Winter Convocation

Let me first express my gratitude to Vice-Chancellor Pearigen for inviting me to speak today. I am deeply honored. And I commend the administration’s decision to launch this “new tradition” of recognizing the faculty at Winter Convocation. This faculty has been an extraordinary source of collegiality and intellectual connection for the past fifteen years. I have learned so much from them, though of course I cannot speak for them. My thoughts today are based on my own subjective experience as a member of a field with the opaque, and (as many now argue) outdated name of “Classics,” a word that does not state clearly what it is: the study of the literature, history, culture, archaeology, languages, art, and legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. As such, my remarks will skew toward humanities disciplines, by which I mean no slight to my colleagues in other fields. They will also skew toward antiquity, by which again I mean no slight to those working on more recent affairs.

As a humanities scholar who has been given a pulpit such as this, my first inclination is to assume a defensive posture. The humanities are under threat from multiple directions, and departments like mine are often the first to be shuttered in the name of necessity. I could, therefore, focus on the utility of studying an ancient past that might at first glance appear irrelevant to some. I could, for instance, use this time to advise you students against a course of study that will train you for a single job and suggest you instead pursue subjects, like Classics, that will give you skills, such as critical, detail-oriented thinking, that will help you succeed in any profession. I could point out the well-documented hyperbole of oft-made claims that humanities graduates do not find gainful employment after graduation. I could tell you how many of my Classics friends and students have found fulfilling careers as doctors, lawyers, dentists, teachers, librarians, artists, small-business owners, restauranteurs, accountants, urban planners, foreign service officers, and more. 

The best defense, however, is a good offense, and so I would like not to defend the utility of studying humanities and thereby center humanities’ detractors. That is to cede ground at the outset. Rather, I want to celebrate the value I derive from the kind of study I and many of my colleagues do. I want to lay out the driving forces of my work and explain why these are central to the mission of the liberal arts. I will do so through the lens of my work in translation, but, for me, translation cannot be disentangled from my scholarship or my teaching, or my work within the particular context of Sewanee. To speak of one is to speak of them all. 

First: Why read and translate such old books in languages nobody even speaks now? Put simply, understanding the ancient past helps me understand the present. The first “driving force” of my work is to be part of a long and ongoing conversation that stretches back, not decades or centuries, but millennia. And just as in our conversations with family or friends or colleagues, we will find points of contact and of divergence. My own favorite author is the lyric poet Horace, and there are times when I feel closely connected to him, particularly when he ponders the good life, giving us indelible phrases we still repeat, such as carpe diem, while at other times I positively recoil at his complicity in Roman systems of conquest and imperialism. My relationship to the past, like all relationships that are longstanding and deep, is complex and ambivalent. 

Yet ultimately, for me, such complexity bears fruit. To place the Greco-Roman past on a pedestal, overlooking its faults and celebrating it only as the font of nebulous “values,” is to have a shallow conversation that masks more than it reveals. Yet we also do ourselves a disservice if we set this past aside due to its faults, and due to the faulty uses to which it has been put. The events of this past continue to echo, for good and ill, in our geo-politics, our languages, our systems of government, our ideals, our prejudices, our collective memory, and our collective imagination. We are still grappling with its legacy. On the other hand, looking to antiquity gives us needed critical distance that lets us better scrutinize our present cultural assumptions. Wrestling with earlier ideas helps us, to quote Italian writer Umberto Eco, “find a foothold, … especially for questions as vague as the notions of being and freedom.” I derive value from studying ancient constructions of justice, democracy, citizenship, the good life, free speech, the body, sexuality, gender, or ethnicity (to name a few) not because I think we should imitate them but because they help me see that there is nothing inevitable about how we define these concepts today. I learn not to accept uncritically the world I have been handed. Of course, such critical interrogation of the world will always find its detractors—as Socrates might attest—yet it is central to the liberal arts tradition.

