Like a hurricane, when winds clash

Only days before Stan Lombardo, KU classics professor, was scheduled to perform at the University of Houston, he was still waiting to hear if the reading would happen. Only a few days before, on the night of Sept. 12, Hurricane Ike had slammed against the Gulf Coast, causing damage in Houston. Finally, after days of uncertainty, Lombardo received a phone call from Bill Monroe, director of the Honors College at the University of Houston. The reading would happen as planned. In the little time before the reading, Lombardo made a choice. Instead of performing his full translation of Homer's Iliad, he would bring alive a different classic poem--one he thought the students would find relevant to their lives at this time.

***

It's Sept. 22, a Tuesday night, and 300 honors students from the University of Houston are assembled in the vast Houston Opera House. The high arcs of the ceiling echo with their rustling and chatting. The students fall dutifully quiet as Monroe as well as Richard Armstrong, professor, give successive introductions. Muffled murmurs and giggles can still be heard.

Then, Lombardo takes stage. Lombardo, at 65, is short and solid with graying hair. He wears a black tee shirt and khaki pants. He cradles a small Indian drum, the size of a coffee can under his right armpit. He stands dead center, illuminated by a spotlight. He seems oblivious to anything but the papers in front of him on the small, black podium.

Suddenly, a drumbeat.

Then another. The sound is eerie, the students hush.

Lombardo begins. 

My queen, you are asking me to relive

Unspeakable sorrow, to recall how the Greeks

Pulled down Troy, that tragic realm...

I saw these horrors myself and played no small part in them.

As he reads these words, students freeze in their seats. Rustling has stopped. All attention is focused on the man in front of them.

He is no longer the being he once was. He is transformed. He is Aeneas, the character in his most recent translation of the ancient Roman work, Virgil's Aeneid, about the destruction of Troy. His voice, deep and slow and full, is mesmerizing. He speaks with an intensity that reaches each person there.

But if you are so passionate to hear an account

Of Troy's last struggle--although my mind

Shudders to remember and recoils in pain,

I will begin.

As he weaves his story of destruction and chaos, the themes hit home with the audience. Sitting in her third row seat, student Ashley Joyner thinks of her father, in Kemah, a town 30 miles away.  After Hurricane Ike, he took a kayak to get to his flooded home and has been there, camping without power, ever since.

"It affected me personally," she said, "I saw on the news my dad's office...all of this area completely covered by water and there are only a few landmarks that you can pinpoint and see that there used to be land there, there was life there."

The connection that Joyner felt with the poem is exactly what Lombardo was going for. A nationally renowned translator and performer, his goal is to reach audiences on a personal level and to convince them that the stories of these ancient authors are still relevant. His gift as a performer enables him to do this.

"There is something in whatever Stan says, that means 'This'll change your life, so listen to it, goddammit!'" said his former mentor, Douglass Parker, a retired classics professor at the University of Texas.

Lombardo's translations have earned acclaim in the past decades. Critics and students alike love his Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid for the powerful way that they retell classic stories in modern American vernacular. To create that flowing narrative, Lombardo finds performance essential. He reads aloud in his office when translating, but his real love is performing in front of audiences. He performs across the nation, as well as in KU classrooms.

"When he came to the University, he was already one of the best performers of classical texts," said colleague Mark Shaw, professor of classics. "In the country as a whole, he was at the top five. That carried over into his teaching--he could convey the poem, convince people that it was important, move them. That is the heart of his production as a teacher--that he can make classical literature come alive."

***

In the Opera House, Joyner is beginning to feel as if the poem is alive.

"You felt like he was reading this story to you," she later said. "You could almost see the Greek soldiers, see this world."

The sky turned, and night swept up from Ocean,

Enfolding in its great shadow earth and heaven--

And the Myrmidons' treachery.

Armstrong, too, felt the story reach out. He felt the Trojan's desire to rebuild their lost city reflected in the post-Hurricane resilience of Houstonians.

"Because of the hurricane, could empathize with the destruction of Troy," Armstrong said. "Houstonians were feeling the sense of solidarity from surviving it. We have stayed and are rebuilding."

***

Lombardo's life has been a journey to find his Homeric voice. For many years, he has performed in different venues and has studied language and verse in an attempt to find a voice true to his own and the author that he is translating.

His training in oral storytelling began, not with the voice of Homer but with the voice of his great-Grandfather. In a rasping voice that still carried his Cajun accent, the former railroad worker would recount stories of his childhood in French-speaking New Orleans.

"I thought the world was forged in his tool shed," Lombardo said.

            Lombardo went on to college at Loyola University in New Orleans. He entered university wanting to study poetry or math. He had no intention of becoming a classics major until he found himself in a small class taught by a French Cajun Jesuit priest named Father Emmett Bienvenue.

            "You had to translate in class absolutely literally," Lombardo said. "But I knew enough about poetry and other translations to realize that the translation is a creative and interpretive act."

The exercises inspired Lombardo.

"It made me know that I wanted to devote my life to this sort of poetry," he said.

He experimented by translating the texts in different ways. He became obsessed by finding a voice to use for classics in English. As a 20-year-old college student, he saturated himself in poetry in all languages. He memorized poems by poets such as Omar Khayim, William Shakespeare, John Keats and Ezra Pound. He found recordings of Dylan Thomas reading his own work and of actors Albert Finney reading Shakespeare and Richard Burton reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He would sit at his desk and challenge himself to write a sonnet in five minutes. He memorized form and sounds in English, Greek, and Latin. He began to form his own style of translation, translating Greek works into a syllabic pattern that retain the lyric quality in English.

