The blood of the ancient lives on in us
I must admit, I was about to write this editorial on Varney the Vampire: Or, the Feast of Blood, a tantalizing tale that turned young damsels uncouth in 1845. However, after the announcement of Anne Carson’s Nobel Prize, my heart is swelling and I cannot bring myself to divert my attention to a morally-depraved Penny Dreadful from Victorian England. If you’ve ever wondered what serial fiction from 200 years ago looks like, please check it out. There are 237 installments.
2026 is the year for translators. Emily Wilson’s name, already infamous among classicists, rose to the forefront of pop culture after Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. And now, UofT’s own alumna Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I woke up to a short email from the Department of Classics informing students of the news. It was only a couple of succinct sentences, but packed with pride, hope, and community. It showed that in this turbulent, robotic world, classics still matter. Translation is not a lost art. People like to say Latin and Ancient Greek are dead languages, but they are well and truly alive in the corpus of the /modern/ world.
When I first read Carson’s book of Sappho fragments in CLA170, I was mesmerized by her bold way of displaying the fragmentary nature of Sappho’s surviving pieces. She didn’t try to form a whole where none could be seen or spin a fragment into her own interpretive poetics; she let the disjointed words and phrases skip down the page, allowing blank space to occupy moments where the reader could comprehend all that had been lost in time—left in antiquity.
UofT’s Classical Studies and Medieval Studies departments are housed in the Lillian Massey Building, which was originally built for the Department of Household Science, a four-year program for university women to learn the science behind household management. This building once symbolized both the domestic expectations for women and their surging role in the academic world; it was a space built specifically for the inclusion of women while simultaneously showcasing their exclusion from male-dominated departments. Interestingly, the Department of Household Science was absorbed into the Department of Nutritional Sciences in the 1970s, the same decade Anne Carson graduated from UofT with her BA and MA in Classics. Just as the sign outside Lillian Massey changed from Department of Household Science to Department of Classics, the field of classics has changed, emerging from irrelevance to relevance again with the help of women who could not bear for the ancient world to be forgotten.
The word ‘translation’ comes from Latin. It’s made up of the preposition /trans/, meaning ‘across,’ and the verb fero (which also takes the form latum), meaning ‘to endure,’ ‘to carry,’ ‘to bring,’ ‘to suffer,’ ‘to say,’ ‘to report,’ and a wealth of other interpretations. A translator embodies the entirety of the word fero. They speak archaic voices through themselves. They carry a life and consciousness from thousands of years ago into our own. They suffer the weight of a dying field, for the sake of even /fragments/ of someone’s bygone art, and insist that the art endures, brought across the River Lethe into the muddy and polluted waters of current times.
Wilson, Carson, and Sappho do have something in common. One is stuck in the ancient world, but two are still alive. And wondrously, amazingly, through their own works, they have ensured the mutual survival of each other.