Author: Alexandra Sladky

Learning Latin has also facilitated a transformation of myself, my understanding of stories, the way that I see myself and other women as players in these stories, the way these stories reflect my lived experience. And now I am experiencing a separation, another change, another transformation. The unknowability is comforting, but it is also concerning as I begin a part of my life journey where I am not explicitly working with ancient languages as a part of my job. 

Like with writing, or any kind of skill that you want to get better at, I’ve been working on building a habit, consistency and discipline, around reading Latin. My capability to recognize the need for consistency and discipline comes to me directly from language learning (the way I used to write out noun charts and verb endings the way that some people engage in prayer or maybe yoga practices).

Perhaps this post and this journey is only for me. Perhaps the message might resonate with others. The audience of people who might relate to this specific phenomenon, I suppose, is quite small. Even writing on this blog, in the wide world of the web, I can imagine this small and quiet corner where a task such as this is important. Latin, to me, has never been only about the language, but so much more. And now it’s time to turn to the skills that this specific learning and teaching has left with me, and how I might continue to use and engage with them still. 

Women’s retellings create a dialogue between ancient and contemporary values and beliefs, and allow contemporary readers to see how influential those stories have become to our culture. And now it is necessary to challenge that perspective, by giving these characters their own voices. And to challenge the very way that we’ve always accepted these stories as foundational. 

I finished a complete draft of my dissertation at the end of March, and it seems like an important milestone - also one that I’ve kind of glossed over, as a stepping stone to the next thing that I have to do - get a job. I wanted to spend a little time reflecting on the experience before I do the defense, before I start revisions.

There are quite a few different uses of “loss” around language - something is lost in translation; abilities to speak or understand languages can be lost when we don’t use or hear them - when my grandmother went to get hearing aids recently, I learned that the sound of certain letters can be lost if we don’t hear those sounds (or use them). There’s also the feeling of having a word on the tip of your tongue but being unable to think of it, and so it feels like something is lost, that language is ungraspable in that moment.

These short passages stayed with me long after I read these novellas, as simple as they are. Even in their simplicity, they capture experiences that are familiar (probably not only to me) and put them into the target language. They connect my own lived experiences to a language that, at first glance, has very little in common with me and my lived experiences. 

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.

All my Latin teachers have used the phrase “lost in translation” when reading and discussing translations of Greek and Latin texts as an argument for why studying the ancient languages is important. We study Ancient Greek and Latin so that we can read the originals, so that we do not have to wonder what gets lost in translation but rather engage with original texts and discover the original authors’ intentions and meanings.

At the beginning of this month we were in DC, and I was reminded that I don’t mind traveling to places that I don’t particularly  like when I travel with Jen. Perhaps I like it because we spend most of our time wandering around cities looking for independent bookstores (and queer bars). In DC we went to Politics and Prose, Lost City Books, Kramer’s, (and Pitchers). In bookstores, I peruse fiction, mostly unable to find what I’m looking for, or, if I do, I find too much of it, aware that I only have a carry-on to travel home.