Goodwin Award Citations
for
Richard Janko and Jeffery Henderson
(The Charles J. Goodwin Award of
Merit, named in honor of a long-time member and generous
benefactor of the American Philological Association, is
the only honor for scholarly achievement given by the
Association.)
This year the Charles Goodwin Award committee
experienced both delight and distress in making a single
award from an enormous field of excellent publications.
We concluded that this field is especially deserving of
the new opportunity granted by the Board to grant more
than a single award, and recognize two outstanding
scholars and their publications. These two sets of
publications embody excellence in
Altertumswissenschaft and modern classical
studies, in manifold and even complementary ways.
In the first instance, we are deeply impressed with
the extraordinary work of Richard Janko, who presents the
first book of Philodemos' On Poems in an edited
text and translation, for the first time. In singling out
this work, the committee and the board of directors share
their admiration for the collective work of an
extraordinary team, exemplified in the volumes already
published and still in progress, and reward a chief
instigator of the original NEH project, Richard Janko. In
the twenty-first century, it is heartening and exciting
to see the rewards that still await a primary task of
philology, the fundamental step of recovering and
reconstructing ancient texts. Such a labor faced those
who tackled the papyri of the villa at Herculaneum named
for its carbonized books, once numbering between 800 and
1200 papyrus rolls. First discovered some 250 years ago,
the contents of this ancient library have challenged
specialists for over two centuries, making its latest
investigators chroniclers of their predecessors' attempts
to unroll and read them. This requires those who decipher
them to serve at once as historians of their own
discipline and archaeologists of previous
reconstructions; they must also command the latest
scientific methods in conservation and digital
reconstruction of images. The results presented in
Janko's Philodemos On Poems (I) constitute a fascinating
history of the technical and interpretive arrangement of
a daunting mass of fragments, a meticulous assembly and
analysis of the ancient sources on the author, as well as
a rigorous edition and translation of the surviving text.
This is a remarkable achievement in any age, and offers
future scholars the primary work of a prolific and
influential Hellenistic literary and philosophical
figure, in both Greek and English. Behind this impressive
volume lie many years of communications and organization,
the participation of graduate students supported by the
NEH, and even more hours of hard work in the Officina dei
Papyri of the Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples. The American
Philological Association delivers its praise and
admiration for the past and future fruits of this project
with the Charles Goodwin Award, by rewarding this volume
for its extraordinary contribution to classical
scholarship. Its publication inaugurates a new and
digitally enhanced age of textual editing, while
celebrating the rewards of traditional, rigorous skills
in editing and interpreting ancient texts..
In our second award, we turn to another vital
dimension of our discipline, likewise experiencing a
welcome revival: the art of translation. Equally
compelling for us as scholars and teachers is the impact
of a new set of translations by JEFFERY HENDERSON of the
Attic comedies of Aristophanes. The art of translation is
one on which we rely so deeply that we take it for
granted, complain of inadequacies in examples available,
yet rarely reward it, either with our own research time
or through scholarly recognition. No ancient text is as
tricky to render in its precise original flavor in terms
of idiom and topicality than Old Comedy, with its balance
of sophisticated witticisms based on politics and
philosophy with graphic obscenities (veiled by
translators in Latin, for many generations of readers).
Henderson has managed to do so deftly and elegantly with
his new volumes for the Loeb Classical Library (of which
the first two appeared recently: Acharnians, Knights;
Clouds, Wasps, Peace). Fast moving and light in tone,
Henderson's translation captures many colloquial phrases
close to their submeanings as well as surface ones in
Greek, and reveals him the master of the bilingual pun.
In these new translations of the plays of Aristophanes,
Henderson applies his expert understanding of ancient
obscenity, so skillfully deployed in his The Maculate
Muse, to enliven some of antiquity's most popular texts,
in a series most widely consulted by non-classicists.
Moreover, each text has been treated to a new and
judicious edition, making these volumes a triumph of
textual editing as well as a new resource for all
readers. In recognizing the enormous role that classical
texts play in translation for students, and scholars in
other disciplines, the American Philological Association
rewards a first-rate interpreter of some antiquity's most
popular yet elusive texts. Presenting this award to
Henderson also acknowledges how central a contribution
classical literature offers to other readers, through
series like the Loeb Classical Library. The fact that
this year, the APA hosts a Presidential Panel on
translation, coincided with our nomination rather than
inspired it: both panel and award are a tribute
expressing collective gratitude and admiration as a
profession for those who make ancient texts come alive
for all readers.
Sarah P. Morris (Chair)
Robert Kaster
Glenn W. Most
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