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Overview
Combining archival research on the entry of women into Greek studies in Victorian England and America with a literary interest in their translations of Greek tragedy, Prins demonstrates how women turned to this genre to perform a passion for ancient Greek, full of eros and pathos. She focuses on five tragedies—Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and The Bacchae—to analyze a wide range of translational practices by women and to explore the ongoing legacy of Ladies' Greek. Key figures in this story include Barrett Browning and Virginia Woolf, Janet Case and Jane Harrison, Edith Hamilton and Eva Palmer, and A. Mary F. Robinson and H.D. The book also features numerous illustrations, including photographs of early performances of Greek tragedy at women's colleges.
The first comparative study of Anglo-American Hellenism, Ladies' Greek opens up new perspectives in transatlantic Victorian studies and the study of classical reception, translation, and gender.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691141886 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/09/2017 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Ladies' Greek
Victorian Translations of tragedy
By Yopie Prins
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14188-6
CHAPTER 1
THE SPELL OF GREEK
VIRGINIA WOOLF'S AGAMEMNON NOTEBOOK
Virginia Woolf read Greek with a passion, beginning in 1897 with a series of private tutors and continuing on her own for many years. In the early journals collected in A Passionate Apprentice, Woolf fondly described her Greek lessons with Miss Janet Case, whose favorite writers were the Greek tragedians. She taught Woolf that "Aeschylus was strenuous, grand, impassioned," and their tutorials included some strenuous readings in Aeschylean tragedy, with Woolf reporting in 1903: "a great flea jumped on to my Aeschylus as I read with Case the other day — and now bites large holes in me." Bitten by the bug, Woolf also jumped into Aeschylus, making her way through the Greek text in leaps and bounds, despite large holes in her comprehension. "I have taken a plunge into tough Greek, and that has so much attraction for me — Heaven knows why — that I don't want to do anything else," she wrote (Letters I, 177). During this early phase of her Greek studies, she recorded her readings in Greek drama in various reading notebooks, where she noted especially of Aeschylus that "in the obscurity of the language lies its dramatic merit."
Woolf returned to Aeschylus two decades later, when she was preparing to write her essay "On Not Knowing Greek" (1925). "I am beginning Greek again ... but which Greek play?" she asked herself in a diary entry of 1922. Having chosen the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, she wrote, "I think that clears the matter up — though how to read Aeschylus, I don't quite know: quickly is my desire, but that, I see, is an illusion." She resolved to "read Greek now steadily" as a daily discipline, since "at forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain" (Diary II, 205–206). In the course of several months, she compiled her own "crib" for translating the Greek text of the Agamemnon, with English on one side of each page and Greek on the other). It is an extraordinary object to behold, with its hand-worn cover and yellowed pages covered in Woolf's distinctive handwriting, part manuscript and part collage (Figure 1.1). To make this notebook, Woolf cut up an older Greek edition of the play (published in 1831 by Charles James Blomfield) and pasted the printed text into the right side of each page. On the left side she transcribed by hand, in variously black and blue ink from her fountain pen, a prose translation by Professor Arthur Verrall (published in 1904, an annotated edition with Greek and English on facing pages). Woolf wrote at the time, "I am making a complete edition, text, translation & notes of my own — mostly copied from Verrall; but carefully gone into by me" (Diary II, 215). Unpublished and unauthorized, her private "edition" was less a translation than a transcription, to which Woolf added a few variations with occasional marks and remarks in the margins, commenting on passages of interest or defining Greek works that she had underlined and looked up in the Greek-English dictionary. After several months of trying "to make out what Aeschylus wrote" (Diary 213) and "master the Agamemnon" (Diary 25), Woolf was pleased to proclaim, "I now know how to read Greek quick (with a crib in one hand) & with pleasure" (Diary 73).
