Joan Alberich: "I am not a wise man, I am a farmer disguised as a professor"

BarcelonaA conversation with Professor Joan Alberich (Reus, 1944) is an endless outpouring of knowledge and curiosities. He is a professor of secondary school Greek, a university professor, a member of the Bernat Metge Foundation, and a translator of various works in Greek, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius – he currently has one of Pausanias' travel books in hand. We talk about languages and civilizations and jump through the centuries following the trail of Greek on the occasion of the publication of the second revised edition of the Greek-Catalan Dictionary from Enciclopèdia Catalana, a fundamental pillar of Western culture in our language, which Alberich and Francesc J. Cuartero have directed and co-written, with several authors.

How did you learn Greek?

— I am a particular case, because at twelve years old they put me to work in a tobacconist's in the mornings, selling tobacco and stamps, and in the evenings I studied commerce. I earned fifty pesetas a week. Then they told us that we needed to have the four baccalaureate courses to study commerce and at fifteen years old I entered an academy. I was scared: some children much younger than me were talking about the direct and circumstantial complement. I had never heard of it. The teacher told me to hold on for a month and I stayed. I worked, studied and took my exams as an external student. In secondary school I took Greek and Latin. And then I was able to study classics in Barcelona.

Wow, from here to making the first Greek-Catalan dictionary. Why was this work necessary?

— For everyone who studies classics it is an essential tool. And Greek is a fascinating thing. There will always be geeks who want to study Greek, because it is very easy to be seduced by it.

Why?

— Because it is the mother of all words of culture and non-culture. Look, Plato was not called Plato, he was called Aristocles. Plato means wide. It turns out that Plato was a broad-chested nobleman. That is why we also say plaça [wider than a street] and plata [a wide plate], they are all Greek words. The flat plate was for rich people, because poor people ate their porridge in bowls. Imagine how many words!

The dictionary collects a thousand years of literature written since Homer, from 800 BC to 200 AD.

— It's fortunate that only between 15 and 20% of what the Greeks wrote has been preserved! Euripides wrote more than 100 tragedies and only seventeen and one doubtful one have been preserved. Sophocles or Aeschylus wrote more than a hundred works and we have seven from one and seven from the other, but we know they exist thanks to a patriarch of Constantinople, who wrote down the 300 books he had read. We must consider that they wrote on papyrus, they transferred it to parchment, which had to be made from calf or goat skin, and this has been preserved very well, but during all the following centuries of cultural poverty they only copied religious texts. There is a work, like Aristotle's Constitution of Athens [320 BC], which we knew existed and the papyrus was found at the end of the 19th century in Oxyrhynchus, in some rubbish. A wonderful thing.

How should we imagine literary Greek losing strength?

— It runs parallel to the decline of the Roman Empire. In the 2nd century the crisis begins in Rome, which will fall in 476. The rich part of the empire becomes the eastern one, Byzantium, later Constantinople, which lasted a thousand years longer, until 1453, when the Turks conquer it.

What is happening with Greece and with Greek, these years?

— Greece is a province of the Roman Empire since 146 BC. They take away the name of Hellas, because it is a word that the Romans did not like –like, according to some, in our time they do not like the term Catalan Countries– and they used the word Graecia, which means little Greeks. The official name was Achaea and the capital, Corinth, which preserved only one Greek temple and the Romans rebuilt everything else. The Romans rejected Greek until the end of the 1st century BC. For example, the imitations that Catullus made of Sappho, a wonderful Greek poet, were sung. From then on there are many authors who write in Greek, like the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, who was one of the most cultured emperors and had a young woman who taught him Greek as a child.

Why do Roman elites adopt Greek?

— Among the Roman elites, it became fashionable to go to Greece to study, like one now goes to England or the United States. For example, Cicero, who translated works from Greek, had a Greek slave, like one hires a native English teacher. The Scipio family took a slave with them to the conquest of Numantia, Olivi, who was supposed to teach Greek to all the children in the family, and also acted as a journalist for the occupation of Numantia. It was the Greek slaves who saved the Greek language among the Romans.

What languages survive in the peoples of the ancient empire?

— Since there is no school, the substratum that speaks the uncultured people emerges, the Romance languages that were expanded in Hispania or Gaul by people who were neither writers nor literary figures concerned with language; they were merchants concerned with business, or soldiers, or militarists. The church has a very important role here for the language, and in Greece even more so, because the Turks wanted to level everything and the Church was the only place where they taught Greek, in school, in catechesis. The Greek Church is a symbol of continuity.

