I took a series of courses in Greek several years ago.
My professor said, I dream in Greek, and I want you to as well.
He said, You only really know a language when you dream in it.
I didn't know that he meant that he dreamed in Greek class: He was in his early seventies and was usually overwhelmed midway through the class by the bodily vapors and was fast asleep by the end. He would doze off midtranslation and wake up thirty seconds or a minute later and pick up where he'd left off.
The first sentence we translated was
athanatos he psuche
Deathless (is) the soul
The soul (is) immortal
These were easily the best classes I had ever taken. I had to stop taking Greek when I got to graduate school, which I rather stupidly allowed to interfere with my education.
The goal of this blog is to work through the text that we used in that course and to learn Greek from the ground up again. Ideally, I would like to post 2 or 3 times a week.
Looking through Chase and Phillips' A New Introduction to Greek, I am surprised by how much I've retained. I'm not surprised, however, by how unbelievably pleasurable it is to read however little Greek I am able to make out.
So: I have to decided to write out the Greek sentences from Chase and Phillips, scan them into my computer, and type out my translations with whatever comments occur to me as I work through them.
chalepa ta kala.
Difficult, harsh (are) the beautiful (things)
Difficult (things) (are) the beautiful (things)
Beautiful (things) (are) harsh
Beautiful (things) (are) difficult
Beauty (is) difficult....
That was the second sentence we translated.
2 comments:
I love Chase & Phillips. That's the book we used for beginning Greek in my first year at Smith: one semester for the grammar, a second semester rounding up grammatical stragglers and reading the Apology.
In the days when David was teaching British undergraduates who had to learn Greek from scratch he used to complain because they did not proceed at the rapid pace made possible by C&P.
My Greek teacher recommended that we memorise all the quotations from Greek at the beginning of each chapter. I think what I ended up doing was memorising the first 10 pages of the Apology. (hoti men humeis, o andres Athenaioi, peponthate hupo ton emon kategoron, ouk oida...)
One suggestion which may be silly: it might actually be a good idea to get a Greek font (I think WinGreek is good for PCs, Macs have a different range), and practice typing the Greek in. I think that might help it to stick better than scanning it in.
But it's appalling that graduate study got in the way of continuing, they should encourage you to pursue it.
I did a double major in college: English and something called Program of Liberal Study - essentially, Great Books. The year before I got there, they got rid of the Greek (and Latin) requirements. Can you BELIEVE that?? I'd be fluent in the damn language by now had they offered it. I should have majored in classics, but I think that my track record with Romance languages made me think that there was no way in hell I'd learn Greek. But the desire to learn Greek was there, and that's what I should've realized was essential. It came relatively easily to me when I eventually took the Greek courses at the New School.
So, great--you've given me something to shoot for: work through C & P by Christmas, review in the Spring and start The Apology. Actually, I should be able to go through it faster, given that I've gone through it already, but again grad school is interfering with my education. (By the way, they didn't discourage learning Greek, they just left no time for it. We had to take two professionalization courses in the first year. How much more profitably would our time have been spent learning an ancient language? Or any other kind of language? We take these silly useless "translation" course that we fake our way through and are never required to really be able to READ books in languages other than English.)
And I'll work on getting the fonts. I have a Mac.
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