Category Archives: Latin

Latin, Third Phase, Translating De Bello Gallico

Plateaus

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Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

Struggling with Caesar. Two things keep me at it. This quote: confusion is the sweat of the intellect. And, struggle is the first and painful step toward flow. There is, too, that stubborn insistence that I can learn this.

I’ve not discussed learning plateaus in the Latin for some time, but I passed one last week, when I began to be able to read the Latin without referencing vocabulary or grammars. This lasted only for a couple of sentences, but I did it. This capacity has resurfaced since then, but the ease I experienced last week is gone. For now. What I mean here is that I’m struggling on a much different plateau than in the past.

This process has been excruciatingly slow. It’s very similar to working out though. You keep at it, do a certain amount regularly and the benefits slowly accumulate. Right now I’m doing an hour to an hour and a half of Latin a day. That’s about all my mind can tolerate without becoming resistant to further work.

I’m midway through today’s work in the Gallic War, book 4, section 26. Caesar’s troops have landed near the White Cliffs of Dover and are fighting their way ashore. It’s tough going for them right now.

Art and Culture, Bees, Colorado, Garden, Jefferson County, Latin, Writing

Up Early

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Imbolc                                                  Black Mountain Moon

One of those nights. In spite of the warmth of my electric blanket I was awake at 3 a.m. For good. So I got up, let the dogs out, fed them, but didn’t go get the paper. (too early) It’s now 5:45 and I’m planning on working on Latin as soon as I finish this. Why waste the time?

There was more snow on the deck this morning. Not so much, maybe an inch. I’d say we got 10 inches over the weekend. Snow here is both more present-it snows more often-and less. It melts soon after coming. This week the weather will be cool enough to retain the snow on the grounds, but it should be sunny enough to melt the driveway.

I’m trying to increase my work. The long preparation for, then the execution of the move, distracted me at points, especially over the last couple of months. We needed our focus on the move and that’s where it was. Now though I want to write a new book, continue the work in Ovid and Caesar, dig into art scholarship, especially in aesthetics and Song Dynasty China, and get more deeply into my Reimagining Faith project by focusing on the concept of emergence.

We have a plan for a modest garden using raised beds designed around horse watering troughs. They have a root-centric bottom up watering system and come ready to use. All we’ll have to do is site them and fill them with soil. I purchased material for a Flow Hive set-up like the one posted below, but it won’t come until November, so I’ll give the bees a pass this year. In April I take the first of several classes in a Native Plant Master program.

Exercise is two-thirds of the way back to pre-move intensity and I’ve added three days.

All this happens wrapped in regular visitation with grandchildren, Jon and Jen, going to movies, reconnoitering Denver and our immediate area around home: Jefferson County, Park County, Evergreen.

Settling in. Becoming native to this place. A process.

 

 

Colorado, Latin, Translating De Bello Gallico, World History, Writing

Emerging

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Imbolc                                                                        Settling Moon II

The loft is slowly coming together. One section, the workout space, is close to its eventual configuration. It still needs the pull-up bar. After that it will be as I envisioned it. Doesn’t mean it won’t change after I use it for a while.

The books, as I’ve said before, are clustered and now await built-in bookshelves. As the bookshelves go up Ruth and I will organize them. All my art is, for now, still in boxes or rolled up in tubes. Until the wallspace is more defined, I’ll not be hanging or placing anything.

The IKEA standing desk still needs it work surface brought up from the garage. The twopieces are very heavy. Jon is going to build a round wooden table as a project space. He recommends Paxton Lumber as a source for the table top. This is a national chain owned by Bill Paxton’s family. (actor)

Storage space for office supplies is non-existent right now, so that’s a future project. Filing, which I thought I’d get started over the weekend, I’ll get to this week.

Aside from tweaks though, I’m ready to get back to a regular workout and translation schedule since the remaining work here will be some time in the realization.

 

Family, Humanities, Latin, Memories, Third Phase

A 50 Year Old Habit

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Winter                                                                                                  Settling Moon II

Yesterday, after some bookcase assembling, I got an attack of the Sundays. This is a torpor that hits after noon on the seventh day of the week, perhaps only for those of us of a certain age. Our parents took us to church followed by a restaurant meal or a big home-cooked meal. The effect was like a weekly Thanksgiving dinner, a slowing as the body took in more calories than it usually had to absorb.

So I read Moon, the book I mentioned a couple of posts back, then watched some TV. Not vigorous, more calmed and quieted by a habit created well over 50 years ago.

