S. Worthen | Weblog

If you're planning on going into the humanities and doing any kind of graduate work, what I didn't realize as an undergraduate is that it is not possible to learn too many languages. There will always be more crucial languages that you just don't know yet, so you might as well learn some of as many as possible now.

The languages I don't know this week are Russian and Greek. The poem I only just discovered and really do need to read is in Greek. The critical edition has notes in German, which I can at least work through, but working through the apparatus isn't at all the same as reading the text. Unless secondary sources translate enough of Meliteniotes' Sophrosyne, I'll be needing to find myself someone competent in the reading of Greek in the next few months. (Although further work indicates that I might be able to read it with French annotations instead of German. Either way, not the text.)

As for Russian... well, I'm more certain I know people who can read Greek at the moment.

Update: At least I've found a five page English summary of Sophorsyne, albeit one which doesn't focus on the elements I'm most interested in. Still, it's very useful as a guide and for narrowing down where I do need to look!