But the purpose of this "quick" reading was not to revive ancient Greek in living English, but rather to quicken the strange pleasure of reading a dead language. Woolf describes this experience of reading Aeschylus in a remarkable passage from her essay "On Not Knowing Greek." Enumerating the 1663 lines of the Agamemnon, she observes that Aeschylus makes this drama "tremendous by stretching every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors," so that "it is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words." Answering her own question — how to read Aeschylus — she seems to have turned the flea literally jumping onto a page of Aeschylus into a figure of thought: a way to trace the movement of her own mind around the words on the page. While the words of Aeschylus are often "blown astray," according to Woolf, their meaning might be discerned in a "rapid flight":
For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey the meaning which each one separately is too weak to express. Connecting them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we cannot know exactly what it means. (31–32)
Going on to quote a line from the Agamemnon in Greek, Woolf concludes that "the meaning is just on the far side of language."
To get that far, to the other side of language, we too must leap into a space between English and Greek. Woolf's Agamemnon notebook sets the stage for this way of reading the play. Much more than a "crib," the notebook is a theatrical spectacle in its own right; a theatre where Woolf can perform the act of translating — transposing, transcribing, transliterating, transforming — one language into another. This is not a linear movement from English to Greek, but the creation of an interlingual space that allows us to read in multiple directions. The page of Woolf's notebook reproduced in Figure 1.1 is the beginning of the Cassandra scene, a primal scene of linguistic estrangement enacted in the first syllables uttered, or rather stuttered, by Cassandra: [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1072–1073). At this point in the play, it is not clear yet whether Cassandra is speaking in Greek, or in another tongue, or perhaps in tongues. In its radical unintelligibility, her utterance is both barbaric (otototoi, a series of stuttering syllables that sounds foreign to the ear) and prophetic (O Apollo O Apollo, a punning invocation to the name of the god who is her destroyer).
The momentary alienation of words from meaning is an effect that Woolf admired in Aeschylean tragedy. For her essay "On Not Knowing Greek," she quoted Cassandra's words as they appeared in her Agamemnon notebook, and she called this "the naked cry" of Cassandra:
Every sentence had to explode on striking the ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might then descend, and however enigmatic might their final purport be. No splendour or richness of metaphor could have saved the Agamemnon if either images or allusions of the subtlest or most decorative had got between us and the naked cry
[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (32–33)
What struck Woolf in this moment was the literality of Greek letters, simultaneously before and beyond the figurative language that Aeschylus sends floating forth in metaphors. But if Cassandra's naked cry might have been heard "to explode on striking the ear" in ancient Greek, here, in Woolf's essay, it can only be spelled out in letters that seem to explode on striking the eye: an enigmatic quotation left "naked" in the middle of the page, untranslated and untransliterated, to create a space for reading between languages. In the essay, as in the notebook, it is a dramatic encounter with Greek letters, staged by Woolf for performance in the mind of the reader.
As a performance of and for reading, Woolf's Agamemnon reflects back on a long history of translating Greek tragedy for the page and not for the stage: a textual tradition exemplified in translations of Aeschylus by some of Woolf's literary precursors in Victorian England. For example, Robert Browning's Agamemnon was never intended as a script to be performed for an audience in the theatre; published in 1877, his "transcript" was a more idiosyncratic writerly production, in which he played the role of a famous reader in his encounter with a famous text. Translating "in as Greek a fashion as our English will bear," Browning tried to follow the twists and turns of the original text as literally as possible, and in the case of Cassandra simply transliterated her lament: "Otototoi, Gods, Earth, Apollon, Apollon!" Indeed Browning translated the Agamemnon so literally that one reader complained, "at almost every page I had to turn to the Greek to see what the English meant." The scene of reading famously (or infamously) enacted in Browning's "transcript" left him hovering between English and Greek, not unlike Woolf's transcription of the Agamemnon: at every page of her notebook, we have to turn from Greek to English and from English to Greek, to see what might have been meant.
