Translation Colloquium, Tuesday, February 2nd 2010

Local hero, Atthidographer and organizations guru Josh Ober is keen on 'institutional learning'. In the Athenian context, this meant that citizens were educated for politics partly by doing politics - by actively participating in the Assembly, Council, and the 700 or so magistracies that kept the city-state ticking. One year's councillors could learn from the experience of the previous year's bunch, and their travails and successes would in turn feed into the following year's team, in an ever-brighter circuit of information and know-how.

Some SCIT members - well, maybe just Dikaiopolis - just really wanted to be like ancient Athenians, and couldn't get a place on the Olympias. Most of us, as academics in the mould, didn't quite have time to produce proper academic papers for last year's colloquia. So we decided to see if we could pool our experience of last year's production and channel the various streams of feedback offered by other members of the department into something that got flow, both theoretical and practical. Plus there were some bits in the translation we couldn't quite get right.

And that's where Dikaiopolis came in, loudly and obnoxiously urging the assembled citizens of SCIT to make a decision about some of these key cruces. First up was the name of one of the main characters, Pheidippides (see post below!). Suggestions included Thrifty (pheidos plus car-allusion), Datsun (cheapness plus car-reference plus dubious 'dat son' pun), and the inspired Diesel (bathos at the end of a list of classier names, automobile-nod, plus unexpected and perhaps unwanted evocation of muscle-bound pillock). And Diesel by no means tanked it.

Second critical juncture: what do we call the phrontesterion? Suggestions were, at first, innocent. The Cogitarium. The Center for Learning and Discovery. The Center for Advanced Interdisciplinarity (some participants were worried these places already existed on Stanford campus). Then things got delicately, or grossly, acronymic. The Center for Learning, Inter-Disciplinarity, and Technology. The Center for Universal New Technology Studies. And finally, the coup de grace: the Center for Universal Meta-Studies and Heuristic Omni-Technology.

Farming in Silicon Valley has made old Dikaiopolis pretty savvy about technology, so he thought it would be a great idea for the Clouds to become The (Google) Cloud. This is, of course, a network of super-computers that will store information and offer a platform for software centrally, allowing take-home hardware to become radically simplified. It is also something that Stanford Classics grads have never heard of. So we stuck with the conventional sort of clouds, some of which have actually appeared of late in our big blue Californian sky.

In the original play, Strepsiades complains of being bitten by bed-bugs or fleas in his cot, which also serves as a kind of private thinkery. A modern equivalent allowing easy infestation? Some wanted a school-desk; others a dorm-bed or a yoga-mat. What won out in the end was a bean-bag, a staple (apparently) of Bay Area hippy-intellectuals, and accordingly often infested with fleas. And if you thought that was the last you would hear of fleas, the director is absorbing daily-lobbying for a full-fledged flea side-show featuring a certain Smyrnaean...