things on my plate and as it was, this class was in addition to my regular teaching load. Instead, I told the students we would focus on the reception of Sappho, something I felt far more comfortable with. I had taught a bit about Sappho’s reception in a previous course called “Gender and Power” (the students informally called the class “Sluts in Antiquity”). I also have regularly taught a course about the reception of Cleopatra, so I at least had some stable footing in the area of understanding women whom no one seemed to understand.
Translations of a translation.
The theme of the course was “Whose Sappho?”; eventually we also tackled the “is she is or is she ain’t?” nature of Sappho, that is, “Who’s Sappho?” The joke was on me, since I certainly didn’t know who Sappho was, and owned no part of her whatsoever. Because the class was already so far from the norm, I decided that this would be as good a time as any to expose the students to newer forms of scholarship (blogs, Eidolon) and to give them a reasonable background in fundamental feminist scholarship, something the Hellenists would not have done in their classes … because they were busy knowing all that Greek. I spent a few weeks pulling material that sounded interesting and relevant from online bibliographies, but I hadn’t actually read most of it before my students did (they were aware of this, too).
We began by reading Holt Parker’s “Sappho Schoolmistress,” which is a smack-down against everything everyone thinks they know about Sappho. Then I sent them to a newspaper article that described Parker’s conviction on child pornography charges, as well as Sarah Scullin’s “Making a Monster” in Eidolon. Coming in the midst of the explosion of the #MeToo movement, this trio of readings made us confront whether important scholars forfeit their status when they commit unforgivable acts. The conversation then returned to considering just how far poor Sappho had been dragged from her reality because some considered her behavior to be perverted.
We spent some time on the reception of Sappho in antiquity, looking at artistic representations of Sappho, and at her influence on Roman poets (a moment of comfort for me, since I’m far better versed in Catullus than Sappho). As we left antiquity, venturing into the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and early modern period, we found ourselves reading scholarship outside classical journals. This was a lesson in translation itself: what should we expect from an article in the Journal of Lesbian Studies? What can we take away from an article about how people who never read Sappho in Greek understood her, written by someone else who never read Sappho in Greek? An article on the use of Sappho by German nationalists led to a fantastic discussion on the mis-translation of antiquity: we read Sarah E. Bond’s Forbes essay on the whiteness of Greek statues and discussed the mindboggling online backlash against her. That led, in turn, to my recollections of the debates over Black Athena, an earlier episode in which people who had not read the original (Black Athena, that is) felt free to criticize and call others racists.
Our favorite class may have been the one that centered on Tom Stoppard’s “Rock and Roll,” a remarkable play set in Czechoslovakia from 1968 through 1990. The focus of the play is the countercultural narrative of rock music as a pushback against repressive socialism—that is, song as political statement, as Sappho has so often been made to be. The play is not as overtly classical as Stoppard’s better known (among classicists anyway) “The Invention of Love,” but a few characters, Eleanor and her granddaughter Alice, are students/teachers of Classics and engage Sappho in their dialogue. Alice tries to help her classically illiterate mother Esme make sense of Catullus 51, the Latin poem that is in part a translation of Sappho. Alice, in practice, is translating a translation for her mother. While both Eleanor and Alice are traditional philologists, Alice can see the value in bringing the message of the poem to a “barbaric” audience. And Stoppard himself translates the scene described in Sappho and Catullus’ poem to the setting of his play in a scene in which jealousy completely discombobulates Esme. Perhaps we are to understand that the translation of a translation did not get through to poor Esme, since classical knowledge skipped a generation in her family.
Another stab at “Whose Sappho?” was a discussion of the newly discovered poems of Sappho. Like some other topics, this was explored via the press and blog posts rather than traditional scholarly publications, which took longer to address the problematic provenance of the papyrus. At an earlier time, a discussion of the private ownership of papyri might not have been appropriate to a class on Greek poetry, but the publication of this text, and broader questions of the illegal purchase of antiquities in recent times, have made this topic very relevant. In any case, all students of Classics should be aware of the issues surrounding the legalities and ethics of artifacts.
We finished the semester by reading Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap. We didn’t like it much. Enough said.
I certainly learned quite a few lessons about teaching over the course of this semester. First, and most importantly, I learned that specific content expertise might not be the most important thing a professor brings to a class. While I was an imposter (this was not a case of the famous imposter syndrome — I actually was an imposter!), the fact that I can’t read this particular type of Greek doesn’t mean I can’t understand or know anything about Sappho. (I mean, I wouldn’t try to write an article about Sappho. Except that I seem to be doing just that. Never mind.)
In the 70s, our field began a journey to democratize Classics by allowing students to learn about the ancient world with limited or no knowledge of Latin or Greek. This allowed people like me to major in Classics beginning in college without having learned the languages earlier. That journey, while it kept the field alive for a time, seems to have stalled as we arrive at the latest obstacle: how we define expertise in our field, and who is allowed to have a voice. How will we define “scholarship” moving forward?
Linguistic knowledge remains the gatekeeper to our field, even at a time when more and more undergraduate programs are being forced to cut back on language teaching whether we want to or not. If PhD programs will not even consider candidates with fewer than three or four years of Greek, how many talented undergraduates, particularly ones who go to underfunded schools, will never get a chance to show us what they can do?
Yes, I did study Greek, and for a long time. Yes, I could once read classical Greek with some fluency. But that skill has gone the way of my baton-twirling capabilities: I can still do it, but it’s slow and awkward and I frequently hit myself in the head. So no, I did not read Sappho in Greek with my students. But the class was a success because I brought other things to the table, including a broad knowledge of the ancient world, bibliographic skills, and feminist theory.
Of course, the professor is not the only teacher in a class. My students, two retirees and one traditionally aged student, brought with them their own knowledge and talents and enthusiasm. Through their less judgmental eyes, some of the articles we read by non-classicists were far more interesting than some of the traditional work done by philologically-oriented types, and it stoked their interest in the material in a more lively way. This, I have found, is true also of my undergraduates. One episode of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast (Carlin is a journalist, not a scholar) did more to whet their appetite for Julius Caesar than any scholarly article could have, and made me think about Caesar in new ways as well.
If ultimately our goal is to keep interest in the classical world alive, we have to open our minds to the idea that someone who does not know Latin or Greek might just bring a remarkable new perspective to our understanding of Rome or Greece. Of course, some of the material will have little value, but let’s be honest in recognizing that classical scholars have produced quite a lot of useless material as well. I have learned that not only is there no shame in translating the translation, and that no beauty or meaning is lost in the process, but that translations of translations might just be what saves Classics. I stand corrected.
Jennifer Sheridan Moss is an associate professor of Classics at Wayne State University. She has published in the fields of documentary papyrology and Classics pedagogy, and has been the winner of numerous awards for teaching excellence.
