Category Archives: Latin

Humanities, Latin, Letters, Literature, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

At It

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Spring                                                             Bloodroot Moon

Still reading through Missing, making notes, trying to integrate beta reader observations and questions.  It’s slower right now because I’m also trying to integrate lessons about description and pacing from Robert Jordan’s amazing The Eye of the World.

The general plan for revision III has begun to take shape.  Some shifting of certain narrative threads to book II or to a book of their own, expanding the ending, putting the climax in earlier, making descriptions beefier, more lush and adding narrative in sections where what I wrote was, as Judy observed, outline like.

How long will it take?  I have no idea.  As soon as I can finish it, but just how long that is, I don’t know.  Why?  Partly the removal of certain narrative lines will create disruption as well as clarification.  Partly because the climax I have doesn’t satisfy me and I’m not clear what it should be.  Partly because adding descriptive material is a whole manuscript task and a personal style changer, too, since I tend to be spare.  There will be a learning curve.

Closing in on the last few verses of the Jason and Medea early story.  When I’m done with it, before Friday, and have checked and revised my work, also before Friday, I’m ready to go to Book I and begin the work I first decided I wanted to do back in 2008 or 2009.  That’s exciting.

It’s exciting for more than the obvious reason; that is, that I can now do it.  It’s exciting in addition because it will feed a new work, one I will not start until all three of the Tailte novels are finished; but, a work I hope will utilize all I’m learning about writing and about mythology and Latin and Ovid and Rome.  Working title:  Changes.

 

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Where Can I Find A Sherpa?

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Spring                                                                       Bloodroot Moon

 

At my next session with Greg, Latin tutor Greg, on April 12th, I’m going to tell him that I’m going to go to Book I and start my for real translation of Metamorphoses.  In that process I plan to not only translate but make notes, careful notes, for a commentary.  I don’t know to what extent it will ever see the light of day, but the effort will embed Ovid and his work even more firmly in me.

This translating will find me moving beyond the literal English and the good English to what I find to be the best English, at least from my perspective.  This means I will be comparing translations, doing research into the myths, etymology, Ovid’s life and times, frequency of a words occurrence.  I’m not really quite ready to do this, but it feels like this is what will take me to the next gate through which I need to pass.

 

 

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

In A Dark Wood Wandering

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Spring                                                                               Bloodroot Moon

Another Latin session with Greg finished.  We went once a week for about two years, perhaps a little less, then shifted to every two weeks, the pace we continue to follow.  At first we followed lessons in Wheelock, the grizzled Latin classic, updated, but following in the original’s historic pattern.

(Ovid)

About midway through it Greg said he felt I was a global learner, more like himself, and we switched to work with the Metamorphoses itself.  I translate as best I can then we go over my translation when we meet.  By phone.  All of my lessons, every one, has been done over the phone, not skype, but over the old fashioned landline telephone.  At least in my instance.  Greg uses a cell phone.

It was my passion for learning what lay behind the English translations of Ovid’s masterwork that started me on this path and Greg felt I’d learn best following it.  He’s been right.  It means I encounter things I don’t know from time to time, but that provides an opportunity to learn and not only that but to learn in context, not in the abstract as a textbook does.

(The Young Cicero Reading, Vincenzo Foppa, 1464)

At first I wandered through the Latin like I was lost in a briar patch.  I’d come up scraped and raggedy with sentences to match.  As I have put more reading behind me, it has been more like following an ancientrail through a strange forest.  I can follow it, even if I don’t always know where I’m going.  And, at times, I turn down the wrong path and have to find my way back or, if I can’t do it by myself, Greg shows me the way.

At some point, I think after I finish the story of Jason and Medea, a long one, I will return to the start, Book I, and begin to work my way forward.  At some point, too, I want to read some other authors, follow different trails through the Big Woods that is ancient Rome.  But for now Ovid is enough.

Garden, Health, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Sowing A Fallow Field

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Spring                                                                                Bloodroot Moon

And the Latin keeps on coming.  I’m sure I’ll reach a plateau here at some point, but I seem to be learning faster and faster.  Of course, it’s taken me 3 years to get to this point, so it’s not like it’s an overnight phenomena.  Still, it feels good. Session with Greg tomorrow.

Jason plowed a fallow field, seeded it with dragon’s teeth and an army sprung up, only to take after each other with weapons grown with them.  Men.

My shoulder pain retreated a good bit while in DC.  That was after the third week of rest, including two before I left.  Today I started back with the same exercise routine, trying to discover exactly what’s going on so I can have good data for my visit with the orthopedist on April 17th.

Kate and I have on our calendars garden clean-up starting April 1.  April fools!  We’d have to shovel snow off it to get started.  We may straighten up the garden shed, clean and sharpen tools.  That we can do now.  Of course, I still have that book and file moving/removal project that’s about half done.  No dearth of things to do.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Latin, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Solid Day

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Imbolc                                                                                 Bloodroot Moon

Missing in the a.m.  About 1/6th done.  As I read, it’s hard not to jump in, start line editing, but getting the story and the transitions and the big picture clear is necessary.  I have to reenter the story when I begin this 3rd rewrite, reenter the story in order to change it.  Only by having it again in mind will I be able to do that.  I can already see the value of this approach.

