The award for

the most interesting subject matter checked out to today goes to a graduate student who had a number of books in Russian about the Persian philology. Apparently a great deal of work was done on the Persian language by Russian scholars, something I didn't know at all. Not only did my poor patron have to learn Russian specifically to address all this scholarship, but he had to familiarize himself with the technical vocabulary and style of old academic Soviet Russian, to boot! Yeesh. It gets me to wondering how much work there is in classical studies yet to be translated from Russian journals and monographs as well. I would imagine there'd be something, but you just don't hear much about it. This, however, means nothing - Modern Greek writers put out a massive amount of research on Ancient Greek that never shows up on the radar screen of Classics departments here in the West, something I'm becoming more and more aware of now that I'm ordering books in Greek for Widener's collection. The state of Classics in non-Western countries is another pet interest of mine. I guess it goes hand in hand with the classical tradition, but you often find a weird bias in traditional "classical tradition" studies that ignores anything not written in an Indo-European language (and is extremely spotty outside of the Western canon). Now whether this is intellectual laziness or a justifiable calculation of cost versus benefit is not something I know off hand, but I suspect the former. Whereas our 18th and 19th Century counterparts were comfortable in a myriad of tongues, both dead and alive, we latter-day classicists are disturbingly provincial. Most of us don't know Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Egyptian, Akkadian, or Sumerian, let alone other modern foreign languages aside from German, French, and Italian. This is an insidious thing. The less we know, the more deeper and more intensively we mine it for our C.V.'s, while true wisdom dances around further and further beyond the horizon of our ever-shrinking discipline. Every once in a while we'll catch a glimmer of the bigger picture, like a car in the desert can pick up a radio station a thousand miles away due to a kink in the Van Allen belt, but most of the time we're too hemmed in by what's local and what's familiar to go searching for anything else.