Letters to the editor
The Reporter welcomes responses from readers about articles in the magazine or about Trinity-related matters. Please address correspondence to Drew Sanborn, Trinity Reporter, Trinity College, 300 Summit Street, Hartford, CT 06106 or drew.sanborn@trincoll.edu.
Dear Editor:
Trinity is crowing that some of its students read the Iliad in English? (Trinity Reporter, Spring, 2006). Was our alma mater’s fall through the 1970’s, ’80’s, ’90’s and 2000’s so deep?
Homer is indeed meant “to be spoken. And listened to.” (p.22) But you can’t do either in English. When Alexander Pope asked the Classicist Richard Bentley to grade Pope’s new translation of the Odyssey, Bentley replied, “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”
Please, for the sake of what’s left of our school’s academic honor, don’t brag that Trinity’s students can read English. Let them pick up the ΠΟΙΗΣΙΣ ΟΜΗΡΟΥ and do the hard but worthy work of reading the actual Greek in its restored ancient pronunciation. That’s what scholars would do.
Then let Trinity praise itself, not for high school work, but for higher education.
Yours,
Mark Adair ’71
A response from the chair of the Classics Department:
Rest assured that the study of Ancient Greek is flourishing at Trinity College. We continue to offer six courses in Ancient Greek each year, providing instruction at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels every term. This year, for example, students are reading Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Euripides—and of course Homer—in the original Greek. Additional courses in which students read the Greek texts of Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Aristotle, and the lyric poets are regularly available in alternate years.
We also offer Classical Civilization courses on such topics as the Age of Pericles, the Ancient City, and Men, Women and Society in Greece and Rome, in which ancient texts are read in English translation. Students who are able are invited to read the texts in Greek for additional course credit.
The gatherings sponsored by the Trinity College Center for Collaborative Teaching and Research are entirely extracurricular. Students, professors, staff members, parents, and alumni/ae, are welcome to join us in the Gallows bookstore space on Wednesdays, noon to 1:00 p.m., during the academic terms. This year, we are reading Robert Fagles’ impressive English translation of Homer’s Odyssey.
Martha K. Risser
Chair of the Classics Department
(In the spring issue of the Reporter, we invited readers to join with the incoming Class of 2010 in reading Grahame Greene’s novel The Quiet American. These students all read the book over the summer and participated in discussion groups during the opening days of the semester. The following letter is from Thomas Weiner ’71, who is responding to his reading of the novel and viewing of the film.)
To the Editor:
I am a member of the Class of ’71, and I have just finished reading and viewing Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. I am also engaged in a project involving the Vietnam draft. I have conducted over 50 interviews with a wide range of men and women whose lives were affected by the draft, and I hope to publish a book that gives their voices a forum.
Greene’s book covers a very important and almost always overlooked period in the history of Vietnam and our involvement. At a reunion presentation about Vietnam in June, I was very appreciative that Professor Jack Chatfield chose to take the audience through this history, which Howard Zinn among others writes about, since it is incredibly significant to understanding how things could go so wrong for our government and country in subsequent years. The zeal of the character Alden Pyle—a belief that we could democratize Vietnam through sheer will, regardless of the consequences for the Vietnamese people, is horrifyingly familiar as we continue to be buried in the quagmire that is our “mission” in Iraq.
The willingness to back a “Third Force” embodied in the film by General The and in historical terms by General Diem and others, is indicative of the lengths to which our government went and the enormous distance that existed between our goals and our means. This was coupled in the book and film by an unassailable conviction on the part of Pyle and his cohorts that what they were doing was justifiable and right—including blaming the communists for terrorists actions performed by The’s people, supported by undercover Americans like Pyle and by our dollars and weapons, which were intended to convince Americans that we were fighting for democracy. In reality, Ho Chi Minh was the leader whom the people supported, whatever his politics, and therein lies the same contradiction we are presently experiencing as we promote “free and democratic elections” and the people choose Hezbollah and Hamas.
So the lessons this novel and the very fine film (the second effort after a much more pro-America 1958 film that Greene distanced himself from), which is remarkably true to the book, are endeavoring to teach us about what really was going on in the early ’50s as the French were exiting and we were ratcheting up our involvement, have yet to be learned. Instead, we have entered another country that did not want us and in many ways have prompted a civil war according to today’s newspaper accounts, which featured quotes from American generals in Baghdad.
It is my hope that the book will generate much conversation about this pivotal period in our Vietnam story. During the reunion presentation, Professor Chatfield let those in attendance get a glimpse of how wrong our approach was from the outset by tracing it back to 1945 when Ho Chi Minh sought inspiration for his fledgling government from our Declaration of Independence! This book advances that body of knowledge, which all too often gets lost in the rush to get to the war. There would never have been a war if we had paid attention to the legitimate desires of a people so long dominated by the Chinese and the French. They wanted freedom. They saw themselves fighting against imperialism, and when we took over for the French, we were just more of the same. Pyle doesn’t see that. Neither Johnson nor Nixon saw that. McNamara in Fog of War comes closest to seeing that Vietnam was not a domino, but even he is unable to admit that his position at the time was a mistake. This book makes it more undeniable that our government missed, denied, or avoided seeing the legitimate aspirations of people who had been colonized and craved independence.
I do have a few criticisms to express. For one, though this novel definitely exposes the gaping holes in our approach to Vietnam, it also gets somewhat sidetracked by a compelling, but potentially seriously diverting love triangle. I am hoping that the degree to which this distracts readers from the central ideas of what went wrong, starting more than 15 years before our deep immersion in Vietnam, is minimal. Also, the questionable morals of Thomas Fowler, though contributing to making him a rather compelling and fascinating character, also could distract from the lessons of history Greene, I strongly believe, was seeking to impart. These are the risks of writing this type of historical fiction. Naming them and discussing how they can befuddle and obfuscate would contribute to preventing them from doing so. On the other hand, I found Phoung’s character incredibly important, both in terms of her incredible strength, intelligence, and determination, as well as her as the woman both of these men were trying, in their own distinctive ways, to colonize in the name of love.
Thanks to those responsible for giving alumni a chance to read/view this extraordinary work—novel and film—and to offer our reflections.
Thomas Weiner ’71