After My Brother: Translating grief

57 t is after my brother kills himself and when I am still living in Los Angeles that my dad sends an email saying he is at a bookstore in New York and wants to know if Meditations is by Cicero. It brings me a bit of pride that he asks me, because I know Latin and have read Ovid, Pliny, Vergil, Cicero. He says in the email that I was the only person he would think to ask—me, and maybe his father, he jokes, because his father was the type of person who would know. But his father, like my brother, is not askable, and so he asks me. I’ve forgotten whether Meditations is in Latin or Greek. I’ve been forgetful lately. I forget my purse everywhere, I forget to hand in assignments, I forget to go to sleep at night, I forget which of my brothers died when I wake up in the morning. In Latin class I feel faintly the pleasure of diving into Cassell’s Latin dictionary to resurface with a new translation of a very old thought. But when essay After My Brother Translating grief Brianna Elatove I 58 | Brianna Elatove Ovid speaks of rape and death, I wonder at how he can move past it so quickly. I wonder at how the mothers grieved, why only one line was devoted to them. I grow angry at Ovid. His stories—transfor­ mation, always, from one thing to another, Athena’s petty jealousy of Arachne’s talent and her transformation into a spider, Apollo’s ceaseless pursual of Daphne, who so clearly said no—do they even matter? During class, I sit at the top of our campus in a little alcove in the shade of a large tree, staring at the cloudless sky. It’s beautiful here, I think, and, Ovid didn’t know what it was to have your brother kill himself. Or else he wouldn’t have written so uncaringly about people losing their lives. My Latin professor takes me aside one day. “How are you doing?” She is kind. I look at her wide eyes and feel nothing at all. I try to smile, but her brow creases. “Don’t worry about the classwork,” she says. “Just come to class, so I know you’re okay.” I nod at her. “I think I have to drop the class.” “You can still come to class, even if you don’t do the work.” “The translations just don’t make sense.” Grief just doesn’t make sense. in high school, the wooden chair is hard and cold under me even though I’m wearing leggings beneath my jeans. My hands are thin and long and trembling from the chill. My Latin teacher, Mrs. S., sips steaming tea in a dining-­ hall mug, her face flushed from the walk up the driveway. It’s just us, as usual, because at my tiny boarding school I’m the only Latin student. The wind howls and whistles outside—it’s a New England storm in November; snow is piled high against the door, classes were almost canceled that morning, but most of us live on campus, so we don’t get snow days, exactly. Mrs. S. and I will go over a passage from Vergil’s Aeneid. My hands are so cold it’s hard to hold the pen, and the space heater Mrs. S. brought from home hasn’t started working yet, but it’s fine, really, just drafty; we are lost in sentences anyway. After My Brother | 59 The verb, squiggly underline. Subject, straight underline. Ablative clause, slashed off. Direct object, enclosed in a cloud like a dream. Accusative, subordinate clauses, marked the way a cre­ scendo is marked in a piece of music. “Good,” she says. I lean my chair back on two legs, grinning, trying to think of how to get out of the work for a moment. “So, the Gracchi brothers.” If IaskheranythingaboutGreco-­Romanhistory,Mrs.S.drifted away from grammar lessons and into anecdotes about Ancient Rome: how ancients lay down at the dinner table; Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus leading plebeian revolts; erotic graffiti preserved in Pompeii by the...