But the same theme, the slipperiness of meaning and interpretation, runs through the entire book. “I was travelling through a particularly grim part of your country when I saw this phrase scrawled beneath an overpass,” Mandel writes in one poem in “Screen Memory”. The nonsense phrase is “GORKY SUBLIVM TIXET”, and the poet obsessively puzzles away at it, before a final sentence that arrives from nowhere: “The point is, I arrived in your town and rang your bell at the appointed time, but you did not answer, nor have I heard from you since, and all my letters have been returned sewn shut like eyelids.”
There’s the same deathly note to Mandel’s posthumous trawl through Kober’s many documents and letters. With bone-dry humour, he observes: “One of her notebooks has a page entirely blank except for the phrase: ‘Maybe due to lacunae in material.’” She was an awful typist, but he finds meaning in her typos. In a note about editing one of her papers, hoping to hide herself in her own research, she typed: “I want to oamdit the many instances of the pronoun ‘I’” – “omit” typed over “admit”. Now you see her, now you don’t.
What sort of guy would dedicate months to trawling through her papers? Well, the sort of guy who would set off on a 642-mile hike just because John Keats once did it. Footing Slow (2016), Mandel’s short book about that trek, is a mini-masterclass in self-deprecating humour. His personality leaps from the page in it, which makes the near-total suppression of his personality here rather impressive.
Kober turned herself into a kind of human computer, creating vast tables of symbols, organised by frequency. “Her thoroughness was merciless.” In her research, “she abstained to a stunning degree from favouring one fact over another. Ventris called the results ‘internal evidence dispassionately sifted’.” There’s a similar kind of sifting going on here. We’re given details, and left to join dots.
Mendel – a classical linguist himself – includes his own translations of Horace, Pindar and others. Those translations are all light as breath. “Wisdom leads us into the maze of stories / and then robs us dumb,” Mandel writes, in his version of a Pindar ode. In capitals, he translates odd bits of Linear B. One refers to “THE KEY-BEARER”: “SHE HOLDS THE LIMITS / OF ?TWO COMMUNAL PLOTS BUT SHE DOES NOT DO WHAT SHE NEEDS TO DO”. Ventris said that Kober was “purposefully stopping short” in her research: she held the key, but didn’t do what she needed to do.
Mandel, too, stops short. “The Grid” resists neat conclusions and hyperbole in a way that feels true to its subject. “Her discoveries were so few,” he writes, a painful admission. “It would be false to claim that Kober was responsible for deciphering Linear B. It would also be untrue… to assert that she has been forgotten. Her contribution was fundamental but inconspicuous. She lives on in the limbo of the half-triumphant.”
The Grid is published by Carcanet at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk. Tristram Fane Saunders is the author of the poetry collection Before We Go Any Further