Of course, the translation of Greek tragedy within a textual tradition does not preclude or exclude familiarity with other kinds of performance. Alongside scholarly debates about literal and translingual translation in thenineteenth century, there was a dramatic revival of these texts in the visual arts and in the theater, in amateur theatricals and on the popular stage, in low burlesque and in high opera, and within various academic settings, especially toward the end of the century. Browning attended the 1880 Agamemnon performed in Greek at Oxford, and by the early twentieth century such student productions were an established tradition, familiar to Woolf as well. She was especially interested in The Cambridge Greek Play, and her Agamemnon notebook can be read in relation to two productions in particular. The first was a performance of the Agamemnon in 1900, when Woolf's brother Thoby was a student at Cambridge and Woolf was beginning to learn Greek. The second was the Oresteia produced at Cambridge by J. T. Sheppard in 1921, around the time when Woolf was returning to her Greek studies in her Agamemnon notebook, and preparing to write "On Not Knowing Greek." In these productions, the recitation of ancient Greek must have seemed strange indeed: what did it mean to imagine the sound of Greek, to hear and see a dead language spoken on the stage? Although Woolf wrote in her essay that "we cannot hear it, now dissonant, tossing sound from line to line across a page," in her notebook we can see it, tossing letters from line to line across a page to imagine another way of understanding Greek. Here she transposed the strange experience of seeing a play performed in Greek, simultaneously out of and back into the strange experience of reading Greek.
But first let us consider how Woolf read Aeschylus, in (and on) different stages. Woolf learned Greek not for scholarly purposes but as an amateur, for the love of it. Like so many girls in the nineteenth century, she began informally at home with her brother. "It was through him that I first heard about the Greeks," Woolf recalled in "A Sketch of the Past," and during the years when Thoby was a student at Cambridge she asked him to "help me with a Greek play or two" (Letters I, 42). Then in 1897, she wrote a letter to him, announcing that "I am beginning Greek at King's College," and boasting that "we have got as far as the first verb in our Greek, and by the Christmas holidays you will have to take me in hand" (Letters I, 10). Woolf's teacher in the Ladies' Department of King's College was Professor George Warr, who had a special interest in Aeschylean drama. He had directed The Story of Orestes in 1886 and was working on a translation of The Oresteia of Aeschylus, Translated and Explained for publication in 1900. Surveying the rise of Greek tragedy in his introduction, he emphasized that the poetry of Aeschylus came to life in "a large, imaginative presentation," and that Aeschylus was "a composer, trainer, actor" who "exerted his skill, acquired by lifelong professional training, in the invention of orchestic figures and gestures." As a director, Warr also exerted his skill in a vivid recreation of Aeschylean drama, not only by translating Greek words into English but by imagining the translation of words into gestures as well.
While learning to love Aeschylus from "my beloved Warr" (Letters I, 20), Woolf also studied Latin and Greek with the sister of Walter Pater, Miss Clara Pater, who was "perfectly delightful" (Letters I, 26). Woolf took special delight in Greek, expressed repeatedly in her correspondence from the turn of the century. She fell in love with the language, taking pleasure in spelling out ordinary English words in Greek letters, as she wrote in a letter, "[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] trousers now, does the obtuse beast understand?" (Letters I, 24). Then in 1902, to move into more serious and sustained reading of Greek texts, Woolf began private tutorials with Janet Case that continued off and on for seven years. Case made a strong impression on the young Woolf, whose diary of 1903 includes a sketch dedicated a sketch to "Miss Case": "an excellent teacher" and "a valiant strong-minded woman" who lived up to Woolf's high expectations for Greek (Apprentice 183). "She seemed to me exactly what I had expected — tall, classical looking, masterfull [sic]" and also "more professional than Miss Pater" (Apprentice 182).
The "masterful" Miss Case expected Woolf to master Greek, as well. Seeing that "my foundations were rotten, [she] procured a Grammar, & bade me start with the very first exercise" and "never failed to point out, with perfect good humour that my exercises were detestable." Often she interrupted delight with "the tedium of Greek grammar" as Woolf recalled:
I read a very lovely description of maidenhood in Euripides ... & at the end I paused with some literary delight in its beauty. Not so Miss Case. "The use of the instrumental genitive in the 3rd line is extremely rare" her comment upon Love! But that is not a fair example; & at any rate I think it really praiseworthy; aesthetic pleasure is so much easier to attain than knowledge of his uses of the genitive — I think it is true that she read with a less pure literary interest in the text than I did. (Apprentice 183)
But even if she read "with a less pure literary interest in the text" (it seemed Miss Case never missed a case, grammatically speaking), she left room for Woolf to read Greek with a more pure literary interest, for aesthetic pleasure. Woolf took note that "she was not by any means blind to the beauties of Aeschylus" and sometimes "she would spend a whole lesson in defining the relation of Aeschylus towards Fate" (Apprentice 83).
