Category Archives: Latin

Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, World History, Writing

Writing

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Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

Started reading Erich S. Gruen’s, “The Last Generation of the Roman Republic.” This 1974 work challenges preceding understandings of the fall of the Roman Republic.  Until Gruen, scholars focused on the conflicts, tensions and undercurrents in the period just before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Gruen chooses to look at those elements of the Roman Republic that remained intact even after the civil war.  It’s a big book, heavy. But readable.

Over the years I’ve focused on Mexica, Celtic and Northern European gods and culture in my novels. There was one side excursion into chaos magic and another into contemporary iron range, boundary waters culture, but I’m headed now towards Rome, especially Augustan Rome, the time of Publius Ovidius Naso. I’m not sure where this journey will take me, though the translation of the Metamorphoses will inform it, as will the trip to Romania and Constanta.

What will happen to the Tailte novels I can’t say right now. If I start getting nibbles or a bite on Missing, they remain available to me with about a third of the second novel already written. As I wrote a while back, I don’t want to invest the years it will take to finish the trilogy if there’s no interest in the first book. Perhaps I’ll feel differently at another point.

That means I have the book about our property here, the Roman work and a couple of other novels part way done. One, Superior Wolf, a werewolf story set in northern Minnesota, still draws me back from time to time as does a story about witchcraft.

In light of the process before productivity thinking I described a few posts ago, I realize the writing itself, the process of creation defines me. The products, finished novels and short stories, are in fact byproducts of a relentless curiosity. A further byproduct, publication, is pretty far removed from the journey. Journey before destination.

 

 

 

Art and Culture, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Phone Latin

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Beltane                                                                        Summer Moon

Greg and I have done phone Latin for over four years.  We just finished another go and he found the verses I found difficult challenging, too. That makes me feel ok. Like life, if I have a partner in my confusion, I’m fine. Then we can work on it together. And, if we don’t achieve clarity, we’re still together. Just confused together.

It is a weird thing to contemplate, this long term relationship, now in its fifth year during which Greg and I have seen each other twice, once when I met him at the UU church in Wayzata and a second time when he and Anna, his significant other, came to Kate’s retirement party at the MIA.

Conducting all these sessions over the phone has an anachronistic feel, yet for the study of a language, it has worked just fine. We have the internet in common, using Perseus as an interlocutor for definitions and usage. We met weekly for the first two and a half years, then we went to every two weeks, the schedule we follow now, though even that gets spread out some due to our mutual schedules.

This fall, the long term project can get underway at last.

Right now I’m working on the story of Apollo and Daphne, which Antonio del Pollaiolo has rendered here with Daphne beginning to sprout what will become the leaves of the laurel tree. Ironically, the laurel becomes the symbol of male athletic dominance.

 

 

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Wanting to do better

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Beltane                                                                    Summer Moon

The last time Greg (Latin tutor) and I had a session I fumbled around, missing this nuance and that one. Determined to do better I dug into each word over the last couple of weeks, getting its exact declension or conjugation and meaning, noting that before I went on. Then I hit those five verses I mentioned before and felt I’d stumbled into a dark Latin basement. Unable to see I flailed around but even the commentaries, which usually unstick me, didn’t help.

We’ll see how things go today. I’m still hopeful that by fall I’ll be translating on my own, but those verses challenged that timeline.

Kate’s off to a quilt show in St. Cloud, so I have the dog watch to myself.

Dogs, Family, Garden, Latin, The Move, Translating Metamorphoses

Spray, Translate, Box

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Beltane                                                          Summer Moon

Sprayed the orchard again. I’m going to have this down by the end of the season with two a weeks in the orchard and once a week in the veggie garden. The rain and the International Ag Labs program (+ plus Bill Schmidt’s super juice that I applied last fall) have combined to give much of our garden big boosts. The collard greens, egg plants, cucumbers, beans, sugar snap peas, chard, beets, garlic and carrots have all exceeded their usual growth by this time of year. The tomatoes and peppers have been slowed down by the cooler weather and we’ve lost one of each. The onions don’t look bad, but they don’t look great either.

