Hackney, Sappho, and Bravery

East End Classics Centre--the Best Audience EVER

The prize for the best audience of my life was awarded last Monday, lecturing to the amazing students from several schools and colleges at BSIX BROOKE HOUSE Sixth Form College in Hackney. Some had never encountered the ancient Mediterraneans AT ALL and yet had the courage to speak up, asking, in front of several academics, penetrating questions about whether BAD LUCK or BAD BEHAVIOUR is the issue in tragedy.  Good work Crystal Addey, the Director of the whole enterprise!

So I was already on a high when I got my brain focused on the newly outed five-stanza poem by Sappho, in her delicious Sapphic metre.  Although not exactly “new” (a misnomer for a song composed nearly 27 centuries ago), it has probably not been read or heard since the 300 AD. At one hour’s notice I got to recite THE ACTUAL ANCIENT GREEK TEXT, in an embarrassingly amateur-thespian tone, over the closing credits of BBC Newsnight. I have never been so scared, but had to do it. How often does this beautiful language ever get to be heard at all?

It turned that the duty editor of Newsnight that evening, Marc Williams, had studied Classics at university, and had even heard me give a lecture on Sophocles long ago. So he knew precisely what risk he was taking miking me up for live delivery. He was very fortunate that I didn’t take up the hilarious challenge tweeted me by Professor Barbara Graziosi at Durham, an expert on the cult of ancient Olympian gods, to sing the poem instead.

As a woman with an elder and a younger brother myself, I am particularly pleased that the new poem shows the poet most famous for her erotic love of other women in a completely different light—as the responsible sister of two men, one a business traveler and the other still a youngster. Prof. Tim Whitmarsh has with enormous professional courage published the first translation in the Guardian; here’s the freer version I composed for recital on Newsnight before they opted for the Greek itself.

Why the incessant gossip about Charaxos’ arrival,

in a loaded ship? Only Zeus, I think, knows

the truth, along with all the gods—it’s not for you

to have an opinion!

Hardly! You should be telling me to go and make

repeated appeals to Queen Hera

that Charaxos can make his return here,

ship and all,

finding us safe and sound. Let us place

everything else in the lap of the gods.

Sudden spells of fine weather often emerge

from heavy gales.

Some people are lucky enough to have

their problems averted by the King of Olympus.

They are blessed

and enormously fortunate.

In our case, if Larichos can just grow up

to be a man of leisure and status,

then from our heavy cargo of sorrows

we may very soon be freed!

Burns' Night Guest List for Classicists

Burns Night. My children are terrified that they will be forced to endure the whole of Tam o'Shanter before they get their haggis burgers. But just thinking about the many faces of Robert Burns has always cheered me up—ploughman and dandy, dancer and fiddle-player, womanizing partygoer and soul-searching depressive. 

A world-class poet, he rose from a two-room clay cottage rented by his gardening father, who was determined to get his children educated even though their mother was illiterate. Just as important to the young Robert’s development was his relative Betty Davidson, who enthralled him with ‘stories and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery.’ She would—obviously—head up my list of invitees to my ideal Burns’ Night party.

Carpenter's Son & Greek Prof.

Next would be Professor Andrew Dalziel, the carpenter’s son who rose—as was then possible in the Scottish educational system—to be a leading Edinburgh intellectual. Via parochial school he arrived at Edinburgh University and by 1779 at the Chair of Greek. He was almost single-handedly responsible for saving the reputation of Classics at that university after a long decline, but remained entirely free from snobbery: '... We have got a poet in town just now, whom everybody is taking notice of — a ploughman from Ayrshire — a man of unquestionable genius.’

Esther Knew it Off by Heart

My next invitee would be Esther Easton, the gardener's wife Burns visited in 1787. He recorded that she was ‘a very remarkable woman for reciting poetry of all kinds, and sometimes making Scotch doggerel herself—she can repeat by heart almost everything she has ever read, particularly Pope’s ‘Homer’ from end to end; has studied Euclid by herself; and, in short, is a woman of very extraordinary abilities’ and ‘a great florist.’ Esther could recite Pope's Homer and do the accounts and flower arrangements.

