From dlupher@ups.edu Sun Apr 29 14:03:38 2001 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.03) with ESMTP id f3TL3b988832 for ; Sun, 29 Apr 2001 14:03:37 -0700 Received: from mail.ups.edu (main.ups.edu [192.124.98.219]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f3TL3aF17689 for ; Sun, 29 Apr 2001 14:03:36 -0700 Received: from [207.207.116.53] (wyatt1dhcp53.ups.edu [207.207.116.53]) by mail.ups.edu (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id f3TL3Xe05215 for ; Sun, 29 Apr 2001 14:03:33 -0700 (PDT) X-Sender: dlupher@mail.ups.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: <000701c0d040$fe78fc40$82519318@Rourke.ne.mediaone.net> <000701c0d040$fe78fc40$82519318@Rourke.ne.mediaone.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 13:47:23 -0700 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Propertius, Housman, Carson After all this talk about Manilius in "The Invention of Love," I was a bit surprised to read the following in Margo Jefferson's article on the play in the "Arts and Leisure" section in today's NYT: I had never heard of Propertius, the Roman poet he spent so much of his life translating [sic] and whom he spends so much stage time debating with friends and teachers. And what I didn't know didn't matter....Housman failed his classics exam at Oxford, then worked as a clerk in London's Patent Office and labored for years at a translation [sic] of this minor, largely forgotten poet from the ancient world. Why should work that has been neglected by official history matter? Because, he tells his friend Pollard, it is "useless knowledge for its own sake." I must say that I was a bit surprised to find a writer for this relatively respected cultural organ pronouncing Propertius "forgotten." Has she never dipped into Ezra Pound? Or has she never heard of him either? (But, as she disarmingly declares, what she doesn't know doesn't matter.) BTW, has anyone yet suggested that Stoppard's conceit of the old Housman meeting the young Housman may owe something to Max Beerbohm's wonderful caricature sequence of old writers meeting their younger selves? Incidentally, since Anne Carson's comment on Manilius has been invoked of late, list-members may be interested in an interview with Anne Carson in the March/April issue of "Poets and Writers." Indeed, she is the cover lady of the magazine. Particularly interesting are her comments on how being a classicist helps one as a poet: I think every language has its own set of possibilities, and you can gradually grope out what they are over years of inhabiting it. When you're in Greek you can somehow dig down to the very earliest morning of the words, which gives you a different sense of validity when you're messing around with those meanings. I didn't mistranscribe "earliest morning of the words," nor do I think it was the interviewer's misreading of the tape. It sounds echt Carson to me. As a specific example, she offers a fact that had escaped me, though I have tried to "inhabit" Greek for some years now: There's a connective particle "kai" that means "and" usually, or if there's two of them both "and" and "either/or."...That's one aspect of Greekness that's fixed in their language that we can't get. We have to decide between "and" and "either/or." For them they're just two sides of one coin--as soon as you think into that fact you realize that the world could be completely other than it seems. There are a lot of these little things in Greek. I wouldn't feel confident saying there are quantitatively more, but there are a lot of those moments where you enter a fact but then you just think, "Oh, there's a whole other way to look at this element of reality," and then you think of the world through that lens for a while and everything is slightly different. I have to say that if "kai...kai" truly means "either/or," I had better do a lot of re-reading and start thinking of the Greek I have read through that lens for a while, until everything is slightly different. Have I misunderstood something here? David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .