Chapter 13 #2
“‘When Rhea took the b.aby and took great honor.’” Her voice hesitated.
“She uses that same word a number of times in the Greek.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to, and it doesn’t mean you have to choose the weakest English word. I can’t believe Korinna meant for it to be dull.”
She raised her chin and tried again. “‘When Rhea seized the—the divine baby and grabbed honor.’”
“Better. I’m not so sure about grabbing honor.”
“Back to ‘took’?”
“Perhaps. You can decide at the end.”
“‘Gained,’ perhaps?”
“Better.”
Georgiana began to get into the spirit. “So. They decide to hide it in a cave. Ah! But what cave? The gods are ordered to vote.” She glanced up at him for approval.
He nodded, not wanting to tamp down her enthusiasm.
He loved watching her face light up with new knowledge.
“It appears Cithaeron won the election. He took it by force,” she went on without noticing.
“What makes you say that?”
“Her choice of words.”
“So, how would you translate it?”
“‘Great Cithaeron shouted that he had captured the beautiful victory.’ Maybe not by force. It isn’t explicit.”
“Good. ‘Captured’ is good, or ‘taken’ perhaps.” He intoned the line again in deep voice, “‘Great Cithaeron shouted that he had captured the glorious victory.’” He gestured to her to continue.
“‘Helicon was taken with a dreadful pain.’” She moaned dramatically. “It is certainly passive voice in the original. Something mighty seized him. No, wait, ‘Helicon was grabbed by a dreadful pain.’“
Andrew watched her with delight. He gripped his chest melodramatically and took his turn, “‘The victor received the crown, his heart overflowed with happiness.’”
Georgiana leapt in without hesitation. “‘Helicon groaned and tore a large rock from his own side, hurling it down.’” She demonstrated the poor loser’s angry response and peeped up at him. “No wonder he groaned. He tore out a piece of himself. That must have hurt.”
Andrew felt a wide grin split his face. Georgiana laughed out loud.
“It begins to make sense when you put it like that!” she said.
“Of course! The infant Zeus, father of us all—we being the pagan Greeks, of course—is to be hidden in a cave on a mountain, rescued from foul infanticide. The mountains compete for the privilege, campaigning loudly. The winner crows with delight. The loser is a very poor loser indeed. Oh Andrew, you are a miracle worker. I would never have understood the very point of the fragment without your help.”
The gray of her eyes shifted to brilliant blue in her excitement.
The color grabbed him by the throat and held him prisoner, helpless to let go.
To give her this thing—the sense of her own ability, the ecstasy of sudden understanding where there had been merely puzzlement before—filled him with joy.
Her face, flushed with laughter, held him; the intensity of her triumph crushed his very bones.
He wanted to seize her like Rhea seized the infant Zeus. He ought to leave and never return. He should go far, far away from Georgiana and her blasted family. His good sense told him to break off this sham of tutor and student, but he couldn’t.
“Very good, my lady,” he rasped. “Very well done. You have this passage exactly. Shall we go over it line by line?”
“I think I would like to try that tomorrow by myself. Can we go back to Asopos’s daughters?”
Why not? It was mostly about capture and offspring. Some of the elegies of the other poets would be worse, much worse.
* * *
Andrew behaves like a pompous— She groped for a conclusion–male. At least he agreed to finish the poem about Asopos and the mothers of the heroes. She tried to be patient.
“I’m not a girl right out of the school room, you know. I do know the basics of reproduction. If the ancients didn’t worry about the niceties of marriage...well, they were the pagans, weren’t they?”
“They certainly were. Your mother would be shocked,” he insisted.
“Don’t mention her.” She glared at him. “Don’t ever mention her in this place!”
When they read the mountain chorus, the very air had vibrated with his laughter, as rich and warm as it was unexpected.
It caused reverberations in her chest that emptied her lungs of air, but when his laughter stopped and he withdrew behind those spectacles of his, the sun fled. The teacher returned.
“Very well, Lady Georgiana, let us begin with a review of the Olympian family tree.”
That family tree twisted and turned in knots, fraught with infighting, violence, and incest. Andrew didn’t shrink from the facts of the stories.
He made sure she understood which mother bore which hero and the circumstances (usually violent) of his conception.
Unlike his explanation about the singing mountains, however, he didn’t seem eager to volunteer information or to speculate beyond the obvious.
“How can I do this if I don’t understand what is actually going on? What are they feeling? What is it they want?”
“That knowledge, my lady, won’t come from a book.” He wouldn’t look her in the eye. “Some knowledge comes from life.” He began to rearrange his notes.
What would Lawrence Watterson make of my questions? She understood, with sudden clarity, those pompous fools who found Greek translation dangerous to a well-bred woman. Those same folks would be apoplectic over the direction her work took today.
“You’re leaving?” She watched his graceful hands straighten the papers.
“We’ve done enough for one day,” he said without meeting her eyes. “You did well. Rewrite the mountain lyric. I will look forward to your final word choices. Perhaps the heroes fragment doesn’t give us enough to go on. Some poetry is simply dry.”
She doubted it but didn’t say.
“The day after tomorrow then?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He left her alone with her poems and her thoughts.