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Bellarmine Magazine_Fall2013_Web

Sapp ho on the Potomac annotated, they nudged. And when someone got something a little wrong, they offered what they called a “friendly amendment.” Very generous. I am going to borrow that for my own students. Classicists pay close attention to language, and yet they work with a very compromised set of data. The field is transformative, multi-disciplinary, and connective to cultural origins. Nagy quoted Nietzsche: close reading means “to take time, to become slow, to read slowly, deeply, with the doors left wide open. To read with delicate eyes and with the fingers of a goldsmith.” I like the idea of reading with one’s fingers – a delicacy, like Braille. Nagy reminded us that Sappho was a musician, and that all of her music is lost to us. Only the words remain. Some words. Thus, the original experience of Sappho cannot be recovered. We have entirely lost the performative aspect of ancient poetry, and, as one who has had the pleasure of hearing a few of my own poems set to music (by my colleague Richard Burchard), and performed by a chorus, I can tell you that it is a vastly different experience from merely reading lines on a page. And yet, reading Sappho, even what little has survived, is, for this poet, what hearing the original big bang must be like for the physicist – reaching back and touching the origins of the universe. Along with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, it is the Ur-text of our humanity. I look forward to reintroducing some of these ancient poets to my freshmen and sophomores. Each evening, after a long day of seminars, I took the path through the woods to Wisconsin Avenue and the Bistro Lepic, a fine little French restaurant. I needed some time to clear my head, to soak up the day. A glass of wine and a plate of escargot helped immensely. Frederick Smock is associate professor of English at Bellarmine University. His new book of poems is The Bounteous World, from Broadstone Books. fall 2013 39 the papyri on which her poems were discovered; and Winter, because of the whiteness of so many of the pages. Taken together, If Not, Winter is a title, a statement, a fragment of syntax – but not, I think, a fragment of meaning. The renowned classics scholar Gregory Nagy, our guru, was a true eminence grise. Tall, rumpled, encyclopedic, he held court in the glass meeting house. The Center for Hellenic Studies’ campus consists of two-story white-washed cottages lining a narrow road that leads to the headquarters, an elegant neoclassical building with meeting rooms, a library, and a central courtyard studded with amphorae. Nagy stayed in a compact mansion behind the center. The campus sits just off Embassy Row, Massachusetts Avenue, across the street from Hilary Clinton’s house. (The Secret Service even had a code name for us: the “white cult.”) A path through the woods of the Naval Observatory, where the vice president lives, leads to the restaurants on Wisconsin Avenue. One student asked if the path was safe, and we were assured that we were probably in the safest spot in North America. The Center is funded by Harvard, the Greek government, and Nagy himself. It was in the glass meeting house that we did most of our cogitating. We began with Sappho, and, in some ways, Sappho remained our touchstone. To me, she is the most engaging of the ancients, for the beauty and the elegance of her lines – even the single lines that survive from some of her poems. Fragment 162 reads in its entirety, “with what eyes?” Fragment 153 reads, “girl sweetvoiced.” Greek is a modular language, like German – words can be stacked like building blocks – and so we get these odd yet beautiful compound adjectives. Fragment 138 reads, “stand to face me beloved / and open out the grace of your eyes.” Sappho, the poet of love, wrote in Fragment 130: Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me – Sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in And yet, reading Sappho, even what little has survived, is, for this poet, what hearing the original big bang must be like for the physicist ... On looking at a handsome man, she wrote, “a thin fire is running under my skin.” Of the power of love, she wrote, “Eros shook my / mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees.” Of what matters most in this world, she wrote: Some men say an army on horse and some men say an army on foot and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is what you love Professor Nagy, who insisted on being addressed simply as “Greg,” was a sweet man, unfailingly complimentary toward his students. His mind ranged far and wide. A typical sentence of his might reference Homer, the artist Davíd, the Disney character Steamboat Willie and Persian ululation. How to praise a man whose intellect is unique, sine qua non? He is undoubtedly the preeminent classics scholar in America, and to spend time in his presence was a gift from the gods. He and his protégé, Kenny Morrell, a professor at Rhodes University in Memphis, who facilitated the seminar, professed a deep love of language and an essential kindness to everyone in the room. Observing them, I felt as though I learned as much about teaching as about ancient poetry. They commented, they


Bellarmine Magazine_Fall2013_Web
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