Of Autumn and Greek
Erin Douglass
Tonight, during the first hour of my writing group, we read aloud "To Autumn" by Keats. As the four of us recited the poem in unison, our low- to medium-pitched voices intoning, breathing, breaking for lines, I flashed back almost twenty years to my Ancient Greek professor at Vassar.
I took Beginning Ancient Greek in 12th grade, desperate as I was for challenge and an excuse to escape the small, closed campus of Spackenkill High School. Fifteen minutes away near downtown Poughkeepsie, leafy, stately Vassar offered the Classics, a world of study I'd dreamed of ever since falling in love with Greece as a kid.
It was the Travel section of my parents' Sunday New York Times that started it. Flipping through the smudgy pages, I'd pause over the advertisements for cruises and package tours to the Greek Isles and Athens. The elegant ruins, olive groves and white stuccoed villages offered the exoticism of history without the mothball smell. Most ads promised free brochures to those brave enough to fill out the cramped request forms. Six to eight weeks after popping a dozen in the mail, I'd receive manila envelopes stuffed with glossy promotional material. The vivid photographs captivated my 10-year-old self.
Then, when I was a freshman in high school, the English Department organized a trip to Greece open to all four grades. I jumped at the opportunity and, along with two of my best friends Ritu and Maria, joined the band of juniors and seniors for the Spring Break adventure. We swarmed the Parthenon, hiked to the oracle, cruised the Aegean and bought cheap silver jewelry. Ritu got drunk on Ouzo; the seniors discovered the discos; I kissed a cute local named Peter. Moussaka and feta became my new favorite foods.
Besides the thrill of new sites and tastes, that trip gave me my first experience of the ancient. Never before had I peered at the remnants of lives lived and decorated and defended so long ago.
At the start of my senior year, I met with my guidance counselor to discuss going to Vassar as a 12th grader. Picking up on my enthusiasm — and perhaps sensing a fight if he objected — he agreed to let me duck out of morning classes three days a week.
From the moment I entered the classroom at Vassar I knew I'd found something wonderful. Introducing herself as Rachel Kitzinger, my professor tucked her reddish blond hair behind her ears and exuded quiet, academic wisdom. Among her specialties was the performance of Ancient Greek.
Let me tell you, the first time I heard her give voice to that earthy tongue, my eyes went wide. Long ahs, crashing x's, chopping k's and deep o's: the sounds ran together with passion and fury. This complex language, properly articulated, was a force unlike anything I'd ever heard.
Of course, the six of us in class were hardly able to match the phonic ferocity when we read aloud our bits of The Illiad, Plato's Crito and, later, koine from the New Testament. But we tried.
A year later, freshly ensconced at Pomona College, I signed up again for Ancient Greek. This time the professor was a young guy, simultaneously dorky and cool in his reading glasses and brown suit coats. The language wasn't nearly as fun under his tutelage, but I stuck with it for another year or two. My reward: in the second semester, Professor Kitzinger paid a visit to our West Coast campus to recite, from memory, huge swaths of Antigone.
Even knowing what was in store, I was floored by the performance. This lovely, mild-mannered woman became Antigone that night; the sounds pouring forth full of yearning, desperation and rage not just because of Sophocles' story, but thanks to the complex, malleable language he employed.
I didn't stick with Ancient Greek. I tried Latin, which I also loved, although its churched dipthongs didn't produce the same hair-raising charge each time I heard them. I dove into German for several semesters. I loved its strong mouth-feel, but soon felt overwhelmed by its rigidity, those gigantic nouns. And then came Hindi, its gentle, mellifluous sounds as smooth as water over rock. Gone indeed were the crazed consonants and bellowed vowels of Greek.
Tonight, here in Hollywood, "To Autumn" sent new shivers down my spine. Sound edged out meaning, song obscured image. I knew all those words we spoke into the room (or almost all of them), but somehow, in their chanting, I could've been reading Greek.