Janet Case's passion for Aeschylean drama in particular began with her own student days, at Girton College in Cambridge. She played the role of Athena for the Cambridge Greek Play in 1885, the only woman in an all-male production of The Eumenides. Widely praised for her classical posture and excellent elocution, she was remembered for the rest of her life in this memorable role. Woolf's obituary for Case in 1937 described her as "a noble Athena, breaking down the tradition that only men acted in the Greek play," demonstrating how Greek plays might be actively read, re-read and re-enacted by women to create social activism: "her Greek was connected with the politics of her day," including women's suffrage and other feminist causes. Case had even published an early "feminist" reading of Aeschylus. Combining scholarly commentary with passionate politics in "Women in the Plays of Aeschylus" (1914), Case insisted that "Aeschylus gives his women brains as well as hearts," and she was especially eloquent in defense of Clytemnestra, who "strips naked the unjust bias of men's condemnation." According to Case, Clytemnestra embodies "the qualities [Aeschylus] prized most in women, courage, loyalty, love; only in her ... they have been poisoned at the source and turned to evil things by the intolerable pain of wrong and suffering"; nevertheless, Clytemnestra commands our respect through "sheer intellectual force" and "torrential eloquence."
The intellectual force and eloquence of Case commanded similar respect from Woolf, who recalls "she was a person of ardent theories & she could expound them fluently" (Apprentice 182). These theories made a lasting impression Woolf as her passionate apprentice. Years later, in "On Not Knowing Greek," Woolf defended Clytemnestra much as Case had done: "Clytemnestra is no unmitigated villainess. [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] she says — 'there is a strange power in motherhood.' It is no murderess, violent and unredeemed, whom Orestes kills within the house" (28). And when she published her essay on Greek in The Common Reader, Woolf was eager for approval from her former Greek tutor: "I am very glad you like the Common Reader. I was rather nervous lest you should curse my impertinence for writing about Greek, when you are quite aware of my complete ignorance" (Letters III, 191).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ladies' Greek by Yopie Prins. Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations, ix,PREFACE, xi,
Between Alpha and Omega, xi,
Acknowledgments, xv,
INTRODUCTION: WOMEN AND THE GREEK ALPHABET, 1,
CHAPTER ONE: THE SPELL OF GREEK, 35,
CHAPTER TWO: [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] IN PROMETHEUS BOUND, 57,
CHAPTER THREE: THE EDUCATION OF ELECTRA, 116,
CHAPTER FOUR: HIPPOLYTUS IN LADIES' GREEK (WITH THE ACCENTS), 152,
CHAPTER FIVE: DANCING GREEK LETTERS, 202,
POSTFACE, 233,
Notes, 247,
Bibliography, 265,
Index, 289,
What People are Saying About This
"Ladies' Greek is remarkable for its sensitive and subtle discussion of the controversial process of translating and performing dramatic texts written in a dead language whose study was at first available only to men."—Helene P. Foley, Barnard College"Combining revelatory archival work and close literary readings, Ladies' Greek tells a riveting story of desire and insecurity, scholarship and theater, friendship and poetry."—Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge"Ladies' Greek is the resounding answer to Woolf’s ‘On Not Knowing Greek.’ What was unleashed when women as well as men, on both sides of the Atlantic, came to intimately know their beloved Greek tragedies? Prins recreates the burgeoning culture of translation and re-enactment at women’s colleges, reviving enthusiasms of the forgotten and famous, from A. Mary F. Robinson to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This is a definitive literary history that will influence future scholars, but any reader may binge on it like a beautiful BBC drama."—Alison Booth, University of Virginia"This original, elegant, and beautifully written book combines deep classical learning and superb transatlantic archival research to produce a wonderful account of Victorian women's intense love affair with ancient Greek. Yopie Prins's classical expertise helps scholars who cannot read Greek toward magnificent new literary interpretations."—Mary Loeffelholz, Northeastern University"Ladies' Greek is a highly anticipated, wide-ranging, and meticulously researched book. Its compelling and original conclusion makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Victorian Hellenism."—Laura McClure, University of Wisconsin–Madison