The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

I said The Rosetta Stone. I think we need more. He said One’s not enough? I said What I mean is, though I believe the Stone was originally a rather pompous thing to erect, it was a gift to posterity. Being written in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, it only required that one language survive for all to be accessible. Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity. You could have Homer with translation and marginal notes on vocabulary and grammar, so that if that single book happened to be dug up in 2,000 years or so the people of the day would be able to read Homer, or better yet, we could disseminate the text as widely as possible to give it the best possible chance of survival. What we should do, I said, is have legislation so that every book published was obliged to have, say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding, so that even if you bought an airport novel if your plane crashed you would have something to reread on the desert island. The great thing is that people who were put off Greek at school would then have another chance, I think they’re put off by the alphabet but if you’ve learned one at the age of six how hard can it be? It’s not a particularly difficult language.