Category Archives: Latin

Health, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate

Jason and the Argonauts

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Fall                                                                                   Harvest Moon

The Harvest Moon has waned almost to New.  Leaves have begun to disappear, going from haute couture to essentials during the Harvest Moon’s month.  The temperature has taken a turn toward the cool, too, welcome in this household though not necessarily in others.

Working out stalled for me when I felt an ouch beyond what I felt made good sense.  On Monday I have my post-op visit and should have better information then.  I walk and lift modest weight with no twinge now, so I imagine I’ll be back to working out as soon as next week.  My capacity to recover quickly from this operation reinforces the resistance work I’ve done over the years.

Spent this morning dipping myself in the waters of the Jason and Medea story, Book VII of the Metamorphoses.   It was hard.  Not sure what happens, but some days the translating flows, other times it comes as if clotted and running through a pipe with bends and twists.  Today was a clotted and twisted day.  This is where we get the story of the golden fleece among other narratives.

A bit more now in the afternoon, just to see if I can bounce past the morning’s grind.

I also have the week 3 quiz to do in the Greek and Roman Mythology class.  Probably tomorrow.  Without much effort beyond review of my notes I’m hitting about 92% and that’s fine.  I could pump it up, but I have no need.  Look for a post in the next few days about some interesting things I’ve learned about the Odyssey and about myth.  Interesting to me, anyhow.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Back

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Fall                                                               Harvest Moon

A morning with Ovid.  Back at it, even though this was a revision of a long sentence I translated a couple of weeks ago.  Greg suggested I redo it with attention to the way the main verb controls the tenses of the subordinate verbs.   This turns out to be trickier and easier than I thought, but it took the morning.

Feels good to have that done.  That means I can move on in Ovid to my next narrative, Jason and Medea.  I also have to translate some more of the Aeneid, too.

Then, back to Missing and the revision, a process that goes well.  At least so I think.

The Vikings have enough going for them for me, the typical fair weather fan, to watch them again, so I’ll take up the remote and assume the position later on today.  Maybe get some bulbs and hosta planted too, though tomorrow looks good as well.

Cooking, Garden, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Head and Hands

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Lugnasa                                                                      Autumn Moon

Worked my head into a fuzzy place today.  Just couldn’t go further, so I worked out.  That always helps.

Tomorrow is a Latin morning with my tutor at 11:00 AM.  Before I meet with him, I have to review my Ovid, the last of the Philemon and Baucis, 14 verses.  I reviewed the Aeneid this afternoon, 9 verses there.  This crop, in both authors, was difficult.

This weekend is a garden weekend.  The orchard, shoring up a leaning apple tree.  It’s a Zestar and we had two apples from it today.  Boy, are they good.  I plan to harvest the tree before we begin the shoring up.  These are mostly bagged and, for some reason, the squirrels have left them alone.  Maybe they’re honeycrisp connoiseurs?

We’re going to prepare for winter pruning, decide the remaining tasks before the cold and get on the priority ones.

There’s one more soup to make, a winter vegetable that will use our onions, leeks, carrots and tomatoes at least.  Our frozen soups. pot pies and vegetables have begun to use up the available space in our freezer so one task is to clean out the old and the no longer desirable to make room.  That will happen over the weekend, too.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Finishing.

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Lugnasa                                                                     New (Autumn) Moon

Finished Philemon and Baucis this morning.  Now I have to decide where I want to go in the Metamorphoses next.  Not sure I want to start at the beginning just yet. When I do, I want to produce idiomatic English and English as beautiful as I can render it.  I’m not there yet.  Maybe I’ll do the Medea cycle, she’s pretty interesting.  I plan over this next week or two to start some Tacitus, too.  Just to keep myself guessing.

(Medea.  Sandys.)

It feels good to have gotten this far, but there is plenty more of the trail yet ahead.

 

Garden, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

TGIF

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Lugnasa                                                           Garlic Planting Moon

A Latin day, this time with work on both Ovid and Virgil.  Aeneid’s first 7 verses, its first sentence with the famous opening phrase, I sing of arms and the man.   Greg sees a lot of progress in my work.  It’s as if some dam broke a couple of months ago when I began using phrases to translate rather than whole sentences.  The benefit of hanging in there.   (philemon_baucis_bramantino)

The most important thing I can do is to read more and more.  That ups my vocabulary, increases my facility with grammar and adds to my foundation in written Latin literature.

When I hit Friday afternoon on a week, I feel like the work week is over.  Tours on Thursday and Latin all Friday morning, then a quiet time.

Tomorrow the garlic goes in the ground, the potatoes come out and I check the bees to see how the feeding is going.  It will be a pleasure to work outside, as a change from all this head work, and in weather beginning to cool.  The nights are better now, much better.

I’m also looking forward to getting back to Missing and the revision.  This last three days: pre-op physical on Wednesday, tours on Thursday and Latin today has not left me with time for it.

Art and Culture, Cooking, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Latin Fridays. (Maybe I Should Eat Fish, Too?)

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Lugnasa                                                       New (Garlic Planting) Moon

Down in the pits with Ovid this morning, rasslin’.  I’m not moving as fast as I did a month ago, but I believe that this stretch is more difficult, not that I’m slower.  There are many small satisfactions in translation:  learning new words, puzzling out word order, identifying conjugations, putting phrases together to form a sentence and sentences together to form a narrative.  I enjoy it.

