Andrea Marcolongo’s motivation for writing The Ingenious Language is refreshingly straightforward: the Italian writer, translator, and classical scholar wants everyone to fall in love with ancient Greek. Casting aside the rigid pedagogical practices and elitism traditionally associated with classical studies, Marcolongo focuses on the personal, exploring the “extraordinary” challenges, ecstasies, and opportunities ancient Greek offers to all who engage with it. Written for “those who have never studied it and are curious, those who have studied Greek and forgotten it, those who have studied it and hated it, and those who are studying Greek literature in school today,” The Ingenious Language is a bestseller in Italy and, in translation, has been embraced by readers around the world. Masterfully translated from the Italian by Will Schutt and published by Europa Editions, Andrea Marcolongo’s love letter to ancient Greek is now finally available in North America. To celebrate, Asymptote spoke with Marcolongo about falling in love with an ancient language, the “strange” appeal of studying Greek, the myth of Greek color blindness, and the need for a common utopia.
—Sarah Timmer Harvey
Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): In the introduction to The Ingenious Language, you mention “falling in love” with ancient Greek as a young girl. Can you tell me why Greek was so appealing to you, why you fell in love?
Andrea Marcolongo (AM): I always say that the love story with Greek is the longest of my life. However, it wasn’t love at first sight: I don’t believe in that. Instead, it was a path of knowledge. I remember myself as a young girl waiting for the yellow bus to go to high school with a big Greek dictionary in my hands. It was a challenge, first of all, to learn an alphabet that I didn’t know, and then a challenge to myself, my openness to the world.
Obviously, every language is “ingenious” in its own way because it expresses thinking of those who use it every day. The adjective “ingenious” which gives the title to my book derives from three different languages: the Greek, where it comes from the verb root “to create” and means, as in Aristophanes, “creative mind,” the Latin, in which it refers to the “genium” which, according to mythology, is a small being that accompanied man throughout the course of life to make him happy, and then the French, in which “génial” means fun, or beautiful. I played with these same words in three different languages as a way of explaining why I, Andrea, a thirty-year-old woman, love Greek. I love it because it is a free and human language. Free, because its quirks—maybe even those that drove us crazy at school—were not made obligatory by grammar, but left to the free choice of those who used Greek daily to speak and write. It is, therefore, a human language because it leaves people the responsibility of choosing not only what to say, but also how to say it. And in doing so, Greek also allows the speaker the freedom to express who they are.
Even before language, human beings have used words to understand and make themselves understood. And before speech, there is always thought. That is why it is the language that shapes the way we see the world. While writing The Ingenious Language, I tried to ask myself how the ancient Greeks saw the world through their language: a world that possessed, for example, a special number to say a couple, the dual, or a very precise way to express a wish or regret. And this way of seeing the world, so delicate and at the same time without obscurity, was something I wanted to share with everyone, whether they had studied Greek or not. My book uses ancient Greek as the key to inviting readers to first come to terms with themselves and secondly, to put into words what they feel with honesty, authenticity, integrity, and, yes, even irony. Because the words are there, we must always find them to avoid silence, the unsaid, the disorientation of not feeling understood, or feeling alone in this contemporaneity.
STH: When did you begin writing the book?
AM: The Ingenious Language was born twice (and is collecting so many stories that it should write a book of its own!). The first time, now seven years ago, was when a boy I taught asked me why he should learn the paradigms of Greek verbs, and to answer this question, I prepared a document for him, which then became the first chapter of the book. Only then did I understand the beauty of his question, which only kids can see: he asked me the reason why there is so much strangeness in Greek. He didn’t ask about its usefulness, as adults almost always do. When, a couple of years later, I proposed the project to a publisher, and he accepted it, I thought it was a joke!
I am often asked to explain the success of the book (over three hundred thousand copies in Italy and twenty-seven foreign editions), and I really don’t know how to answer. I wrote the book as a gift to the language that I love, which is always described as important and useful but rarely called beautiful. My luck was that, except for a few close friends, nobody believed this, so I felt free to put myself on every page with the utmost sincerity, revealing, in the process, who I am and who I’m not. Writing about my life and the Greek language, I was afraid of losing part of myself. Now, thanks to the readers, I know that I didn’t lose anything. In fact, I’ve discovered a new part of myself, which is the writer I always dreamed of becoming when I was a child.