Translation in particular helps me think through such ideas, though at times ushering the past into the present feels like an impossible task. Yet, to quote novelist Anthony Doerr, translating the dead languages is “the best kind of fool’s errand.” Inevitably, the most interesting and illuminating words are the hardest to translate. How, for instance, should we translate the Latin pietas when it is far more encompassing than its English derivative “piety,” demanding not just duty toward the divine but toward one’s parents and the state? How should we translate Greek or Latin words describing skin tone when these were not racialized as they are in our contemporary language? How translate scenes of clear sexual violence that use words that do not map directly onto our vocabulary for rape? It is because there is no one-to-one correspondence between present and past that antiquity gives us such fertile ground for contemplation.

Another driving force of my work is to frame the ancient past in a way that feels accessible to everyone. There is perhaps no discipline as evocative of the ivory tower as Classics, but I reject utterly any elitist formulation of my field, or of the liberal arts in general. Yet we must confront the fact that such elitism was originally baked into the very idea of what the Romans called the artes liberales, “the liberal arts.” The word liberal goes back to the Roman concept of libertas (“freedom”) and the liber (“the free man”), as opposed to the unfree, such as an enslaved or formerly enslaved person. The concept directly contrasts the pursuits thought suitable for the political elite (such as philosophy and rhetoric and poetry) with those thought suitable for the professional non-elite (such as business and medicine). This division has had many ramifications I can’t get into, but one is that historically the “liberal arts” could too easily be used to shore up exclusionary hierarchies. 

The study of Latin and Greek has too often been tied to the elitism I have just described—usually because such study has simply been unavailable to most people. There was fortunately a Latin program at my public Tennessee high school when I was a student in the 1990s, yet such programs are few and are becoming fewer. If we continue on our current trajectory, they may in the future be relegated to the richest and most exclusive institutions. This is already underway for many disciplines, with only the tiniest sliver of available academic jobs focusing on the premodern world, whether it is Greece and Rome, global antiquities more broadly, or other fields such as Medieval Studies or premodern Islamic Studies. We risk ceding these fields to an elect few, who may not bring the diversity of perspectives to them that can uncover new approaches and thereby deepen our knowledge. One of the greatest challenges, and opportunities, facing those who teach and study the liberal arts today is opening them up to all. 

Translation is a key tool I use. To show how translation is vital for inclusion, I’d like to speak personally for a moment about my maternal grandmother, Lorene, who spent her life amid deep poverty in rural west Tennessee, much of it in a house that, while my mother was growing up, still lacked even running water. None of my grandparents graduated from high school, though I suspect that Lorene was quite brilliant. While two of her brothers were allowed to attend college, she married young and raised the seven of her children that survived childbirth and infancy. She was a glorious quilter, stitching together fabric with the same concentration with which I now stitch together words. And she was an avid reader. She loved the novels of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and the Brontes. When I was in graduate school, I sent her the translation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and she fell utterly in love with it. She read it over and over; it became her favorite book. My grandmother would never have had the slightest opportunity to study the Russian language, but through translation Tolstoy belonged to her as much as to anyone. And so, while I think it is essential that we in academia write specialized works for each other in order to advance knowledge, if we want our studies to flourish and to pulse with continued life, we must also write for the world at large, for people like my grandmother. As students too, you must not let the Mountain remove you from the world. Instead, I hope you let your time here embed you within the world with greater purpose.

