This
Journal

October
1999

I suppose the coolest thing of the day was that I got to read closing sections of The Odyssey to the freshmen. It was not cool because we are finally done with it. It wasn't cool because I got to haul out my dramatic stuff before this captive audience. It was cool simply because I got to experience that great lump of language myself - again and again and again. I relish the grain and muscle of those words in my mouth and in my ear. Robert Fitzgerald's translation:

He drew to his fist the cruel head of an arrow for Antinous/just as the young man leaned to lift his beautiful drinking cup,/embossed, two-handled, golden: the cup was in his fingers:/the wine was even at his lips: and did he dream of death?/How could he? In that revelry amid his throng of friends/who would imagine a single foe - though a strong foe indeed - /could dare to bring death's pain upon him and darkness on his eyes?

Haughty Antinous sits on the verge of a radical transformation from spirit to matter courtesy of that arrow. What do they say? It comes like a thief in the night, when you least expect it.

On the page, in the eyeball, we rush over it all. But the voice demands a certain, more careful, attention. And something still carries across these thousands of years - the possibility of a voice, a spirit wrestling with life's darker realities and ironies. (Is it the translator's power or does it belong to The Poet Formerly Known As Homer?)

Well, these are pretty lofty concepts for the freshmen. I keep them to myself, but I do pause to point out (after giving them a chance to experience it somewhat in the reading) the pathos of the father's self-revelation to the son or the old dog's dying glance at his long lost master. I think they can appreciate these moments as much as the bloody, action-packed extermination of the suitors.

I get a kick out of being able to perform it with a degree of dramatic power. (Those theater classes at Marquette paid off.) (Is it true, as I've heard, that English teachers are all frustrated actors?) But we had read parts of this epic in so many ways already (silently, out loud with partners and in groups), so why not a full blast of Br. Tom's best effort? I was painfully aware of the torturous reading most of them had been giving it. They struggled and stumbled over words, usually just skipping the realy weird ones. How could this story's language live for them - short of surrendering to the videotape? They finally deserved to hear it in a voice that made sense, that even gloried in pronouncing the most treacherous Greek name (Amphinomous?) It can be done; this can be read. For kicks even. That was my lesson today.

The rest of the day? Mostly a blur of minor concern over The New Look, wondering if it will look as good on most browsers as it looks on the Explorer and Netscape of my machine. It looks a little goofy on the school's computers whose fonts seem set way too large. I realize that some will find it bland, but I stick to my notion that blandness is a significant feature of my own personality and should be figured forth.

Today I also got to sub for the first time - in a history class. They took a quiz on old India and China which I could not have passed. Why did we never learn these things? Even after bad experience with Japan and Korea and lots of worry about communists in China, the curriculum of the fifties and sixties taught us that Asia didn't matter. So then we tried to turn Vietnam into a golf course...

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. ...Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
Anthony Burgess