Classics Equips a Civilized Person for Any Task: An Interview with Caroline Alexander

Abstract

ClassicsEquips a Civilized Person for AnyTask: An Interview with Caroline Alexander PATRICK O’DONNELL Caroline Alexander is a classicist, a writer, an independent scholar and the author of nine books, including a notable translation of The Iliad. Born in Florida of English parents in 1956, Alexander spent her childhood in Tallahassee, where she attended Florida State University, after which she was in the first group of women chosen for Rhodes Scholarships, in 1977. She holds a PhD in Classics from Columbia University, where she was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. She has written for The New Yorker and for National Geographic magazine. At age twenty-six, Alexander founded a Classics department at the University of Malawi, her only academic appointment in a long and distinguished career of writing and scholarship . She was instrumental in opening the sport of modern pentathlon to women and has competed in three national championships. She has written definitive, best-selling books on the voyage of and mutiny on the Bounty and on Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition, two astounding tales of heroic leadership and survival. Alexander’s work is notable for the depth of its research and its independence from received ideas. She is resourceful in support of her work: in order to help finance her travels in Borneo, after participating in the North Borneo Expedition of 1981, she even sold the electric wok she had won in that nation’s annual footrace; she interviewed the somewhat-demented former dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda, in Latin, when his other languages failed him, on the occasion of his trial for murder. In person, Alexander, still athletic, is a woman of relaxed, natural dignity, who laughs easily. She is an excellent mimic and a skilled storyteller. Alexander lives on Mt. Desert Island in Maine. The conversation below began on May 17th, 2017, in the Turtletown Athenaeum in Concord, New Hampshire, and continued thereafter. ❖ Patrick: Shall we start in the thick of things? When did you discover Homer? Caroline: I had the very good fortune, I believe, of going to arion 25.2 fall 2017 one of the worst high schools I could have gone to. We were taught very little. Essentially, I had lots of free time for reading, so I read The Iliad absolutely on my own terms at age fourteen. It became my book. P: Lattimore? C: Yes, I chose Lattimore because it’s what was in the Florida State University bookstore. I was highly interested in the classics in a very abstract sense, and I knew The Iliad was the Everest. In this weird high-school program at Florida High our English assignment was to read what we wanted and the teacher then gave points for what was read. I had the luxury of reading The Iliad without any instruction. P: What do you mean when you say, “it became my book”? C: You know, I never met anyone who felt about The Iliad as I did. I have never found people who thought it was theirs. They studied it, but to me The Iliad was like Wuthering Heights or War and Peace, just something utterly great that I entered and possessed. When you are young, you own what you read. You do not calibrate against what other people are reading or thinking. So a good book becomes “your” book. P: What do you remember about your first reading of The Iliad? C: Since I was given the opportunity to read it utterly on my own terms, I blipped over many of the names and frankly many of the fighting parts, which just seemed to me at that age not interesting, so I sped, quickly reading through those. The great speeches are what I remember most, and the great characterizations. P: And your mother encouraged your lifelong interest in The Iliad. Forty-five years after your first reading of the epic, you dedicated your translation to your mother, Elizclassics equips a civilized person for any task 136 abeth Ann Kirby, who, as you put it, “always knew I would do this.” C: Yes. She always knew I would do this. I almost want to say that she expected this translation. When I was young, she...