The last, though, would be John Lapraik, a friend to whom Burns showed touching loyalty, supporting him when he was sent to debtors’ prison. It was in his famous Epistle for J. Lapraik, an Old Scots Bard, that Burns set out his own poetic manifesto: education was all very well, but even men like him and Lapraik, who had not studied at university, could write inspirational poetry. 

Contrary to popular (prejudiced) interpretation, Burns never ever says that study of the Greek and Latin Classics is prejudicial to poetry. On the contrary, he takes care to show his own immersion in the entire poetic tradition. His point is this: without talent, no amount of education can turn ‘dull, conceited’ students into anything but ‘asses’, who have confused ‘their brains in college classes’. Nobody ever managed ‘to climb Parnassus / By dint of Greek:’

Boring the family 25th Jan 2013

Gie me ae spark o' nature's fire,

That's a' the learning I desire;

Then tho' I drudge thro' dub an' mire

At pleugh or cart,

My muse, tho' hamely in attire,

May touch the heart.

This poem has the added virtue of being short enough to prevent the haggis getting cold. For those of you as mystified by Burns’ dialect as many of his readers were by ancient Greek, you can preface your dinner tonight with this delicious and comprehensible recording of the poem by David Rintoul: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/epistle_to_j_lapraik. 

This blog is in honour of my TWO friends who share a birthday with Robert Burns as well as a love of all things Greek, Fiona Macintosh and Pantelis Michelakis.

Thoughts on Walls

    Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

    What I was walling in or walling out,

    And to whom I was like to give offense.

 

Tsvetelin Iovchev

So wrote Robert Frost in his poem ‘Mending Wall,’ published exactly a century ago, in 1914.  One man who could give Frost’s narrator a clear answer is Tsvetelin Iovchev, the Bulgarian Minister of the Interior, who has announced the near-completion of a 33-kilometer-long wall designed to keep Syrian refugees and other migrants from crossing the Bulgarian-Turkish border.

Walls, whether in Bulgaria, on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in Berlin, or prisons and penitentiaries, divide politicians and commentators. Those who put one up routinely insist that it increases security for people on both sides and is therefore an instrument of universal wellbeing. Those whose movements are restricted by the wall—from either side—always respond that it decreases security by exacerbating the underlying conflict which caused the wall to be built in the first place. 

Piping while Athens gets defortified

Walls create new problems. The water-borne killer plague which decimated the Athenians early in the Peloponnesian War took hold more easily because they had all come in from the countryside to crowd behind their Long Walls.  But the walls did protect them and thus prolong the war. When the Athenians were finally defeated, their enemies tore the walls down ‘with jubilation, accompanied by the music of girl pipers’.

Joshua's trumpeteers

Despite having a soft spot for the classical Athenians, I think that walls really are at their best in the process of coming down. ‘Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls came Tumbling Down’, especially as sung by Paul Robeson, remains a resounding anthem of Abolitionism and the Civil Rights movement. All those trumpets!

The sight of the first East Berliners through the fissure in the wall on 9th November 1989 completely changed my life. I was locked in a miserable marriage to a progressively more controlling individual, but was far too scared to leave. The fear was justified. It transpired that my possessive then-husband liked to throw television sets around. He had also hired a private detective to stare at my window in Magdalen College, Oxford through binoculars from a car parked in—you’ve guessed it—Long Wall Street. The detective reported to him that I was having a passionate affair with my Atari (a Jurassic proto-computer, to those of you under forty-five). Incendiary information!

Inspired thousands to change their lives

But as I watched the TV news that momentous evening, the tears splashing into my gin, I at last found the courage to make The Phone Call. (Then I hid). A tiny personal victory, but one which has made me forever grateful to those brave Berliners and forever fond of the sight of walls in the process of dismantlement.