After 40 years of teaching, this multi-lingual professor is enjoying retirement as a guitarist and novel translator

POCATELLO – Professor Emeritus of Language at Idaho State University, and polyglot (someone who speaks multiple languages) Arthur Dolsen, has immersed himself in language for over 60 years. But he didn’t start life musing about verbal aspects, phonetic similarities, or translation.

“I wanted to be a bicycle racer,” he says.

Although born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Dolsen grew up in Vancouver, B.C., where he developed a love of bicycle racing. His love of racing brought him to the bicycle shop of Lorne Atkinson (“Ace”), where he purchased a cycling magazine. It was in Italian.

“So, I started to teach myself Italian,” he shrugs.

He later went on to take a university course in Italian while still in high school, as well as Latin, Spanish, and French. He won first place in the region’s annual French competition during his senior year.

His love of language followed him to the University of British Columbia, McGill University, and eventually Trinity College in Dublin.

At Trinity, he studied under W.B. Stanford, a leading Homer expert and Regius Professor of Greek.

While a student, he met and married Marijana, a native of Zagreb, Croatia, and a famous cook with a particular interest in Austro-Hungarian cuisine. They had a daughter, Daria, in 1973.

In 1978, Dolsen received his Ph.D. in classics from Trinity with a thesis on verbal aspects in ancient Greek. At the time, he taught at a private school for boys in Victoria, B.C.

“That was challenging,” he reflects, noting the school’s funding problems and demanding parents.

But his prospects improved with a teaching position at the University of South Dakota in 1980, followed by the University of Mississippi in Starkville, and finally Idaho State University in Pocatello in 1983.

“It felt like coming home,” he says, noting that most of the entertainment he was exposed to growing up in Canada came from the U.S.

During his nearly 40-year tenure as professor of language at ISU he taught French (which he refers to as the poor man’s Greek), Russian, Latin, Spanish, and Italian. After 10 years at ISU, he received the Teacher of the Year award from the Idaho Association of Teachers of Language and Culture. Recently, the Dolsen Visiting Writer Event Endowment was established in his honor.

Now retired, Dolsen enjoys a quiet — although by no means sedentary — life. He plays classical guitar, a hobby he’s cultivated for decades, and recently finished translating Armenian novelist and playwright Alexander Shirvanzade’s “An Evil Soul.”

He explains in the introduction that he decided to translate the novella because he couldn’t find a translation in English, despite searching for one while visiting Armenia in 2013.

He also regularly chats with retired ISU philosophy professor Carl Levenson. What about? The ancient Greek language and its philosophers, of course!

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