I feel a need to explain myself as a woman who studies ancient languages and rhetoric and translations of ancient texts particularly because this field seems to have little space for women, and few women’s voices. I’ve been struggling with this feeling of being between English and Latin and my desire to exist in that place of in-betweenness, insisting that there is a connection between the two, that their study goes hand-in-hand, and really that rhetoric should be taught in the study of Greek and Latin languages, and that those languages should be taught rhetorically. Even though I am getting a PhD in English, I still feel that I have a stronger connection to Latin and all that I have learned from this course of study points back, in a way, to Latin and Latin education.
The way that I’m thinking of this has to do with my being fluent in English. Because I have this relationship to English, the language already gives the answers, and I am unable to separate myself from knowing this language. Because I am fluent, English looks exposed. In Latin, I have to figure out the meaning and I’m always in some liminal space between knowing and not knowing. Knowing that there is a “right” answer, but also knowing that there are so many ways and reasons that the answer is unknowable. In “On Not Knowing Greek,” Virginia Woolf says it like this: “It is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words… 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.” This always being somewhere in between knowing and not knowing marks the experience of Latin for me – and the many possibilities for translation or interpretation. To look only at English and talk of texts only in English – there’s something missing – the meaning is obvious, the answer is already there, there is nothing to figure out. With texts in Latin and Greek, the best ways to tell those stories are through those languages and those words, and I accept that even translations offer a sorrowful rendition of the originals.
Now I see the struggle to know something that is unknowable is situated as part of women experiencing, studying, and approaching ancient languages, as Yopie Prins has argued. I see my desire to know ancient languages parallel to a feminine and queer desire. Virginia Woolf argues that we have no real idea about Greek. We can make arguments that we know about Greek pronunciation from Cicero, but what do we really know beyond that? And yet we’re drawn to it, we want to know it, have a desire to know it. This is the whole problem, the impossibility of knowing, and yet Greek and Latin are integral to our culture, values, and literature. Yopie Prins uses archival research and “a feminist approach to recovery, discovering new materials and making it possible to read” women’s texts and ancient texts “in new ways” (3). These are both ways of situating arguments in feminist and rhetorical practices. In a small way, I extend the reading of Woolf and Prins to my own experience.
The idea of not knowing is part of the experience of learning ancient languages. While I’ve always been certain of my queerness, the not knowing and not understanding queerness is a part of the fear that people feel – the idea that hatred stems from fear and from not knowing. So there are varying relationships to not knowing and what not knowing means. For many it means fear and hatred. For me, it means possibility, not needing to have an answer. It means that it’s ok to not know, and that it’s ok to have other answers. And the unknowability is not something to fear, but rather to rejoice, to desire. This approach to languages is one that women have been a part of for the whole time that they have been experiencing and working with ancient languages. And it’s an experience that I link (inextricably) to queerness and my queer experience.
There’s the rhetoric of the last few months, years, of reasons for why queer and trans people are targets of so many violent crimes that all come back to fear and hatred and not knowing. So, there’s a connection, and I see that ancient languages mean possibilities, they mean an opening into a kind of not knowing that brings possibility, and a way of thinking and exploring this experience. I see this, too, in women’s ways of knowing that are steeped in the concept of not knowing – questioning, being an amateur. Prins’ analysis of Woolf’s “On Not Knowing Greek” addresses the ways that Victorian classicists “made various claims to ‘knowing Greek,’ Woolf turned to Greek to perform ‘not knowing’ as a movement of thought more mobile, more emotive, or (as she described the powerful spell of Greek) ‘an emotion different from any other’” (45). Where emotions are often associated with women, the experience of turning to Greek in the way that Woolf suggests strikes me as a feminine or queer experience, steeped in emotion, in possibility, in movement. And by extension, the various claims of classicists to know Greek strikes me as a very masculine one.
Because women were amateurs when it came to learning Greek and Latin, they occupied a marginal space around these languages and were able to interact with and transform these languages in the ways that they do (Prins, 8). This is where women’s lived experiences, different from men’s, become important in their interpretations of languages and texts. These women writing about and translating ancient languages do so in ways that speak to women’s and minorities’ lived experiences, and it’s the status as amateurs, rather than experts, that allow them to do this. Their admission that they don’t know everything and cannot know everything makes room for other possibilities of knowing.
Desire for language and stories constantly brings me back to ancient Greek and Latin (“…it is the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which perpetually lures us back,” Virginia Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek”). The desire to know doesn’t mean that we can know or understand the language in the same way that the ancients did. But it calls to mind, for me, the saying “language is power.” A desire for language makes sense because language is powerful, and even more so the desire for languages that are inherently patriarchal and masculine, because it means that there is the possibility of opening them up, of knowing or not knowing them in new ways.
Sources
Prins, Yopie. Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy. Princeton UP. 2017.
Woolf, Virginia. “On Not Knowing Greek.” berfrois. 28 June, 2018. https://www.berfrois.com/2018/06/virginia-woolf-not-knowing-greek/. Accessed 29 Nov. 2022.
Alexandra Sladky 