STH: When it comes to translation, you discuss the perils of students clinging too much to the dictionary, warning that doing so risks the Greek scholar retreating “further and further from the language, like a castaway who refuses to abandon the raft and trust that the rescue boat is on its way.” Why is this important?
AM: I am convinced that this happens with every subject, from mathematics to foreign languages like French. We all want the rules and the manuals, for fear of making mistakes without giving space to intellectual freedom. I realized that I had studied Greek for almost twenty years and was always terrified of making mistakes, as though there was a court at the end of a translation that established whether it was right or wrong. Studying is fundamental, of course, it is the basis, but what matters, when speaking of translations, is leading the reader to that feeling linguistically. It cannot be a binary process, nor can we remain prisoners of the dictionary. I don’t believe that Greek is a dead language because we are alive, and we still read and seek answers in the texts of Homer, Plato, and Euripides.
A piece of advice that I always like to give to my students is to have fun. Ask all the questions you can. Be curious, slide beneath the surface of the grammatical rules and the natural fear that an ancient language imposes. Forget learning by heart. This doesn’t mean not studying at all, but rather trying to understand a language for which grammar is the code, not the means to an end. Ancient Greek, like every language, was used to depict a world: try to think how the Greeks thought. With a good guide next to you, there’s no version of the language that can be scary, because ancient Greek will be yours, it will become part of you.
STH: You describe the “incomprehension and discomfort” that many students of Greek feel when striving to speak the language because there is no model or true understanding of how it sounded, meaning that every modern attempt at pronunciation is, at best, an educated guess. In your own practice, how do you approach this discomfort?
AM: It’s true. For years, I have done nothing but despair of seeking a way to pronounce Greek. From the first word I learned in school, I have always been uncomfortable, even afraid of making mistakes—as if Plato himself could reproach me. Even now, I lower my voice when I read Greek aloud! It was at university, when the language became fully mine, that I stopped feeling embarrassed. We will never know how a Greek pronounced ancient Greek, but even in the silence imposed by history, it is possible to love a language that protects us from the noise and contemporary confusion.
STH: Your book begins with a quote from Virginia Woolf’s essay, “On Not Knowing Greek,” in which Woolf writes that it is “strange” that “we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel forever drawn back to Greek.” Yet, in the same essay, Woolf offers an explanation that I think might resonate in light of today’s climate crisis. Woolf suggestsed that we when we read Plato or Sappho: “They admit to us a vision of the earth unravaged, the sea unpolluted, the maturity, tried but unbroken, of mankind.” What are your thoughts on this?
AM: I am happy to answer this question because it highlights the absolute contemporaneity of ancient Greek. Jung wrote that many contemporary neuroses would be resolved if we still lived an era linked to the naturalness of the myth. I also strongly believe this. There is no necessity for an appeal to return to the past—a claim of regression—but the need for awareness. There is no need to live on a Greek island to respect the environment in which we live and the human beings around us. I think that human nature does not change, that our inner needs are the same as they always have been, from the times of the Trojan War to the present. What has changed are our ways of finding the necessary answers.
I‘ve experienced some of what is happening with the climate emergency at the European space agency (ESA) in Germany. A scientist told me the paradox of how we currently possess the most scientific data we’ve ever had, and yet, it has become difficult, almost impossible to change the human conscience when it comes to climate change. This is why there is a need for myth or narrative oxygen: an awareness that we are all part of the same story aboard the same ship, sharing the same values. For this purpose, the Iliad and the Odyssey were needed to form the collective consciousness. Today we feel discouraged and distrustful, each engaged in an individual battle, without a common utopia.
STH: You have written about the way that ancient Greeks viewed color, that it was “life and light, a human experience rather than a physical or optical one.” This view has caused centuries of confusion with various scholars, who have gone so far as to suggest that the Greeks were “color blind” because their way of communicating color was so unique. Why is the Greek concept of color so elusive?
AM: This is one of the riskiest mistakes that occur when we pretend to understand difference, forcing the foreigner to think according to our intellectual categories. It is clear, perhaps even obvious, that the Greeks saw colors exactly as we see them. The difference was that the words they used have been incomprehensible to us for centuries.
Basically, there is the question that every linguistic scholar asks themselves: “Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?” I’m paraphrasing Shakespeare, and my answer is yes! For this reason the sea will never cease to be painted blue, pink, purple, orange in the light of sunset, the same sea that Homer called the “color of wine,” οἶνοψ πόντος (òinops pòntos).