My grandmother brings me to my third driving force as well. Why spend years translating a twelve-thousand-line epic into strict English iambic pentameter? Well, largely, for the same reason my grandmother would spend year after year at her massive quilting frame making more quilts than she had practical use for: the pleasure of creativity. The study of ancient languages evokes many words that do not summon creative pleasure to mind, words such as rigor, grammar, declension, conjugation, and passive periphrastic (I can feel the Latin students wincing), but such study can also be deeply creative. Classics, which has been called the first interdisciplinary field, has brought many approaches under its tent, such as linguistics, literary theory, archaeology, philosophy, women’s and gender studies, studies in race and ethnicity, and more. But Classics professors themselves have been slow to take up creative work like translation, this despite the many novels, paintings, plays, video games, and movies set in ancient Greece and Rome or inspired by mythology – these are topics people are immensely open to learning about in a creative way. Perhaps Classicists have been slow to embrace creativity due to anxiety about proving our utility, though of course creative works have immeasurable value in building community and generating intercultural dialogue. In many universities, a translation would not even count toward a faculty member’s tenure and promotion – this is something that sets liberal arts colleges like Sewanee apart; they have traditionally embraced such endeavors among their faculty. 

This is why, in the summer of 2016, when my son was three and my daughter was one, I had the freedom to take a new path in my writing. I decided I had far too little time on my hands ever to write another word that would not bring me pleasure to write. That may have been the very same day I began translating Horace’s Odes. I am one of those people who is simply not okay without a creative outlet—I can spend entire days (on the rare occasions my children let me) taking photographs or embroidering or refinishing furniture. Not only has writing creatively made my work more personally fulfilling, it has also, I hope, shown my students that creativity can be threaded throughout a liberal arts curriculum in unexpected ways. I hope each student here, as you ponder what success in college entails, will weigh not just grades or professional paths but also whether, during this transitory period of your life, you experience the pleasures of creativity and the imagination.

I now come to the last of my driving forces, one that I suspect applies to every faculty member here today, and I hope to every student. To delve into the ancient past and to try to usher it into the present through scholarly study or creative pursuits is ultimately an act of curiosity. I aim every day to sharpen my own sense of curiosity as well as that of my students. Curiosity is a fire that must be fed, and I think that is our shared mission here. To be curious, you must have an open mind, you must ask questions relentlessly, you must go down the proverbial rabbit-hole; you must delve into books, look through microscopes and telescopes; and wrestle with words you do not fully grasp in your own and other languages. You must be willing to let anything you encounter spark your interest, whether it’s a text, an artifact, a building, a system of government, a microbe, a word, or an idea. Curiosity opens a chasm that wants to be filled, and what is so breathtaking about human beings is that we fill this chasm in so many imaginative ways. Consider the simple act of looking at the night sky. An astronomer sees a dance of gravity and elements; a myth-maker sees gods and monsters; a poet sees the eyes of a beloved; a Stoic philosopher sees a fiery intelligence that binds us to the will of heaven; a translator sees stellae or astra or a thousand other words for “stars”; and, yes, a meteorologist sees potential signs of danger that tell us to seek shelter (as we all have learned well this week). All of these acts are sparked by curiosity and have deep value to the human experience, even if we might see some as being more practically useful than others. 

Such moments of curiosity and the inquisitiveness they spark are at the heart of humanistic, scientific, and theological inquiry. To conduct such inquiry in community with others is how I would define the liberal arts. We can do this in a shared time and place, as we do here at Sewanee. But we can also do this across time and place, as we do when we read a book written long ago or far away. One reason I am drawn to humanistic study is the sense of connection it makes me feel, especially with those who may not share my language, class, gender, location, or time. What gives me the greatest hope for the future of a place like Sewanee is that humans are by nature curious creatures, and we will always seek out such connection.

If I can leave you students with one exhortation, it is this: go take a course about a time, a place, or a people completely unfamiliar to you. Open yourself up to the possibility that it might resonate, or it might spark your curiosity and creativity, in ways you do not expect. You might learn something new about yourself. But hurry. The terrain of higher education is shifting beneath our feet even as I speak, and we cannot take it for granted that such courses will always be a part of the American university or liberal arts college. And as any Classicist knows who has yearned to read a long-lost work like Ovid’s Medea or the complete poems of Sappho or any of the texts once housed in the Library of Alexandria, it is impossible to get something back once we have let it slip away.