Today has seen the book cases assembled as far as I can take them until I find more shelves. So I’ve started the really fun part, the organizing of my library. The bookshelf next to the computer will contain ancient history, Latin, mythology, material focused on the world of classical antiquity and its predecessors. Another large section I’m filling up now contains books related to art. These will stand next to a broad section on the United States with literature, history, religion, anything that helps fill out the current gestalt of our nation.

Right now that’s as far as I’ve gotten, but other sections will emerge as I move more books.

Colorado, Latin

Almost a Week

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Winter                                                    Settling Moon

Tom and I got here a week ago tonight; Kate followed the next day. A week, almost. The events of the unloading are already stories, no longer present, far overwhelmed by the settling tasks.

The pace is, both by altitude and attitude, deliberate rather than hurried. Much like, as friend Bill Schmidt said, the pace elderhood takes as its mantle.

Off now to Rome. Adrian Goldsworthy’s Augustus is scholarly rather than dramatic, but it puts Augustus in his time and place. Well worth reading. I look forward to getting back to the Latin not long after the first of the year.

Art and Culture, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating De Bello Gallico, Translating Metamorphoses

Classic

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Samain                                                                              Closing Moon

Back to the Latin over the last few days. It’s surprising how much like weight lifting and cardio-vascular work outs studying a language is. It needs constant effort. I let go of the discipline of daily translation for about a month and my ease of work with the language suffered considerably. I’m back to it now, but it’s a challenge, will take awhile to get the flow back.

(Philemon and Baucis)

Surprised myself on Friday by telling Greg that I’m hoping for a synthesis between my study of Latin and my study of art history. I thought I was doing this to implant the stories of the Metamorphoses in my head. Turns out I have an additional agenda.

What would the synthesis look like? Not sure right now, but one obvious route in is to look at all the art inspired by Ovid, then translate all the relevant stories (I did several for the Titian exhibition at the MIA) and learn the backstory about artists, paintings, the myths, and the Augustan context for Ovid’s work. Somewhere in there is probably something pretty interesting.

Latin, Memories, Myth and Story, Translating De Bello Gallico, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

Regret, like resistance to the Borg, is futile. In all ways but one.

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Fall                                                                                Falling Leaves Moon

Not sure why, but today I told Greg, my Latin tutor, why I was doing this. Or, maybe I’ve told him before and don’t remember, but I don’t think so. (Of course, by definition, how would I know?)

The story begins with my traipsing off to college, already doubting my Christian faith for a number of reasons, not the least of which was what I perceived as a holding back by my native Methodism of (to me at that point) elegant proofs for the existence of God. I got them from the local Catholic priest. I didn’t know that he re-iterating Aquinas.

It was not far into my first history of philosophy class that we dismantled each one, piece by piece. Oh. My.

Philosophy set my mind on fire week after week. I signed up for Logic in the second semester and the second history of philosophy segment. Even though I left Wabash I had already earned half a philosophy major’s worth of credits in my freshman year.

All this excitement led me quickly to the conclusion that I wanted to be able to read German, so I could pursue Kant, Hegel and Heidegger in their native language. So, I signed up for German, too. From my point of view it was a disaster. I struggled in every aspect of it and was faced with getting a D at the end of the second semester. That was not going to happen, so I dropped it.

A youthful decision, one I regret. It took me 45 years to get back to a language; but, I decided I wanted to challenge myself, see if my conclusion, defensively drawn in 1966, that I could not learn a language, was in fact true. It was not true.

Now I have a deeper regret, that I didn’t pursue German further and that I didn’t do Latin and Greek while in college, too. The classics and art history seem to be my natural intellectual terrain, but I never took a course in either one. Regrets are pointless, of course, the retrospective both wallowing in a past now gone and not retrievable, but I believe there is one good thing about them.

They can be a goad to action now, or future action. That is, we don’t have to repeat the actions we regret. We can change our life’s trajectory. So, I intend to spend the third phase of my life, as long as body and mind hold together, pursuing the classics and art history, doing as much writing about both as I can.

 

Great Work, Latin, The Move, Translating De Bello Gallico

Slowed

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Fall                                                                            Falling Leaves Moon

Been moving at a reduced pace the last four days. Latin each day, getting further into Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Today he set out on a characteristic fast march from Rome to protect “our province”, a part of which is now Provence, from marauding Helvetians. Whom he’d set up with a betrayal by a wealthy leader of their people, Orgetorix. This is the war when Caesar, in the ever expanding effort of Rome to secure its borders, bleeds himself into world history. He speaks of himself in the third person.