STH: The Ingenious Language has been translated into dozens of other languages, can you tell me a little about your readers? Is there anything that has surprised you about the way that people around the world are connecting with your book?
AM: What I now understand, after almost four years of traveling around the world thanks to my book, is that only in distance and diversity do we gain the pure, crystalline sense of what often eludes us when we are too proximal to something—when we look at only at our feet and not at the vastness of the world. That it is easy, in a certain sense, to find confirmation of our own beliefs in those who are similar to us, in those who resemble us, in those who share the same history and the same roots. Above all, thinking back to everything that happened to me between Santiago de Chile, Valparaiso, Cusco, Arequipa, and Lima, I think that the international success of a book dedicated to the Greek language can possibly be contributed to the fact that linguistics is not an exact science, but it is a human science—in the sense that it deals with human beings, regardless of their latitude. This is why talking about an ancient language like Greek in South America has perhaps excited me more than talking about it in a bookstore in Athens, Rome, or Madrid. Thanks to the attentive and amazing readers in the Andes, I discovered an uncontaminated curiosity, much like the Amazon that surrounded me. No Chilean or Peruvian reader has ever asked me what I thought of a particular grammatical rule. Everyone seemed amazed to find the same power in the myths of Greek tragedies—stories in which they ignored almost everything, except that the myths are pulsating with life on the page. And the discovery of the beauty of a language like Greek, which was the beginning of Western culture, made them even more proud of their ancient languages, which have their roots in the time of the Incas. I listened for hours to ecstatic older people and children who spoke to me about Quechua (they even gave me a dictionary as heavy as a Greek dictionary), I heard them say nos otros, “we,” with the strength that only a language possesses in determining the identity of a people.
Now that I’m back from Colombia, I understand the immense gift that South America has given me. This new world has given me a new Greek, shaking off the dust and tiredness accumulated over decades of study and endless debates on useful or useless languages. The truth is that in Latin America, the Greek we study at school, sweating between declensions, versions, and paradigms, is as exotic as it is for Europeans to read the passion flowing in the blood and flesh of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s women or to admire, with an inexplicable sense of the sacred, the immensity of Machu Picchu.
STH: In your opinion, what is the biggest misconception when it comes to the discourse around Ancient Greek scholarship?
AM: There is much debate, and in my opinion too much, on the usefulness of Greek at school or the crisis of the classic. I like to define these polemics with an irony that is true to my character, more ancient than ancient Greek. And often, we lose sight of the first feeling that ancient Greek arouses in those who approach it: wonder.
Greek is, first and foremost, a language that serves to express an unrepeatable idea of the world; it is certainly not a sum of grammatical rules. And here comes, for me, the importance of appearance: we often imagine the Greek world, its art, its literature, as something very close to us, as though we are the direct descendants of the ancient Greeks. And yet, Greekness and the Greek language are so different and distant, and familiarization requires so much effort. In Greek texts, we do not read the ancients; we read ourselves.
When I am teaching, I ask the children to help me understand why they are studying Greek today, and the answers they give me make me more than certain that something is missing from the current controversy. We continue to wonder if Greek is useful in the world of work, but children are not users, they are human beings who are on a path more complicated than the Greek language, namely adolescence. Why do we always ask ourselves about the future without seeing what happens to children in the meantime, during those five years of studying Greek? The challenge is with oneself (and not with grammar), managing the failure of a task in the classroom, and the joy of success. In my opinion, the study of a language that challenges us the way that Greek does teaches us the trade of living and, if I can quote Cesare Pavese, prepares us for the whole range of pains and successes that adult life holds for everyone.
Andrea Marcolongo, born in 1987, is an Italian writer, lecturer, and translator from the Greek. She graduated in Classical Literature from the University of Milan, and her work has been published in twenty-seven countries. Author of The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek (Laterza, 2016) and a work of narrative history, The Heroic Measure (Mondadori, 2018), Marcolongo writes for the cultural insert of La Stampa, lectures at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota and UNAM in Mexico City, served as president of the 2019 Festival de l’histoire in Blois, and was a finalist at the Prix des Lecteurs in France.
Sarah Timmer Harvey is a writer and translator currently based in New York. She holds an MFA in writing and translation from Columbia University and, most recently, her work has appeared in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Gulf Coast Journal, and Cagibi Literary Journal.
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