Growing up in Greece, Christina Tsarampari studied the works of Greek poet C.P. Cavafy in school and developed a fondness for his poems.
Now, as an Emory student, Tsarampari was offered the irresistible opportunity to contribute to a project using Cavafy’s work.
One of the English translation of C.P. Cavafy’s Greek poem “Tomb of the Grammarian Lyceus,” on which “The Tomb of the Librarian” exhibit at the Oxford College Library is based.
Jacob Lackner, a teaching and learning librarian at the college, invited Tsarampari to contribute to his exhibit inspired by Cavafy’s “Tomb of the Grammarian Lysias,” a 1911 poem about grieving students who want to bury their beloved teacher in a library near his favorite books.
After working in the library during her two years as an Oxford College student, Tsarampari already knew Lackner and was happy to help celebrate one of her favorite Greek poets.
“We were taught about Cavafy’s poems at school in Greece, so I was very excited about it,” says Tsarampari, who is now a junior on the Atlanta campus, majoring in chemistry and focused on pre-med.
Lackner’s exhibit, “The Tomb of the Librarian,” runs through Wednesday, Dec. 9, and was created in partnership with the Michael C. Carlos Museum. Lackner curated the exhibit and worked with Ruth Allen, curator of the Carlos Museum’s Greek and Roman Art collection, to add ancient funerary vessels to the pieces on display.
Exhibit inspiration
The exhibit is the capstone project for Lackner’s MA in art and design with a concentration in museum studies, which he earned in August from Kennesaw State University. As he brainstormed for exhibit ideas last spring, he knew he wanted to combine his love of libraries with a Carlos Museum collection but didn’t yet know how that would happen.
“I was just looking through poems online, and I read “Tomb of the Grammarian Lysias” that talks about burial in a library, and the poem just really stuck with me,” says Lackner.
“Being buried in a library may be relevant for a librarian, but the idea could apply to anyone,” Lackner says. “In the poem, these students have found a way to process their grief by burying their deceased teacher near his favorite books. When they visit the library to get books or study, they can also honor his memory.”
Working with the poem and the exhibit, Lackner noticed a second theme emerging.
“I don’t think he was suggesting people actually do this, but I think he was exploring ideas about grief, rituals, and our relationships with objects,” he says. “That inspired me to collaborate with the museum, using objects and remembrance as the exhibit’s center.”
Students from a class visit the exhibit and answer questions designed to spark critical thinking.
Oxford College classes such as Ancient Egyptian Art and Architecture, Ceramics, and Introduction to Information Sciences visited the exhibit, and students answered questions about the poem’s theme, such as whether burial in a library would make the library a sacred space.
“I think that if someone was buried here, it would show that the library had so much significance to someone that it was important enough to be buried there,” says Yaron Shekel, an Oxford College freshman in the Information Sciences class. “I think that alone would make it a sacred space, just the level of value it had to that person.”
Building the exhibit
For the exhibit, Lackner needed a way to convey that someone had died but without seeming morbid. Fully aware of Oxford students’ love for Dooley, Emory’s skeletal mascot, he bought a 5-foot plastic skeleton online, then covered it papier-mâché style with English translations of the poem, printed in various fonts and sizes.
Exhibit curator Jacob Lackner bought this 5-foot skeleton online and covered it in copies of various English translations of the Greek poem, “Tomb of the Grammarian Lyceus.
“The idea was that the text would cover up the skeleton like a burial shroud,” Lackner says. “I’m not an artist, and I was just learning as I worked on it. It was very freeing, a lot different from your standard desk work.”
With Allen’s help, Lackner chose a variety of funerary objects from the Carlos Museum’s Greek and Roman Art Collection that represent how ancient cultures thought about death and remembrance and how they conveyed those beliefs with physical objects.
Carlos Museum items on display include:
- An Egyptian bronze falcon casket, sized to fit a small bird, dated 722-332 BCE
- The marble cinerary urn of Gaius Pompeius Ireneus, Roman, 69-96 CE. The urn, shaped like a building, features symbols such as rams’ heads and grapes carved into the marble, chosen to aid Ireneus’ journey through the underworld (pictured below, far right).
- A ceramic funerary urn in the form of a house, with a small lid topped by a bird, 2nd-3rd century CE (pictured below at left)
These three funerary vessels from the Carlos Museum, made of ceramic and marble, each have their own stories.
Although the deceased’s names are largely missing, and their remains are no longer with these objects, the urns are still “testaments to the lives lived, and it feels fitting to see them displayed together in this exhibition,” Allen says.
“I was drawn to the exhibition’s theme and its invitation to consider objects as containers for both collective and individual memory,” she adds. “The Carlos Museum’s collections preserve the memories, knowledge, and lived experiences of different cultures and time periods, and caring for these objects means caring for those memories, too.”
From Greek to English
For Tsarampari’s contribution, Lackner asked her to write a reflection about the Greek and English versions on the poem, which is featured at the beginning of the exhibit.
In her piece, Tsarampari noted that certain words in Greek mean different things in English. For example, she says, a two-word phrase translated to “beautifully chosen” in the poem “means something richer than that. In Greek, it has nothing to do with aesthetic beauty. It conveys rightness and intellectual suitability, a sense that the burial place befits Lysias in the deepest way,” she explains.
Tsarampari also wrote that the themes of professional reputation found in Cavafy’s poetry resonate with her own views on purposeful work.
“I found it interesting how the poem focuses on Lysias’ reputation,” she says. “He’s buried in the library where he worked and made his contributions. I relate to the idea that our work and character shape how we’re remembered. It reminds me that the work we do here at school has a purpose, and that can have an impact even when we’re no longer here.”
“The Tomb of the Librarian” is located on the second floor of the Oxford College Library and is open to the public at no charge with an appointment during visitors’ hours. Members of the public can call the service desk to make an appointment at 770-784-8380 or use the librarian chat box that opens on the hours webpage.
—by Maureen McGavin, senior writer, Emory Libraries
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