Joseph A. Russo

A true Renaissance Man! Many fond and precious memories of Joseph including his brilliance with languages, cooking, Greek literature and music. He was a passionate man who lived life to the fullest. We enjoyed walks with him at Haverford College, Christmas Sing a longs, and summer reunions in Ocean City. He adored his family and no they were (no doubt) his biggest source of pride. He instilled the aptitude for learning and traveling with everybody he met. He leaves a great legacy behind. Much love, Jennifer, Ginger and Kara xo

I first met Joe Russo as a student, dazzled by his brilliant and far-reaching insights into the beauty of Greek literature, and energized by his infectious brio, zest for intellectual adventure, and warm, nurturing personality. We clicked as people too, keeping in close touch after graduation throughout what turned into a 50-year friendship, which only recently ended with his death.

He made his mark in papers rigorously analyzing and categorizing the memorized jazz-like verbal riffs ("formulae") that Homer used to create semi-improvised epics, first expanding the "oral-formulaic" approach of Parry and Lord to new levels, then later challenging some of its shibboleths.

He also shed new light on the Greek lyric poets, tying lyric and epic together in an over-arching theory of ancient poetry as an aural public performance with important sociological functions.

I found these insights into how riffs were used in ancient live poetry performance musically illuminating in my sideline as a jazz musician, showing the adventurous interdisciplinary (and intercultural) aspects of Joe's work.

These explorations went beyond standard Classics, ranging from psychology (Greek theories of mind & body, penetrating Jungian analyses of Homer, neo-Freudian comparisons of ancient Greek vs. Japanese dependency psychology), to comparative literature (comparison of Homer with the Sanskrit and Mesopotamian epics), to cross-cultural analysis of Greek vs. French, English, and Jewish jokes and proverbs, and, last but not least, to folklore studies.

Folklore studies came more to the fore in Joe's later career, especially in his masterful complete translation with Jack Zipes of The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, bringing to the English-speaking world a treasure trove of folk tales whose importance has been compared to the that of the Brothers Grimm. Joe also contributed to Italian folklore studies journals more generally, emphasizing, as he had with Greek poetry, folktale-telling as a live performance art.

Exchanging notes on these tales was another aspect of the shared bond I had with Joe, as we were both Sicilian-speakers and members of the Northeast US Sicilian-American culture. Although we were a generation apart, reading his unpublished memoirs of growing up in an immigrant family in Brooklyn resonated on many points, and we had great discussions looking for ATU folktale motifs in Pitrè's "The Parrot with Three Tales to Tell" or debating linguistic points of the original texts of the tales.

These lively discussions went on to the very end by regular Zoom, ranging from the structural qualities of jazz riffs vs. poetry riffs, to Indo-European word derivations, to current epic performance traditions of the Heike Monogatari bards or the dalangs of the Javanese puppet theatre in videos that I'd send him from trips to Japan or Indonesia, to our last conversation a few days before his death, comparing Jungian trickster deity archetypes in the Iliad and Odyssey with the Mahabharata and Ramayaa.

So many wonderful conversations with my dear friend... I'll miss them deeply.

I have told this before. One summer, about my last year in college, Joe and I shared a tent on Big Turtle Island on Lake George. We rented the site, the tent and the kerosene lamp from Lamb Brothers. The first night, Joe left his cot, and by the dim, dull orange(nearly brown) light of the kerosene flame I saw Joe, in his summer underwear, bent over a page of The Iliad like some devout worshipper at his night prayers. When he had finished, he extinguished the light and joyfully leapt into bed. And so goodnight, dear Joseph, goodnight, goodnight.