Today is a Latin day, so I’ll whack away at Ovid in the afternoon, too, before I work out.  Tomorrow it’s back to Missing though I hope I can work some short Ovid sessions along the way, too.

I had two different couples stop me after the Rembrandt tour yesterday, none of them part of the home school group who were my primary tour.  They both said I was an excellent docent.  Used those words.  That felt good.  I thanked them and said it was good to hear.

Kate’s roasting peppers this morning.  That set off the smoke alarm and the co2 detector.

Family, Garden, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Intiba, Radix, Lactis Coacti, Ova

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Lugnasa                                                               Hiroshima Moon

Spent yesterday with my nose in the Metamorphoses.  I’ve not been doing Latin every day, rather only when I can devote sufficient time to it, like 3-4 hours.  Yesterday I put in 6.  It’s not the best way.  Each time I have to crank up my Latin engine, which often acts like one of those old cars with the hand starter.  Better to keep the engine  running by daily exercise.

Still, I made progress.  Even had Latin nouns circling in my mind before I went to sleep:  intiba, radix, lactis coacti, ova.  That’s endive, radish, cheese (coagulated milk) and eggs.

Today Mark and I will make one attempt for his driver’s license.  By we I mean I’ll drive him over there and then sit as he waits in line.  For hours.  I hope he gets it though since it would allow him to rent cars in Saudi Arabia, be generally more free.

I sliced garlic and gathered rosemary last night, both for drying.  We bought a dryer several years back and each fall we process things.  First time for garlic, though Kate has done a number of herbs in the past.  I hope to dry apple this year.

Mark has a bank account, new passport and the material he needs for his visa.  The driver’s license is the main thing he wants now.  He leaves Friday for Lansing, Michigan to visit our cousin Kristen, then on to Detroit to visit Leisa and her husband, Bob.  She’s in a nursing home recovering from a devastating stroke.

 

Family, Latin, Weather +Climate

High Cotton

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Summer                                                    Hiroshima Moon

We’re back in high cotton here in Andover.  The chiller’s putting out cool air and the outside temps have veered back into roughly normal.  Makes working inside and out better.

Brother Mark comes to town next week for a week or so.  He has a new job in Riyadh, but he gets a return home visit and flight back as part of his package.  He’ll be with us, then move on to see a friend in Boston.

Tomorrow will be a Latin day since I have a session with Greg on Friday.  We move through the verses faster now, not as colleagues for the most part, though that happens from time to time, but definitely as more than student and teacher.  It’s been an interesting transition.

AMANDA HOUSE PHOTOGRAPHY!

We were walkin’ in high cotton

Old times there are not forgotten

Those fertile fields are never far away

We were walkin’ in high cotton

Old times there are not forgotten

Leavin’ home was the hardest thing we ever faced

-Alabama

 

Humanities, Latin, Literature, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Travel

Searching for Ovid

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Beltane                                    Garlic Moon

Ovid on the third phase:  At times it is folly to hasten at other times, to delay. The wise do everything in its proper time.

Searching for Ovid.  Gone now.  2000 years ago.  An unhappy man, yet he went on, did not stop, wrote, lived.

Of course, his statue is here.  He looks suitably serious, dignified, the man some Romanians take as their first national poet.  But what of the man, not bronze?

If I limit myself to the Roman mosaic, the material objects in the museum, the remains of the wall across from Hotel Class, the ruins of the homes and the butcher shop, the promontory views from the high coastline overlooking the Pontus Euxinus, the Marea Negra; if I image Ovid carrying a small oil lamp to light his way and his night, drinking from the glass vessels in the museum, turning a cynical educated Roman eye towards depictions of gods and goddesses; getting water from the clay and lead pipes also on display, walking over those intricate mosaics while looking out at the sea, a slave stigiling off his sweat and dirt with the small curved tool I saw here, then I have begun to see him.

To populate this place in the very early 1st century a.c.e., to get the small things right and the people and the matters under consideration, I wonder how much that would take, how much research?  A lot, I imagine.  Still, it would be worth it, if the time was available.  Why?  Oh, for the same reason, evoking 2012 Bucresti is worth it.  Because we’re strange creatures, but often the same and we can reach across time and space to be with each other.  That’s a gift and it makes us more.

Garden, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

A Solid Day

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Beltane                                                   New Garlic Moon

Got outside a bit.  Ate lunch with Kate at that hotspot of haute cuisine, Applebys.  We got there just before the after church crowd.  Later on I transplanted a clump of hosta from its exposed location under the cedar I had to cut down (it split in a storm.) to a new location under our still  young bur oak out front.  Took me a bit longer than I planned because I forgot the correct placement of the spading forks to break up the heavily rooted clump.  Had to figure it out all over again.

(a Roman mosaic, ruins of Tomi in Constanta, Romania)

Rest of the day, Latin.  I made progress.  Am very close to the end of Pentheus and my goal is to finish it before I leave for Romania.  I think I’ll make it.  The translation comes much more easily now, a couple of years of hard work to get here though.  Still not facile, but much more so.

It does look like the Latin will help me in Romania with pronouncing Romanian.  There’s the oddities each language has, but the phonetics are very similar.