On not knowing greek, de Virginia Woolf

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On Not Knowing Greek (excerpts)

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Virginia Woolf (Londres 1882 - Lewes, Sussex, 1941)

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For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?

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Yet it is not because we can analyse them into feelings that they impress us. In six pages of Proust we can find more complicated and varied emotions than in the whole of the Electra. But in the Electra or in the Antigone we are impressed by something different, by something perhaps more impressive — by heroism itself, by fidelity itself. In spite of the labour and the difficulty it is this that draws us back and back to the Greeks; the stable, the permanent, the original human being is to be found there. Violent emotions are needed to rouse him into action, but when thus stirred by death, by betrayal, by some other primitive calamity, Antigone and Ajax and Electra behave in the way in which we should behave thus struck down; the way in which everybody has always behaved; and thus we understand them more easily and more directly than we understand the characters in the Canterbury Tales. These are the originals, Chaucer’s the varieties of the human species.

It is true, of course, that these types of the original man or woman, these heroic Kings, these faithful daughters, these tragic Queens who stalk through the ages always planting their feet in the same places, twitching their robes with the same gestures, from habit not from impulse, are among the greatest bores and the most demoralising companions in the world. The plays of Addison, Voltaire, and a host of others are there to prove it. But encounter them in Greek. Even in Sophocles, whose reputation for restraint and mastery has filtered down to us from the scholars, they are decided, ruthless, direct. A fragment of their speech broken off would, we feel, colour oceans and oceans of the respectable drama. Here we meet them before their emotions have been worn into uniformity. Here we listen to the nightingale whose song echoes through English literature singing in her own Greek tongue. For the first time Orpheus with his lute makes men and beasts follow him. Their voices ring out clear and sharp; we see the hairy, tawny bodies at play in the sunlight among the olive trees, not posed gracefully on granite plinths in the pale corridors of the British Museum. And then suddenly, in the midst of all this sharpness and compression, Electra, as if she swept her veil over her face and forbade us to think of her any more, speaks of that very nightingale: “that bird distraught with grief, the messenger of Zeus. Ah, queen of sorrow, Niobe, thee I deem divine — thee; who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb.”

And as she silences her own complaint, she perplexes us again with the insoluble question of poetry and its nature, and why, as she speaks thus, her words put on the assurance of immortality. For they are Greek; we cannot tell how they sounded; they ignore the obvious sources of excitement; they owe nothing of their effect to any extravagance of expression, and certainly they throw no light upon the speaker’s character or the writer’s. But they remain, something that has been stated and must eternally endure.

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Further, in reckoning the doubts and difficulties there is this important problem — Where are we to laugh in reading Greek? There is a passage in the Odyssey where laughter begins to steal upon us, but if Homer were looking we should probably think it better to control our merriment. To laugh instantly it is almost necessary (though Aristophanes may supply us with an exception) to laugh in English. Humour, after all, is closely bound up with a sense of the body. When we laugh at the humour of Wycherley, we are laughing with the body of that burly rustic who was our common ancestor on the village green. The French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer, to make sure that they are laughing in the right place, and the pause is fatal. Thus humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue, and when we turn from Greek to English literature it seems, after a long silence, as if our great age were ushered in by a burst of laughter.

These are all difficulties, sources of misunderstanding, of distorted and romantic, of servile and snobbish passion. Yet even for the unlearned some certainties remain. Greek is the impersonal literature; it is also the literature of masterpieces. There are no schools; no forerunners; no heirs. We cannot trace a gradual process working in many men imperfectly until it expresses itself adequately at last in one. Again, there is always about Greek literature that air of vigour which permeates an “age”, whether it is the age of Aeschylus, or Racine, or Shakespeare. One generation at least in that fortunate time is blown on to be writers to the extreme; to attain that unconsciousness which means that the consciousness is stimulated to the highest extent; to surpass the limits of small triumphs and tentative experiments. Thus we have Sappho with her constellations of adjectives; Plato daring extravagant flights of poetry in the midst of prose; Thucydides, constricted and contracted; Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and quietly, apparently motionless, and then, with a flicker of fins, off and away; while in the Odyssey we have what remains the triumph of narrative, the clearest and at the same time the most romantic story of the fortunes of men and women.

