Author: Stefanie Goyette
An image from Plato’s Phaedrus: the lovely Phaedrus invites Socrates to walk with him outside the walls of Athens and to read the text of speech recently given by Lysias. Socrates shows himself to be intensely suspicious of the written word, which, cut off from the speaker, cannot be questioned, interrogated, argued against. Like Lysias’ speech, the written text of ancient, classical, and medieval works is also a kind of orphan. It most often appears to modern readers as a printed book, a codex, a familiar and safe form that makes sense. The book makes sense phenomenologically, in that we understand how to hold and read this object. It weaves together fragments of papyrus, clay tablets, or transforms scrolls, the interior walls of a pyramid, the inside of a bronze vessel.
This expression – “make sense” – is essential, because, in the case of the book, it is literal: the book participates in creating the meaning that it seems to transmit. The printed text not only transmogrifies material experience, but also compresses time, suggesting, even if unintentionally, Homer’s Iliad as “original,” as a creation belonging to Homer, even while the text the book offers comes down from many generations after the historical Homer, if any such person existed. If translated into a language that we can read, the book makes sense linguistically.
None of these precisions is meant to denigrate the printed, edited versions of texts, which are indispensable as tools for students and for scholars. Nonetheless, when teaching ancient, classical, and medieval texts in the core or survey classroom, where books and printed materials are generally the means of access to texts, how can we encourage students to situate these works in context? Furthermore, how might we suggest that the material, phenomenological, and linguistic transformations of texts must be interrogated in order to multiply – not reduce – inflections of meaning? Digital editions and archives have begun to restore a sense of materiality and multiplicity to the reading experience, while also creating a new kind of reading. Large-scale digitization projects like the Roman de la Rose Digital Library and UCLA’s Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative have incredible research and pedagogical power, but such archives remain primarily visual and textual.
I have endeavored to incorporate the experience of orality and performance in my ancient and classical world cultures course in several ways. Below, I will address two approaches to introducing concepts of orality and performance of poetry through the use of audio, one pertaining to public, oral performance of Sappho’s lyric poetry and the other to pronunciation and homophony in the Chinese “Classic of Poetry.” In both cases, the essential goal is not simply to contextualize, but to invite students to take possession of texts.
When studying Sappho’s Aeolic poetry, my students and I begin by reading a brief, humorous account of the “historical” Sappho from Mary Barnard’s translation: “The biographical tradition, which is full of contradictions, says further… That her birth date was about 612 B.C., or earlier, or later; That her father’s name was Scamandronymous, or Eurygyus, or Simon, or Euarchus, or Eryctus, or Semus…” and so on (96). This introduces the all-important uncertainty principle to our study of Sappho.
We then engage directly with Barnard’s versions of the poem, discussing form and imagery, themes of love, sexual desire, and poetic immortality. Sappho’s voice, the poetic, individual “I,” is so seductive, and meshes so well with images of the lovelorn Romantic poet that it can be difficult to imagine a second Sappho – not a better, more accurate image of the poet as she composed (how could we know for certain?), but another realm of possibility.
At this point, I suggest to students that Fragment I, “Prayer to my lady of Paphos” in Barnard’s version, may have been a marriage hymn, performed publicly for an audience with a chorus of other women. Following Gregory Nagy, I sketch Sappho as leader of this band of worshippers, praying to Aphrodite in a literal way, and then embodying Aphrodite as an avatar and representative of the goddess. We view images of the lyre and pectus and listen to a fragment of the poem read in (reconstructed) Aeolic. We are then able to discuss the poem from a new set of perspectives, without abandoning the image of Sappho as a poet of the personal. Connections with contemporary pop music and the idea that a musician might present not only a personal expression of emotion but also a second persona of the self – an I and an “I” – further clarify one way that we might view Sappho. The phenomenological point of view is essential here: instead of imagining Sappho as composing alone, pen in hand, a solitary genius at a desk or on green grass under a tree – an image codified in part by the printed book – we can imagine a public composer, with lyre in hand, participating and performing with other professional entertainers. The shift in the experience of the poetry from the little book of translated poems to hearing and imagining the oral performance is essential to this change in perspective.
Teaching orality in the “Classic of Poetry” also consists in designating a field of possibility that is not entirely recoverable. The Confucian classics were composed during the Zhou dynasty in China (c. 11th-7th century BCE), but the Chinese logographic system was not regularized until the period of Han rule (c. 220-206 BCE). This is also when the works were set down their earliest known forms, so our experience of these works depends in large part on Han era interpretation and hermeneutics. The question, for me, was how to best communicate this temporal shift to students.
One question that arises in studying works in Classical Chinese is that of pronunciation – while Chinese served as a kind of lingua franca in Asia at this time, allowing people from many regions of China as well as surrounding countries to communicate via writing, pronunciation varied drastically from one area to another. Thus when scholars study “Plop go the plums,” or “摽有梅” (“Piao You Mei”), the poem’s homophonic components are largely lost. Yet early Chinese, due to the limited nature of the logographic system, possessed extraordinary possibilities for homophony.
To underline this feature of Chinese for my students, we listen to recordings of the poem read in Mandarin and Cantonese. The differences in pronunciation and rhyme structure are immediately clear even for those among us who do not speak any dialect of Chinese. Since a delimited set of meanings cannot be established, the image of the plums multiplies infinitely, permitting a range of interpretations engendered by the experience of the audience (or reader). To further underscore the role of the audience, I play a clip from the Radiolab podcast on “Translation,” in which cognitive scientist and translation scholar Doug Hofstadter expounds on the unlimited translatability of Clément Marot’s “Ma mignonne,” suggesting that every experience of poetry is an experience of translation.
To conclude, I find that judicious incorporation of audio resources can serve to clarify and underscore issues of interpretation more forcefully than simply reading about the conditions of performance in ancient Greece or Han hermeneutics. In combination with a consideration of historical conditions and context, the experience of hearing poetry – not in the original, but as we know it or as we are capable of representing it – can multiply possibilities of interpretation by establishing a (fertile) field of uncertainty.
Suggested resources:
- Chinese Text Project: http://ctext.org/pre-qin-and-han
- In Our Time Podcast, BBC radio: “Sappho”: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqsk4
- (I recommend In Our Time as a teaching tool in general – the episode on Sappho is particularly excellent, and includes an oral reading of Fragment I and a heated discussion about the personal “I.”)
- Radiolab Podcast, WNYC Radio: “Translation”: http://www.radiolab.org/story/translation/
- Sappho, trans. by Mary Barnard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958 and 1986).