What role does the church have in implementing Latin and Greek in compulsory education in the Spanish state?

— A professor of Latin, who was a fascist and ended up being expelled from the university by Franco, Antonio Tovar, one of the wisest people I have ever known, when he returned from Germany, gave Franco to understand that Greek made the boys strong". Not the girls. And that is why Franco introduced Greek in 1938. First everyone who did secondary school had to study it, then only those studying humanities, and now very few people do.

So, the idea comes from Germany?

— In the 18th and throughout the 19th century, the Philhellenism was experienced. Goethe could never go to Greece, but he did go to southern Italy to see its temples and was admired. Philhellenism reached politics. Hitler and Franco liked classical things.

Latin has lasted longer than Greek, in high schools.

— Because we are Latin. The Church stopped using Latin for masses in 1962. But Latin is still used in the Vatican, and also in Lourdes, or in the international mass of the Sagrada Familia on Sundays.

What have we missed, those of us who no longer studied Greek?

— Knowing what we are. It is the foundation of our culture. You only need to think of geography, Greek word; history, invented by a historian, Herodotus; mathematics means learning; physics, nature; chemistry, mixture; medicine, taking care of others. Hippocrates already speaks of medicine in the 4th century BC. The words used by doctors, all are Greek. Theatre, is a place to contemplate, because in Greece they used to perform three tragedies and a satyr play one after another, they spent all day at the theatre.

You, who have been a professor of Greek, Latin, mythology, philosophy, Catalan... how do you experience the marginalization of humanistic teaching in favor of more instrumental education?

— I accept that the world changes. I am from one era, you from another: we are already different.

Isn't it one of the apocalyptic ones, then?

— No, no. It's the law of the world. People who have cultural sensitivity, sooner or later will discover Greek. Cato, a Roman stubborn as hell, wanted to learn it at 80 years old: you still have time.

Universities are full of old people seeking humanistic knowledge, which is not considered useful.

— Its uselessness is its greatness. It's good for nothing, obviously, you won't make sausages out of this. It's good for beauty, and beauty is also useless! Theaters are also useless. Out, out with culture, out, out! You don't need to know how to read or write either: since man emerged like a mushroom, millions of years have passed and they lived quite peacefully, those people! Well, peacefully. Can we go back? Well, let's go back! You have to accept things as they come.

You have been a professor of language didactics and have tried to spread the fascination for Greek to future teachers.

— Exactly, it's that Greek fascinates. Do you know what a fascinum is? A necklace with a male sex that the Romans wore hanging. It was a talisman, it brought them good luck. Hence to fascinate!

You who are a wise man...

— Wise no, I am a farmer disguised as a professor. Call me an old man.

You who accumulate all this knowledge, what do you think of AI? Will knowledge, languages, dates, history... cease to make sense?knowledge, languages, dates, history...?

— AI is a cake on display, but if you want to enjoy it you have to taste it. I think it's better to go through experiences yourself. AI can be a help. But if you can, go to Greece or go to the British, or the Louvre, or the Vatican Museums, or go to Munich...

Or to the Iliad or The Odyssey, which you have translated.

— I have dipped into chocolate on Sundays thanks to high school, that's how I've made my living; the rest was for dessert. That's why I've always thought about young people, about making it understandable for them. High school students didn't read Carles Riba's translation, they read it in Spanish and it tricked you.

What can the Greeks tell us today?

— They explain us. They are a mirror where we see ourselves. They are the basis of European or Western culture. They are the first ones who have thought of us. Now, life is very good without thinking, depending on how: don't think and you'll be happy! But if you ask yourself any why, you'll be lost: you'll have to go to the roots.

Is there any maxim that serves for the current moment?

— Let's see, the Romans already said Nihil novum sub sole: nothing new under the sun.

And a Greek aphorism that you particularly like?

— A Heraclitus: panta rei. Everything changes. You will not step twice into the same river, because the water will be different. Everything is changing.

Knowing the evolution of classical languages so well, should we worry about the disappearance of Catalan?

— Obviously, because we have big, traditional enemies, from Quevedo to Unamuno. It must be suffered for it to be taught, so that it is normal in all fields, that it does not remain tucked away in a closet, and then it must be allowed to evolve. But it is very difficult to make a language disappear: it transforms. Panta rei.