Delivered May 29, 2025
Congratulations, all of you, for your degrees, your many years of hard work. Also my condolences—now you are unambiguously grown ups. There are no more excuses.
This is actually my first Encaenia. I never went to the graduation ceremonies for either of my Oxford degrees, because I was an idiot. I thought this kind of traditional celebration of a rite of passage would feel performative and fake, too separate from my own self-important notions about what my years of education meant to me. To quote the immortal Bob Dylan—I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.
I now realize just how important it is for us—us in a specific community like this one, and us in the community of mortal human beings, together on this planet for just a few revolutions of the sun—to share these rituals with one another, recognizing that our individual experience is part of a much larger whole, and a much longer history. For most of the Iliad, Achilles refuses to participate in the shared activities of his community—the banquets, the council meetings, the debates and the battles—because he’s so intensely focused on his own individual, monumental, enraging and in fact irreparable losses. But in the final sequence of the poem, he recognizes—and the listener or reader recognizes with him—that opting out doesn’t save you from loss or mortality or change. It’s through the collective work of ceremonies, whether it’s a funeral, a sporting event, a banquet, a marriage or a graduation—as well as through the quasi-ceremonial work of narrative, poetry, music and art—that we get to recognize how our individual glories and losses are part of a much larger human whole. Today is all about you, not just as individuals but as a collective: it’s about all of you, together.
So I’m truly honoured to be with you today, at this important moment in all of your lives.
I hope you’ve already absorbed from your rigorous education here an awareness of the limitations of the inherently cheesy genre, the graduation speech, in which the speaker tramps through the rich mines of culture, and extracts some little nuggets of cliché modern wisdom that you could get from the Disney channel—like Schliemann bulldozing his way through the priceless archaeological site of ancient Troy in search of a half-baked fantasy about the historicity of the Iliad. I’m not going to tell you that life is an Odyssey, full of twists and turns, and manufactured by Honda. The point of reading, studying, researching, debating, living with big, complicated, difficult texts, like the Homeric poems—or any of the other big, difficult subjects you’ve all studied in depth here over the past few years—is to be with them, to learn for learning’s sake, to undergo the whole complex difficult experience, and to allow it to change you, and to change your vision of the world.
But I know it’s my job to provide a few nuggets of delicious cheese, so I will share with you some principles that guide my work as a translator, some of which may also work as lessons for life.
The first step in creating a new translation of an ancient text is not to instantly write over the original with my own hideous first draft, but to sit with the original in all its strangeness, and listen. Always remember, there’s more to meaning than meaning. Dwell with it. Let the rhythms, the sounds, unfold. Slow down. Be patient. Notice the things you’ve taken for granted. Unlearn what you think you know. You may feel stuck on something—for hours, days or years. Being stuck is a sign that you’ve met something important that you can’t yet make sense of. Keep going. Get outside every day—walking is an important kind of thinking. Pay attention to your feelings, your values, your body, your voice. Notice the gaps between your expectations or projections, and what you read or see or hear. You learn to know yourself by meeting the other. You learn to know the other by taking the measure of yourself. When you don’t know what you think, write. When you don’t know what you’ve written, try saying it out loud, and you’ll hear what you don’t believe in. Breath has power. Study and respect the authorities, and learn from them—in the case of my work, that means spending many hours with the dictionaries, the commentaries, the scholarship on these ancient texts. But don’t expect your ancestors or parents or colleagues to feed you the answers you have to find for yourself. Study the wheel, but invent the airplane. You need your own coherent vision to make any project fly.
At some stage, even if it’s not perfect, you gotta let it go—meeting your deadlines and showing up on time is part of being honest and trustworthy, not letting other people down. The flawed project you labour into birth and share with others is always better than the ones you were too scared to finish. Whenever you think you’ve got it and you know exactly what you’re doing—remember to reach out for help. Be open and vulnerable enough to learn gratefully from other people when they’re generous enough to tell you how you’re wrong. I couldn’t have completed any of my translations without the editors who commissioned them and guided them to publication, and the wide array of colleagues, friends, students who read and commented on my work in progress, always improving it by telling me what was confusing or didn’t work on the tongue or the page. As humans, our lives are very short, and our vision, even for those of us less shortsighted than me, is very limited. Our only hope of understanding anything is to learn from one another.