I have a list of characters, things and places that I’m writing down as I read.  The first time a character appears or a place gets mentioned or a thing like a particular sword gets used.  A long list and I’m only a little ways in.

Translating today went well, two sentences, about 6 verses.

The mechanical inspector came to examine our new furnace.  A cursory look.  “Fine.”  And he was on his way out.  To show though the things you do not know.  He stopped at Kate’s long arm quilter.  “My wife just died.  She was a quilter, left me with a lot of quilting things.”  Then, he buttoned up and left.

Still reading the competition.  Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

And, hey!  How about that Pope.  Argentina, eh?  But, from a good Italian family.  And a Jesuit?  Interesting though.  Look at a graphic  that shows Catholic strength by world region and you will see that it has bulged for some time in the Southern Hemisphere.  As the West has gotten more secular, Africa and Latin America have grown more Christian.  And more conservative.  It will be a while before we can see what this means.

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

On Translating Latin On This Particular Plateau

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Imbolc                                                  New (Bloodroot) Moon

Latin.  I’ve found a method that works for me right now and I want to write it down before I lose it.  First, translate one sentence a day.  Keep going until several verses have been finished, perhaps two or three days before a session with Greg.  Then, go back and review, one sentence at a time, the work that has been done.

In that review nail down the whys of the translation and identify specific questions, i.e. type of subjunctive clause, that extra word left over.

In general I’ve discovered that the faster I want the process to go, the more anxious I get and the less attention I pay to the details.  Yet, in Latin, the devil is truly in the details.  A great spiritual and intellectual exercise for me, the paying close attention demanded by my buddy Ovid.

 

Latin

So, I Wandered, Weak and Weary

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Imbolc                                                            Valentine Moon

Latin this morning.  Woke up refreshed, ready to hit the streets of Rome.  Which I did.  Still making progress.  Greg and I have a long standing relationship now and he grasps where I’ve headed off the rails.  This time it was figuring out subjects of verbs.  Have to pay more attention to the nominative case.  But you already knew that, didn’t you?

The morning left me weary though so I’m looking forward to the nap.

My left shoulder has been giving me fits for weeks now, so much so that I’ve stopped my upper body resistance workouts to give it a rest.  I can’t lift anything at all heavy with my left hand because of it.  I’ll rest it until after my DC trip, two weeks from now, and if its still a problem, I’m headed to the doc.

Art and Culture, Family, Latin

Tired Mind

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Imbolc                                                                Valentine Moon

Must of worn out this mind.  Talking to Mark early.  8 a.m.  Then some time on revision, how to do it with a book I’d forgotten, but has very wise advice.  Finding Your Writer’s Voice.  After that, a careful read through an essay on PRB technique and method, one that involved a lot of looking up terms, finding examples of certain techniques in paintings available on the internet.  (all of them, so far)  Then writing the post below.

After that I started to review my Latin for tomorrow.  Couldn’t make my mind go there.  Then I sent went over to Chess.com for some lessons.  I performed abysmally, lowering my rating on challenge after challenge.  I hate feeling stupid and those two did it for me.

Glad Kate and I have dinner out and a piece of performance art at the Walker, Cynthia Hopkin’s piece, This Clement World.  It’s time to unload the brain cells.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Family, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

And Jazz Saxophone after it all

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Imbolc                                                              Valentine Moon

Here we go.  A perfect day.  Revising Missing before 11:00 am.  A sentence from Ovid before lunch.  Nap.  Working with pre-Raphaelites until 4:00.  Some chess until 5.  Workout.  A movie with Kate.  As I said.

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Plateaus

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Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

After the Swede saw, lunch and a nap followed by another sentence, 6 verses long, in Ovid’s retelling of the Jason and Medea narrative.  When I have a week off from translating, or almost a week, like I had when I spent time rearranging and reorganizing, I wonder if I can still do it.  Sometimes I convince myself that what I’ve learned has dropped away and I’ve wasted all the time up to that point.  Silly, yes, but real nonetheless.

(Medea, Batumi, Georgia)

As a result, it is a relief when I return to the work and find myself able to translate.  This time in fact I managed a translation of a clause without looking up a word.  Something is seeping into the lower crevices of my brain.  Language work, at least for me, is slog, slog, slog, plateau.  Plateau, plateau, plateau.  Slog, slog, slog, slog.  Plateau.  So on.

Right now I’m gaining facility at recognizing words and verb forms and sussing out grammatical forms, though I’m wrong as often as I’m right.  That’s without Perseus (the online classics web engine), without Anderson (the scholarly commentator on Ovid) and without Wheelock (the grammar text).  There’s the plateau.

I can only advance part way into the text without the books.  With the books now I increase my facility by maybe another 25%.  So a lot of the time I can translate the literal sense of Latin correctly, but at least a quarter of the time, I’m lost.  That’s where my tutor comes into play.

(Ovid, Constanta, Romania, 2012)

He unsticks me from my stuck places and has been invaluable as a role model for tactics and strategy when approaching unfamiliar text.  He also guided me through the initial learning phase, about two years, when the grammar and vocabulary were still largely alien (foreign) to me.

My personal goal is to be 90 to 95% successful on my own by the end of this year.  Then, I imagine, I’ll use Greg (my tutor) less often and then as a backup.  That’s unless we decide together to get back on the commentary track.  That still sounds fun to me.