Of the many professors of literature I had at Santa Cruz, none captured my imagination or gained my admiration so much as the Classics professors did.
Not that I was a Classics major by any stretch but I did happen to enroll in a half-dozen or so classes in Latin, ancient Greek novels, and mythology. The teachers I had, with their lack of far-leftist pretensions and their love of the Ancient World, provided a refreshing counterpoint to a lot of the self-congratulatory yuppie Marxism that was as prevalent in Santa Cruz as Pink Floyd on repeat.
What also struck me about many of these Classics teachers, usually handsome middle-aged men and women who were equally fluent in Latin, Ancient Greek and probably several other dead languages, was how healthy they looked. Not to mention how happy they acted and how enthusiastic they were about the writings of centuries-dead Greeks and Romans. Not just enthusiastic but gushing, even so much as tearing up at certain passage from The Iliad. Some of them went surfing in the morning, right around dawn, before cycling up the hill to teach a morning’s worth of introductory Latin classes. Others clearly lifted weights and these were usually the women. When their adult children came to guest lecture they were firefighters or doctors or medieval weapons experts who knew a thing or two about Thucydides.
It is a small regret of mine that I was not trained in the Classics. That, in fact, I’m not a classicist.
A larger regret is that I’m not Anne Carson, poet, essayist, translator, professor of Classics and recipient of a MacArthur grant.
A very friendly young man who comes into Red Hill Books now and again was asking a few weeks back if we carried any of her books. In my ignorance, I asked, “Who is Anne Carson?” And he replied, “Oh man, you don’t know Anne Carson?” I promptly decided to find out about her.
I was happy to see that one of her recent, sort of cross-genre works, Eros the Bittersweet, is a poetic mediation on romantic love which, not surprisingly is one of my own obsessions. And it all begins with Sappho, as so many things do:
“It was Sappho who first called eros ‘bittersweet.’ No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean? . . .The relevant fragment runs: ‘Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me/sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up’. . .It is hard to translate. ‘Sweetbitter’ sounds wrong, and yet our standard English rendering ‘bittersweet’ inverts the actual terms of Sappho’s compound glukupikron. Should that concern us? If her ordering has a descriptive intention, eros is here being said to bring sweetness, then bitterness in sequence: she is sorting the possibilities chronologically. Many a lover’s experience would validate such a chronology. . .”
Coincidentally, I was recently at a going-away party for a friend of mine who will be attending NYU’s M.F.A. program in the Fall and at the party my friend told me she just found out that Anne Carson will be one of her teachers.
She added that I just had to read Autobiography Of Red.
It continues to amaze me how much there is to read.