Beyond the Latin, not so much else. Picked a few raspberries. Electrified the visible fence. (Kate says I should call it the invisible fence, except I didn’t bury it, I strung it on an existing fence line.)

Finished up the Southern Reach trilogy. Not sure how I felt about it. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it might have been good. In essence it presents an alien invasion that is so alien we can’t even be sure we’ve been invaded. Its central idea, that an alien might come to earth in a way so outside our experience that we would have difficulty recognizing it, seems valid to me. Anyhow. Check it out or not.

Watching the news, picking up positive threads about the environment. Bill McKibben’s 350 organization’s 400,000 person march in NYC was good news. Increasing public disapproval of the Polymet mine project is another. Coal seems to have been knocked back on its heels, at least here in Minnesota and by Obama’s actions, in the rest of the country. Little El Hierro has gone 100% renewable as did the Danish island of Samsø. Even the President’s decision to reach out to a smaller club of wealthy countries for action on carbon emissions is a positive sign, maybe the most positive of all these.

Still, as a Sierra Club staffer said when I gave her the same list, “Yeah, but doesn’t it make you nervous?” She’s right. Gaining ground would be so unfamiliar to us that we might make mistakes. But we have to take the risk that our message might finally be gaining in both public and political circles.

Feeling like I might get back to the packing side tomorrow. Clean up some clutter left behind after the SortTossPack push. Vet yet more files. Pack photographs, office supplies. There’s still more to go.

 

Colorado, Latin, The Move, Translating De Bello Gallico, Translating Metamorphoses

Moving on

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Lughnasa                                                                           College Moon

It’s been another full tilt day. Business meeting in the morning, then shed cleaning. We worked, ate lunch, napped, and worked some more. Geez. I told Kate after this experience that I believe we should do the same in our new place. Every 20 years just like here.

We’re over half done with packing and decluttering, the momentum seems to be shifting now.  More like we’re moving toward Colorado than away from Minnesota.

In my Latin yesterday with Greg we decided I would keep on with every two week sessions, reading Caesar and Ovid and whoever else, I think Vergil’s Georgics, too. Apparently at my particular place in the learning curve reading and more reading, grappling with each nuance is the way forward. After the amount of time I’ve invested so far, I’ve decided to go all the way. I want to become a fluent reader of Latin. That’s a ways away, but no longer imaginary.

It’s odd, I realized, but every two weeks for one hour is 26 contact hours in a year. A language class for a 12 week quarter would meet at least 3 times, usually 5 with a lab, which is either 36 or 60 hours a quarter. We’re not even doing a full 26 because we have sessions that we miss or extend for three weeks. That means I’m advancing ok given the number of contact hours of teaching.

Plus, while it’s certainly luxurious to have a personal teacher, a tutor, there is additional learning from being with a group doing the same exercises-a class. All this is self-talk, really, about taking 4 years plus to get to this level. Seems like a long time to me. But maybe not.

 

 

 

Latin, Translating De Bello Gallico, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

De Bello Gallico

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Lughnasa                                                                           College Moon

I asked Greg (Latin tutor) for something new, a different arrangement. He wrote back and suggested I start reading Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. That’s not quite what I had in mind, but I decided I’d try it before our time together next Friday. I’ve already translated 20 lines. It goes quicker than Ovid, prose rather than poetry explaining part of that I imagine. Translating made me feel like I’d made real progress. Probably Greg’s point in recommending it.

The commentary I’m using for Caesar suggests reading in the Latin word order first. That’s very hard with poetry because Latin poets move words around based on rhyme scheme and meter, as well as for dramatic effect. With Caesar however it gave me, for the first time, a feel for Latin as a foreign language rather than a puzzle created by unfamiliar words. Reading in the Latin word order means thinking the way a Latin writer and reader would.

There is a subtle irony involved in reading Caesar for me, two in fact. The first is that Caesar was the first real Latin text I ever began to read, way back in Miss Mitchell’s class in high school. (Yes, speaking of ancient times, that was 1964 and 1965.) The second and more profound one for me is that it is through Caesar and through De Bello Gallico, Of the Gallic Wars, that we have a great deal of our knowledge of the ancient Celts. Gaul = Celt. And, it was Caesar who invaded Briton. Between Caesar and Tacitus, a Roman historian, we have the bulk of the written accounts about the Celts, how they lived, fought, worshiped.

I’m going to keep translating both Ovid and Caesar, though I’ll finish Caesar long before I finish the Metamorphoses.