"Listening to it, hearing the sound, is essential for me as a translator," Lombardo said. "You are translating for performance... silent reading was unknown."

***

It was as if the South Wind were fanning fire

Through the fields, or a mountain torrent had leveled

The farmlands and swept away the oxen's tillage,

Flattening the hedgerows, and I was a shepherd

Listening in the dark from some towering rock.

***

The perfect place for Lombardo to continue his studies was at the University of Texas at Austin, where Lombardo went for grad school, graduating with a PhD in 1976. The classics department of the university was a progressive place.

"You had a quantum jump in the way people translated--not trying to get literally but get what it means," Parker said. "We really had some wild men, he fit right in."

The department also put an emphasis on reading aloud, something that had always been Lombardo's interest. The driving force behind this movement at UT was a professor named Gareth Morgan, a Welshman with a lilting accent, "a performer who read Greek out loud more beautifully than any man ever has," Lombardo said.

Morgan tied translation to the art of reading aloud. He bought a home with a large parlor so he could host classical readings every other week. Everyday at noon, he would hold a reading in his large ground floor office, seated at his desk with chairs fanning out from either side. As light streamed in through the windows and illuminated the tall shelves of books, those assembled would take turns reading. Sometimes there'd be two readers, sometimes 15--a mix of grad students, faculty and the occasional undergraduate. Lombardo was often there.

"It was unrehearsed if not completely misconceived, that's what he called it," Lombardo said. "The idea was to just do it."

With the formal training given by mentors like Parker and Morgan, Lombardo learned, grew and practiced.

"It took six years at the University of Texas before I began to feel like I knew what I was doing as a translator," Lombardo said.

But for his mentors and colleagues at UT, Lombardo already stood out.

"Among the world class readers, I would put Stan first," Parker said. "He has that beautiful organ of a voice and he takes it as something that is meant to be oral, meant to be pronounced out loud to show that there is meaning."

***

In Houston, intensity is building in the audience.

Brave hearts- brave in vain

If you are committed to follow me to the end--

You see how we stand. All the gods

Who sustained this realm are gone, leaving

Altar and shrine. You are fighting to save

A city in flames.

"The sufferers are out there in the audience and I am aware of that," Lombardo said. "I knew that many had been deeply affected by it. Connecting with the audience is very important in the way that I do these readings. Everyone responds to suffering, what is already an intense experience becomes more so and personal."

***

Post-graduation, Lombardo found a home at the classics department of the University of Kansas. He joined the faculty in 1976 and has been here for 32 years.

Lombardo flourished in a department that emphasized teaching. He continued that legacy in his role as department chairman for 15 years of that time. He is now the director of the Honors Program. His favorite spot, however, is in the classroom.

"All professors have to be performers to some extent, but in that area, he excels," said Shaw.

He used his student audiences to develop his voice as Morgan and others at UT had taught him--with performance. He was finally beginning to translate Homer and he would read sections of his work aloud to students. He also experimented with other venues--alternating between parlor readings like those at Morgan's and the poetry slams of the early nineties. With the publication of his works of translation, first those of Plato, Hesiod, Callimachus and Sappho and later, with Hackett Publishing Inc., Homer's Iliad, in 1997, Homer's Odyssey in 2000 and Virgil's Aeneid in 2007, he began to be demanded by other places as well.

"Stanley achieved national reputation very quickly with his translation of the Iliad," said Shaw. "He quickly became a very well-known classicist in the U.S."

Critics commended his work, calling it "fresh" and "moving." Homer's Odyssey was a New York Times Book of the Year, the Iliad, a recipient of the Byron Caldwell Book Award. He has twice been a finalist for the Pen Award, once for his collected works and once for the Aeneid.

Armstrong, in choosing Lombardo's works for his honors students, notes differences between Lombardo's work and others.

"Some translations are almost impossible to read. You can read a page, but can you read forty or fifty?" Armstrong said. "But Lombardo, he is not ashamed of the American idiom. It's an idiom that speaks to our students; there is a directness to it."

Lombardo's translations have reached out to embrace a whole new generation of students that may not understand the importance of the classics. Universities across the country that assign their students to read his translations also send invitations to read. Lombardo spends most of his weekends traveling and performing. He doesn't disappoint.

"The word for it is charm," said colleague Mark Shaw, professor of Classics at the University of Kansas. "He reads expressively, he convinces the listener that they should be taking this as something important. He holds their attention."

***

It was like a hurricane when winds clash

From every direction, Winds West and South

And the East proud with his colts of Dan.

The forests groan, and Nereus foams with rage

As he stirs with his trident the lowest depths.

Lombardo couldn't see the audience that night because of the blinding lights over-head but he was able to sense its connection to the poem in its stillness and concentration.

"I has an awareness of their awareness," he said later. "The worst thing for a performer is to have an audience who just doesn't get it. But to have an audience where you know they are getting it, you are at your best."

As Joyner left the auditorium, she felt dazed. In the coming weeks, she would continue to think back on the classic characters in a way she never thought she would. She especially thought about it when she went to Galveston to volunteer in a rebuilding project.

"The story transforms time and space-- the basic underlying principle is that there is going to be trouble and hardship, but humans have the capability to overcome both," she said. "All of those families that would go back to their homes would just start cleaning up. News crews would go and people would just grin and say, 'Well hell, I'll rebuild.' "