Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen

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.