Ancient Greek in action: the imperfect tense

As you’ve seen in this module, while the Greek imperfect and aorist tenses can both refer to events in the past, they express different ideas about how an event takes place in time. (This is sometimes called grammatical aspect).

The following two reading selections will be distributed in class. Each is a reflection by a native speaker of English on the experience of seeing past events through a different language with an imperfect tense similar to that of ancient Greek. In Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor’s poem, “Widowed NYC Teacher Studies Spanish in Mexico,” images of the life experience of the title’s widowed teacher are interleaved with her practice of the Spanish imperfect.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s autobiographical work In Other Words is an account of her remarkable decision, a decade after winning the Pulitzer Prize for her first novel, to master Italian by moving to Italy, and allowing herself to read and write only in Italian. The Italian imperfect tense is at the heart of this selection.

A. Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, “Widowed NYC Teacher Studies Spanish in Mexico”

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, poem from Imperfect Tense, “Widowed NYC Teacher Studies Spanish in Mexico”

B. Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

Jhumpa Lahiri, excerpt from In Other Words, “The Imperfect” (pp. 103-114)