"Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - The Secret of Homer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strugatski Arkady)

THE SECRET OF HOMER
By


A.POLESHCHUK
Molecular Caf├й Compilation

Translated from the Russian
The translator is not mentioned
Mir Publishers
Moscow
1968

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OCR: http://home.freeuk.com/russica2


To this day I can't make out how it happened, and I've never been in such a state
of mental confusion. It all began during the last session of the Moscow Society of
Lovers of Classical Literature. At the meeting there was a stranger who came up to
me afterwards, introduced himself, and asked me to visit his school. "I'm worried
about my boys," he said. "Technology, mathematics, and physics have absorbed all
their interests. I'd like to inject a fresh stream into their education."
I accepted his invitation and have not regretted it. The senior pupilsтАФboys of
sixteen and seventeenтАФgreeted me warily and after the first lesson one of them
asked me point-blank, "Have they sent you to cure us of our technical 'abscess'? "
"No," I answered. "But didn't you find what I was talking about interesting?"
"Not bad," answered someone sitting on the window-sill, "Not bad so far."
But, as I knew quite well they were still only boys and when the hexameters of the
ancient myths resounded in the snug classroom, the eyes of these self-confident
adolescents lit up with enthusiasm and curiosity. I must admit that in my work with
students reading philology and history I've never encountered such attention and
such interest. What apparently was a duty for arts students was a marvellous
fairy-tale for these lads.
I came to them once a week, and every time they astonished me with their
freshness of perception and their remarkable memory. And only one of themтАФthe
tallest and probably the strongest lad who sat in the second row and beat time to
rhythm of the verses with his brawny arm thrown over the back of the chairтАФnever
asked me any questions. Sometimes I put a question to him myself but his answers
were laconic and monosyllabic.
"You talk like a Spartan," I said to him once, and that, perhaps, was my first
mistake.
A month passed, and another. The boys I knew were working hard at their
favourite subject, and had nearly finished assembling an extremely complicated
apparatus something like "time machine". My lessons were only a kind of
"pedagogical adjunct", so I was quite literally thunderstruck when the taciturn lad
suddenly stopped beating time during one of my talks and said, "The stress. It's
wrong. Your..."
"Come now," I said. "The stress in this word only changed during the Roman
Empire. Have you started learning ancient Greek?"