I’m always conscious that my main collaborators are people—like Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca or Homer, if there even was a person named Homer—who lived in a very distant time, place and culture, and spoke languages that haven’t been have been part of a living tradition for thousands of years. My task always entails recognizing their radical strangeness, and at the same time, their full humanity. This is also one of the major themes of both the Odyssey and the Iliad: the need to find connection across difference, to welcome the stranger into our home, and to recognize that sometimes in some places, each of us is the stranger. I hope that as each of you goes out into the world, wherever the journey takes you, you’ll take with you a willingness to extend curiosity and generosity to people who seem entirely different from you. As we learn from the Odyssey, we need to recognize the strangers who live in every corner of the world, including our own homes. In the Iliad, Priam and Achilles are not just strangers but deadly enemies, and yet they can, for a few moments, recognize their own pain and mortality in one another. I hope you’ll go through life with an awareness of the capacities, for courage, grief and connection, in every person you meet, and an awareness that every story can be told and retold a different way.
The archaic Greek world, when the Homeric poems were produced, was both very different from the world today, and in some ways similar. It was a time of trade, travel, environmental damage, economic change and instability, population expansion and massive migration, war and territorial conflict, when rhetoric and radical new ideas and new artforms were transforming cultural life, and people were struggling to come to grips with extraordinary new technologies, like iron and the revolutionary new IT that would transform societies and minds—the alphabet. The Homeric concept of ξενία—of building relationships with people who are not like us—was a response to this distant time of proto-globalization, and offers a beautiful invitation to us in our own time, to embrace the gift of learning from strangers, the friends we haven’t met yet. I hope in your long, happy, productive lives, you’ll all open your hearts to and find community with strangers, both living and dead—I hope you’ll open your minds to strange, surprising ideas, including the unexpected elements that might have been taken for granted in your own life or culture. I hope your deep training in literature and history will also enable you to think critically about the changes you’ll live through: new isn’t always better, and sometimes our most important insights come from the distant past.
This is a time of new threats to education, democracy and truth—especially in the US, where I live, but also around the world. I feel moved and inspired to see the thriving of this institution in these times, and to get to meet so many young, well-educated graduates, ready to step into this big, complicated, challenging world armed with all the skills you’ve learned here: patience, curiosity, attentiveness, grace, dialogue, teamwork, critical thinking, an ability to articulate your own ideas and listen to those of others—and to take on big, difficult challenges. The world is changing fast, and an old lady like me can barely begin to imagine what life will be like for you when you’re my age. Your years here have equipped you with the best possible training for a changing world. The greatest gift of these college years is not that you now know everything, but that now, you know how to learn.
The ancient Greeks didn’t exactly have graduation ceremonies, but they were very good at both ritualized drama and the drama of rituals, and they were equally good at aphorisms. If you’re looking for life lessons to carry with you today or put on your next tattoo, you can’t go wrong with the paired maxims from the temple of Apollo at Delphi: μηδὲν ἄγαν—nothing too much—and γνῶθι σεαυτόν, know yourself. Both these aphorisms suggest an implicit warning: don’t go too far, don’t imagine you can do everything, don’t think you’re a god. Remember your mortality. There’s nothing wrong with humility, and there’s everything right with being brave enough to recognize hard truths. But on this day, and every day hereafter, I also want you to remember the ways you are still, and forever, unlimited. You don’t always have to play it safe. If you never take risks, you’ll never learn anything.
In my own life, I’m constantly grateful that when I was about your age, very unsure what I wanted to do with my suddenly adult life, I accepted a place in grad school across the Atlantic Ocean, in a country I’d never even visited—I picked Yale because it was more or less the only American college I’d heard of, and I thought it would be by the sea, which actually it wasn’t. In the spirit of taking chances and of adventure, I want to remind you of a third ancient Greek maxim, ascribed to the great Athenian lawmaker, Solon: γηράσκω δ’ αἰεὶ πολλά διδασκόμενος. I grow old, always learning. Awareness of our limitations is often forced upon us against our will. We’ve got no choice about the growing old part—if we’re lucky enough to stay alive. But we do have a choice about learning. You all had a choice to come to college, and to stick with it, to get your degrees, and more importantly, to learn—both from your classes and from one another. I hope you’ll all decide, and keep on deciding every day, that even though your college years are behind you, you’ll never stop learning, growing, experiencing and creating new things in the world, and opening your minds and hearts to the strangers and the strange.