The Odyssey is merely a story of adventure, the instinctive story-telling of a sea-faring race. So we may begin it, reading quickly in the spirit of children wanting amusement to find out what happens next. But here is nothing immature; here are full-grown people, crafty, subtle, and passionate. Nor is the world itself a small one, since the sea which separates island from island has to be crossed by little hand-made boats and is measured by the flight of the sea-gulls. It is true that the islands are not thickly populated, and the people, though everything is made by hands, are not closely kept at work. They have had time to develop a very dignified, a very stately society, with an ancient tradition of manners behind it, which makes every relation at once orderly, natural, and full of reserve. Penelope crosses the room; Telemachus goes to bed; Nausicaa washes her linen; and their actions seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.

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Virgina Woolf

On not knowing Greek

The common reader

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Virginia Woolf

on not knowing greek

Introduced by Elena Gualtery

et remotissima prope

Hesperus Press Limited. London, 2008

ISBN: 9781843916055

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Som al “moment” «The wire», ens diu Xavier Antich

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Ja fa un temps, ens referiem en aquest blog a «The wire»:

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The Wire, la tragèdia grega i la Ilíada del segle XXI

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També ens permetiem donar un “consell d’amic”: vegeu les cinc temporades de «The wire».

Avui, en Xavier Antich, en un article a La Vanguardia, en fa una glossa i resitua aquesta gran obra en el moment que estem vivint, ressaltant-ne, un cop més, el seu caràcter de “tragèdia grega per al segle XXI”, on “el paper dels déus olímpics l’exerceixen les institucions postmodernes: la policia, les estructures polítiques, el sistema educatiu i les forces macroeconòmiques que no passen per les urnes.” I insisteix:

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Si encara no ho han fet, és el moment de veure The wire. Mai no se’n penediran. Som, ja de ple, al “moment” The wire.

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Versió en castellà a La Vanguardia on line.

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The Wire, la tragèdia grega i la Ilíada del segle XXI

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No lo digo yo, lo dice David Simon, creador de The Wire:

The Wire es una tragedia griega en la que el papel de las fuerzas olímpicas lo desempeñan las instituciones postmodernas y no los dioses antiguos. El Departamento de Policía, la economía de la droga, las estructuras políticas, el sistema educativo o las fuerzas económicas son los que arrojan ahora rayos jupiterinos y dan patadas en el culo sin ninguna razón de peso. En la mayor parte de las series de televisión, y en buena parte de las obras de teatro, los individuos aparecen a menudo elevándose por encima de las instituciones para experimentar una catarsis. En este drama, las instituciones siempre demuestran ser más grandes, y los personajes que tienen suficiente hybris para desafiar al imperio americano postmoderno resultan invariablemente burlados, aplastados o marginados. Es la tragedia griega del nuevo milenio.

Lo dice Simone Weil:

El verdadero héroe, el verdadero tema, el centro de la Ilíada es la fuerza. La fuerza manejada por los hombres, la fuerza que somete a los hombres, la fuerza ante la que se retrae la carne de los hombres. El alma humana aparece sin cesar modificada por sus relaciones con la fuerza, arrastrada, cegada por la fuerza de que cree disponer, encorvada por la presión de la fuerza que sufre. Quienes habían soñado que la fuerza, gracias al progreso, pertenecía en adelante al pasado, han podido ver en ese poema un documento; los que saben discernir la fuerza, hoy como antaño, en el centro de toda historia humana, encuentran ahí el más bello, el más puro de los espejos.

“… cegada por la fuerza de que cree disponer, encorvada por la presión de la fuerza que sufre…”. Los camellos adolescentes en las esquinas de West Baltimore, las armas, la jerga violenta, la ilusión de poder confrontada de forma admirable con la maldición, la condena, el destino de que los ubica inexorablemente en las calles de una ciudad que parece una ciudad pero que en realidad es un verso virgiliano, una boca infernal, unas fauces, el tragadero pestilente del capitalismo salvaje.

The Wire. La fuerza. La Ilíada. La fuerza que somete a los hombres.”

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Extret de: “The Wire: poema de la fuerza, urbana contitio”. Iván de los Ríos. Dins de: “The Wire. 10 dosis de la mejor serie de la televisión.” Errata naturae editores. Madrid 2010. ISBN: 9788493788919.

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Dos consells d’amic: Rellegiu la Ilíada. Vegeu les cinc temporades de “The Wire”.

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