All entries for December 2009

My Mother Reading Homer

During the 1950s my mother had to learn Ancient Greek in high school, in the small mountain village of Meskla, in western Crete. The classes would collectively chant lines of poetry to memorise the work. One of the key aspects to pronunciation was that every vowel should be pronounced distinctly, whereas modern Greek (specifically demotic, not katharevousa, or 'high Greek') is full of diphthongs and elisions.

This pronunciation lends the rhythm to the language. Not just the syllables, but the vowel lengths are counted - so each line will have a consistent number of long and short vowels in a particular pattern.The rhythm is still audible in Greek Orthodox churches, where the litany is sung in a rising and falling lilt, often in a two part harmony, or catechism.

I know nada about Ancient Greek myself, but as an undergraduate I tried writing in English to see if I could translate the metrical and vowel effects across, choosing long and short vowels to chime with lines from the Iliad. It was bloody hard. One advantage of Ancient Greek is that you can move sentence elements around, or change the syllable counts and vowel sounds of the epithets by attaching them to the end of pronouns. So 'Hera of the calf-eyes' and 'calf-eyed Hera' (as a random example) had metrical differences that allowed the lines to fit into the hexameter of epic poetry. The rhythm aided memory for rhapsodists (public reciters of other people's verse - they weren't poets themselves); they would instinctively know which epithet to use when and how because the rhythm of the language provided the structure of the words.

For a small, poor village, I was always impressed by the range and depth of the education, the importance of learning Greek as a language that included 2700 year old words alongside contemporary dialects, village dialects, officialese (katharevousa was the dominant public dialect until modernist poets like George Seferis effectively created a demotic Greek language revolution, from around 1920s). Greek is one language, three millennia old, with many instances all co-existing; you can still hear peasants with the thickest of accents dropping ancient words or phrases into sentences, over tsikoudia in the cafeneios.

CP Cavafy was the master of this, a late-19thC outsider-poet, a big influence on the later modernists (and championed by TS Eliot) who used to juxtapose a range of dictions in single poems. One of his anecdotes was about how he used to find words that he really wanted to use in a poem, and to test his audience's familiarity with these words, he'd drop them into conversations when he was out socialising in Alexandria. If the people he was with looked puzzled, he'd go back and find another word.

Anyway, here is my mother reading out the opening 42 lines of The Iliad.

Download

George Ttoouli : 03 Dec 2009 21:18 |  Tags: Homer Iliad Poetry |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem