INTERPRETATION AND TEXTS IN GREEK (START HERE)

Interpretation and Texts


There is a vast difference between Criticism and Interpretation. The scholarly Classical world has long shown its preference for the critics, and been shy of the subjective side of interpretative study. It is as if Criticism, founded in history and cumulative detailed scholarship, were more worthy of honor than intuition and imaginative interpretation. The amount of detailed critical study devoted to Sappho and the history of the actual texts is staggering, more than a literary reader would be able to digest in months of concentrated reading. And it is couched in a scholarly format which makes it unavailable to non-professional readers, and probably unreadable in large party as well. The aim of this study is to interpret the authentic texts which have been established as Sappho's poetry, in their original form, examining their communicative meaning on the one hand, and at the same time investigating the internal microstructure of the poems as poetic artifacts.

All Greek and Roman poetry has an immediate base in form and sound. The sounds of the words themselves are pure musical sound, and since language moves in time with motion, they foretell the way we see moving images in modern cinematic art. Cinematic style viewing does not come from a machine, it is a way of seeing which has deep roots in the past, often ensconced in vivid storytelling, in the ancient Epic, and in the choral parts of Greek drama. We cannot separate a Greek poem from either its explicit sound or from its explicit visual references, since together they present a duplex level of composite meaning which accompanies and amplifies the apparent "meaning" of a written text. Presenting this composite view of Sappho's poetry in terms of sound and its configurations is the specific aim of the present study.

Before turning to the poems, which are here given in Greek text along with a translation and followed by a detailed commentary, it is necessary to discuss several things which impinge on the reading of the Greek. The text itself involves several problems, the first of which is the representation in modern typographical conventions.

The first thing a beginner notices about a page of Greek is the display of several diacritics above the characters, which he is told are "accents", and he dutifully goes about reading the words with these "accents" at a louder amplitude than the unaccented syllable. He has substituted Stress for something else which these marks were put there to indicate --- a musical Pitch. But there are complications:

The Acute or 'oxu' is a musical pitch sign, which requires the pitch of the vowel indicated to rise up as much as a musical fifth. This is an up-sliding motion, which starts at a base level and moves upward over the indicated length of the vowel. This rising pitch can be associated with a short vowel or a long vowel, and must be employed simultaneously with the duration of the vowel as part of the metrical cadencing of a line of verse.

The Circumflex is more complicated. It starts with an up-sliding pitch like the Acute, but it rests at the top of the rise and then slides down to the original base-line from which it started. This takes more time than is allowed by a regular long vowel, so the circumflexed vowel or diphthong will be "overlong", allowing for the time required for this swinging pitch. The circumflexed sound will seem strange at first, it is something like the "meeouw" of a cat's cry, or the melismatic effect of the Chinese 'hao' for "good", or the English patronizing phrase "Well, now....!".

The Grave is not a pitch at all. It means that a previously up-pitched Acute has been demoted to the base level at which all unmarked syllables reside, and is to be disregarded as a sound of musical intonation. Some of the papyri intended for school use of for teaching foreigners the right pronunciation of Greek will have the Grave on all syllables which do not have Acute or Circumflex diacritics, a caution to the barbarian learner NOT to raise the pitch level. Stressing this also as loud we make a bad mistake.

Since learning to use the pitch intonation is important in reaching for the authentic sound of Greek poetry, this study prints with the Greek only the pitch markings which involve actual sounds. Thus the Smooth Breathing (which means nothing more than "no aspiration here!) is unnecessary, as is the negative information of the Grave sign (meaning "Keep tone level down, please!). By clearing away unnecessary signs, and indicating only the rising Acute and over-arching Circumflex as real sounds as used in the poetic idiom, we keep he reader's attention on pronunciation, as critical to the understanding of the poetry.

Why does this have to be mentioned at all? It is because we have been pronouncing all three Accent marks as Stresses when we learn our Attic Greek, making the syllables strong and loud. Learning this regularly in reading prose, we have to forget what we have been doing when we turn to verse, and start over again with long and short syllables. But we are so used to this Stress pronunciation, that we then start converting "long" to Loud, and "short" to Weak. This is in direct opposition to the known metrical quality of Greek as a Duration based language which has something like a musical eighth note for a Short, a quarter note for a Long, and a dotted quarter or even a half note for the triple-length Circumflexed syllable.

At long last Classicists are beginning to recognize the fault in our traditional pronunciation of ancient Greek, and attempts have been made to rectify the situation with recorded segments as examples pointing toward an authentic sound. One problem here is that it is very difficult to combine the metrical long-short sequences with a pitch-wise up-down tone, and some of the recorded examples are done by people who are not sufficiently trained in voice manipulation. It takes the practice and experience of a trained professional actor to get these things all right, and make them flow easily in a natural way.

A second problem is the fact that each native language speaker will inevitably pronounce his "authenticized" Greek in the manner of his own speech patterns, and an Italian pronunciation of Greek may be virtually incomprehensible to an English native speaker. So we have a dual set of problems. We want to understand something about the nature of ancient Greek pronunciation, and also find a way to represent it in the phonetic patterns of our own native speech.

People always ask what the pronunciation of ancient Greek was like, but the idea of a corrected pronunciation which will be good for all modern speakers everywhere regardless of their own language usage, is clearly impossible. In such a jumble, one might revert in despair to the old double standard of the traditional "prose or poetry" reading of Greek, but that would completely lose sight of the exquisite refinements of the poetry of ancient Greece. Doing it all right does take work, but like many other things that do not come easily, doing it right will be well worth the effort expended.

There is now much interest in reading Ancient Greek with an authentic pronunciation, but there are two problems which confront us as soon as we start. Let me outline these very briefly:

First, we all have very specific pronunciations of our basic speech sounds which we have learned in early childhood in accessing our native language. These are deeply encoded in our linguistic memory, and aside from a few of us who are completely bilingual, we retain our native pronunciation throughout life. When we read an ancient language where there is no detailed information about the sounds, we will continue to use the sounds of our native speech, even if we try to make some minor adjustments. A French speaker will read Platovery differently from a native U.S. speaker, and an Italian will read his Vergil in a manner which will be totally foreign to the English speaker trained in his English-based school pronunciation. We can "correct" simple linguistic features like the over-aspiration of a Greek Phi, but we cannot produce the genuine ancient vowels, since we don't know exactly what timbre they originally had, and at the same time we cannot divest ourselves of our own native vowel-patterns. Second, it now seems very important to try to use the musical pitch signs which are recorded as the Greek "accents", but there are several problems here. First we have to get rid of the Stresses which have long been associated with the Accents, and replace them by Durations, a difficult process once one has learned Greek in the traditional Western way. Then having mastered a length-based system for reading Greek poetry, we face the doubly difficult business of superimposing musical pitches atop the length-based readings. In theory this should be possible by reading both lengths and pitches from the printed text as we go along, but anyone who has tried this will attest the difficulty of the triple process of Reading characters, deducing variable Length patterns and applying musical Intonations to the vocal output all at the same time.

As one who has advocated a better and more authentic way of reading ancient Greek for many years, I know how difficult such a composite process can be. The only way I have been able to combine all three of these disparate levels of reading is by imbibing into memory the composite "triple text" and becoming so familiar with it as a singlemind-sound process, that I can read or (better) chant it in a single acoustic flow. But of course this is just what an ancient bard or poet was doing, and following lamely and with difficult in his path at this far removed date, we begin to see why the role of "Poet" was in ancient times so highly regarded. He did things learned by long practice, things which nobody else in the society could think of performing. So if we embark on this route toward authenticity, I suggest we proceed carefully and with much assiduity, expecting the process to be much harder than a scholarly description would state.

Since Greek is always sprinted with diacritics Accents, we have ready-made information on each page which can be read from the text, without reference to rules explaining how they got there. In fact there is much confusion about many of the accented words, which the ancient metrical writers went to great efforts to explain. And modern editorial conventions have regularized the accents, which in many cases have variants discussed in the old treatises or seen in the papyri.

The Accents were invented and first used by the Alexandrian academicians who were faced with teaching a correct pitch pronunciation to a large body of non-Greek speakers in an expanding Hellenistic world. Accented texts were used for school texts, and reading copies of the papyri are often without any diacritics. There is no evidence that an educated reader in the days of Plato had accented texts for any of his reading, and in the Archaic period we are not even clear about the shape of the characters used. Sappho probably recorded her verse in somewhat rounded capitals, but we have no idea of the shape or appearance of her autograph copy.

This would be a far cry from the MSS hand on which our printed 16th century editions were based, replete as they were with abbreviations and special ligatures which are unreadable even to a modern trained student of Greek. Our shaded Teubner text is no more original or authentic than the Oxford font derived from the handwriting of Richard Porson in the early l9th century.

Format is important, since it dictates a great deal about how we read a text, the speed of reading and rate of comprehension, as well as the esthetic impressions we derive from a page of written verbal art. The great attention paid to the development of special fonts since the days of William Morris is witness to an improved sense of "readability". A poem of D.G. Rosetti printed on fine handmade paper with a specially designed art-font is quite different from the same poem read from an equally spacing typewriter or Courier font, printed out on cheap paper from a mimeograph machine. Looking at the verse few lines of an ancient papyrus, we see that an Alexandrian reader must have had a very different approach to his reading. The large characters with their handwritten irregularities would be slow in reading but easier on the eyes than a small print read fast. The papyrus would be white and clear, the ink from octopus sepia or boiled walnut juice would be a dark and permanent brown, and the book unrolling between two hand held roller sticks would have to be perused in a leisurely manner. There was nothing in the ancient world like Aldo Manutio's little portable pocket-book of the early 16th century, nor the need for a micro-printed Elzevier a century later. Reading means absorbing, imbibing the meaning and also the sound of the text, and this is never done at a glance with a swift scan.

A good example of leisurely reading can be seen in this elegant portrayal of Sappho with a scroll of her poetry:

And what she might be reading would be something like this, if we can imagine a clean sheet of new papyrus elegantly handwritten with dark brown sepia based ink on creamy whitened sheets:

Here is another set of Papyri, much reduced, with a piece of Sappho Pap. Oxyrh. 1787 at the left with parts of three poems. At the right is a letter "to my brother Heracleides..." dated from Tiberius 27 AD, and below from third century: "Eudaimon invites to dine at the gymnasium, crowning of son on 1 st a 8th hour."