Greek to Me: Adventures of
the Comma Queen
Mary Norris (W.W. Norton,
2019)
When I reviewed Mary
Norris's Between You and Me, a memoir about her life on The
New Yorker's copy desk, I hoped we'd hear from her again. In
Greek to Me, she's back with the story of the obsession that
occupied her non-working life. She studied both modern and classical
Greek; she traveled all over the Greek world (the book would have
benefited from a map); and she immersed herself in Greek myth and
drama. She was fortunate to work for The New Yorker, which had
a policy of supporting educational opportunities for its employees.
Her boss there, Ed Stringham, loved Greece; he helped her plan her
first journeys, and loaded her down with books to encourage her new
enthusiasm.
One of Norris's first
delights was the Greek alphabet itself. She sprinkles it through the
book as a challenge to the reader, but of course, we already know a
good deal of it, from the 𝜶 and 𝜷 of the word
'alphabet', to the 𝝍 of 'psychology' and the 𝜒 of
'charisma'. And, of course, there's the noble 𝜴. "Oh!
Omega has energy has energy in it, it has breath and
inspiration...Nobody seriously translates 'I am the Alpha and the
Omega,' the words of the Almighty from the Book of Revelation, as 'I
am A through Z.' The Greek alphabet is infinite."
I love the connections
Norris finds between antiquity and the present day. The
conversational putty that fills American English ("like,
totally, so, you know, OK, really, actually, honestly,...") has
its counterpart in the particles of ancient Greek. "I was
amazed, in reading Plato's Apology of Socrates, how much
nuance these syllables give to Socrates' speech–they act like
nudges, winks, facial expressions. You can almost see Socrates poking
his listener as you hear his confidential 'don't you know,' a folksy
expression from a sage older generation." The casual nature of
the smallest words poses a translation problem, as the literal
English tends to weigh more than the Greek original. But then, in
writing, we have punctuation for some of the purposes for which they
only had words. Translation is always, always an imperfect art.
That's why people
sometimes perform ancient Greek plays in the original language.
Norris joined the Barnard Columbia Greek Drama Group in the chorus of
the Electra of Euripedes, walking around New York City in a
fog of memorized Greek texts. The following year, she was promoted to
the lead in The Trojan Women, as Hecuba, Queen of the defeated
Troy. Her husband and son have been killed, and her home is burning.
"The play is an exercise in comparative and superlative: Hecuba
starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder and sadder until she
is the saddest woman who ever lived." She wrote to Katharine
Hepburn to ask for advice about the pacing of all that sadness, which
is totally ludicrous, except it's exactly what Mary Norris would
do. She misses no opportunity.
Norris had time to do all
this because she was single. There was nobody to mind if she got
caught up in study and forgot to eat dinner or collect the mail. As a
woman traveling alone in Greece, she attracted the attention of every
man with a pulse, which could be awkward, especially given the
imperfect state of her spoken Greek. Even more, however, her love of
Greece had a liberating effect.
Her Catholic girlhood
had offered Norris a very limited menu of ways to be a woman, either
a mother or a nun. "Other women and girls may favor a different
goddess. Many opt for Artemis, the huntress; someone who longs for
children might identify with Demeter; great beauties are chosen by
Aphrodite. Hera is not popular; in her Roman guise as Juno she is
statuesque and confident, but what a bitch. For me, it had to be
Athena. Whereas the Virgin Mary is a model of humility and servitude,
Athena is the template for a liberated woman." Mary Norris has
taken full advantage of that template, and the result is glorious.
Any Good Books, May 2019 email edition.
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