Greek personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I started learning Greek because of a footnote. Reading a translation of Antigone for A-level English, I noticed a note explaining that one word had been rendered three different ways by three translators, and that none of them quite worked. That seemed extraordinary to me: that a single word could carry more than English would let it carry, and that a reader depending on translation would never know. I wanted to be the kind of reader who could check. My college does not teach Greek, ancient or modern, so I began on my own with a second-hand grammar and a photocopied verb table stuck inside my wardrobe door. What has kept me going is not only the literature but the shape of the language itself: the way the aorist tense treats an action as a single completed thing, the way particles nudge a sentence's tone without translating neatly into anything. Learning that middle-voice verbs let a subject act on their own behalf changed how I read arguments in Plato, where so much depends on who is doing what to whom. Alongside this I have become interested in Modern Greek, partly through work and partly because I find the continuity fascinating: the same word for bread, the same verb endings under a new stress pattern, and a written language that has argued with its own past for two centuries. I want to study Greek at degree level because self-teaching has taken me as far as careful discipline can, and I now need proper instruction in composition, unseen translation and literary criticism, and the chance to read widely in both periods rather than only the passages I can find free copies of.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels have given me the habits Greek demands. English Literature has trained me to argue from the words on the page rather than from a general impression, which is the closest thing I have had to formal training in close reading; working on Milton and on Shakespeare's late plays taught me how much syntax can do to delay or redirect meaning. History has taught me to treat sources sceptically and to notice what a text was for: I wrote coursework on how Victorian writers used classical antiquity to justify their own ideas about citizenship, which involved reading translations against each other and thinking about what the translators wanted. Religious Studies has been more useful than I expected, because it introduced me to textual transmission and to the fact that the New Testament circulates in a Greek quite different from Attic. My EPQ is a comparison of two English translations of a chorus from Sophocles, one nineteenth-century and one modern, in which I work through the Greek phrase by phrase with a lexicon and a commentary and explain where each translator has added a subject, chosen a stronger verb, or smoothed out a difficult word. It has been slow work and I have had to be honest in my write-up about the limits of my grammar, but it taught me to use a lexicon properly, to read apparatus in an edition without being frightened of it, and to write about language precisely. I also completed French GCSE and still use it, which has made me comfortable with the idea that fluency is built from small daily amounts of accurate work rather than bursts of enthusiasm.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

I work Saturdays and holidays at a bakery, mostly on the counter. Two of our regulars and one of my colleagues speak Greek, and after I mentioned what I was studying my colleague began writing words for me on the back of order slips. That turned into a small project of my own: a card index of around four hundred Modern Greek words, each with the ancient form where I could find one, which I test myself on during quiet periods. Working out that a word I knew from a textbook chorus was still on a packet of biscuits was more motivating than any amount of drilling. Serving customers has also made me a better listener; I can now follow the rhythm of spoken Greek even when I lose most of the vocabulary, and I have stopped being embarrassed about asking someone to repeat themselves. At home I share responsibility for my younger brother after school, cooking and getting him to football, which has forced me to be organised: my Greek study happens in fixed half-hour slots in the morning because that is the time no one else needs. I volunteer fortnightly at a community library, sorting and pricing donated books, where I have found several useful second-hand editions and a battered Liddell and Scott abridgement. Explaining to visitors what we have in stock has made me quicker at describing things clearly to people who have no background in them. I also sing in a community choir, including some settings in Greek, which has been an unexpectedly practical way to get used to pronunciation and stress. I am ready for the volume of reading a Greek degree involves, and for the years of steady accuracy behind it.

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