Got back on that equus. The next few verses after those that threw me were also tricky, but with the commentary I got through them. That felt very good.

Kate came up with an excellent idea, pack two boxes a day. If we each do it, that’s 28 boxes a week. And, in just two decades at that rate we’ll be ready to go. No, much earlier than that. By next spring, lord willin and the creek don’t rise.

Today I boxed up DVDs and surprised myself by finding several that I want to take along. More, though, thank god, that I could let go.

Mission crew commander Buckman-Ellis tells me that it’s looking bad for Kep coming to join him in Korea. The housing situation there is dormitory style until the dorms fill up, then you can go off base and, presumably, have a dog. That is, however, if the dorms fill up.

Fine with us. Kep has fit in with the locals.

Garden, Latin, The Move

A Morning

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Beltane                                                                         Summer Moon

Mulching a hosta bed, a bed of grasses, some newly planted begonias and a few perennials. The cooler air, 63 degrees, made the task pleasurable.

When finished, to the Latin. Ay, carumba! Just as I patted myself on the back for having made strides almost long enough to work on my own, five verses came up that were almost as opaque as if they had been written on black paper. That was Friday. Today I hoped a layoff might have filtered them into easier chunks. It does sometimes happen that way for me. Nope.

At that point I found some empty boxes and began filling them with books. I got a good ways along, filling up three boxes, hard cover fiction, paperpback fiction and a box I’ve started for Margaret Levin. She likes fantasy and science fiction.

In both the Latin and the packing I did encounter an obstacle and it’s one I encounter when the dogs dig under fences and dig up garden beds. A sort of weariness comes over me, a sense that I’ve done this work before and now I have to do it again. And then again. And then again. This feeling saps me of resolve and short circuits decision making so that translation and choosing books to discard become seemingly impossible tasks. This is not, I imagine, peculiar to me, but when it hits, it slows whatever I’m doing down. A lot.

It will pass and the tasks will become easier and more tractable.

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Climbing the Cliff to the Final Plateau

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Beltane                                                           Summer Moon

On Friday I had a hard Latin session with my tutor Greg. And I’m glad. When we finished, he said, “You need to go back to basics, gender and number.” Oh, I thought. By god, he’s right. I’ve been pushing myself, trying to get faster so I can get this work started in earnest, thinking it’s maybe time, maybe past time for having gotten to this point. Doesn’t matter.

I am where I am. But. What I need to do to advance, to start climbing the cliff which leads, I’m pretty sure, to the last plateau, is slow down, pay exquisitely close attention to grammatical detail.  That means not entering my conclusion about a word’s grammatical identifiers until I’m sure. That often means holding all or most of the words in a sentence in my head while I try out different combinations.

Then, and I started doing this today, I translate the sentence. At that point I go to Anderson and Lee and Guanci (commentators) and Giles, a literal translation, to check my translation. After I take in that information, I go back over my translation, checking what each word means in the very best literal translation I can muster. Then, I enter the grammatical detail under the words.

Here’s what I mean. We’ll take Book I: v. 452 and v. 453 as a for instance.

Primus amor Phoebi Daphne Peneia, quem non
fors ignara dedit, sed saeva Cupidinis ira.

Under primus I wrote, adj. s. m. nom. (adjective, singular, masculine, nominative). Under fors I wrote s. f. nom. (female, singular, nominative).  Dedit got 3. perf. (perfect tense, 3rd person). And so on. When I wrote these descriptors under the word (I print out the Latin text using 5 spaces between lines and write the descriptors under the word and the translation over it.), I already had a translation done and knew that in it these words had to have these descriptors. Before this change in my process, I’d been trying to get pretty close, not worrying about being exact. Not good enough anymore.

When this comes naturally, I’ll be a Latinist on my own terms.  I can see this not very far ahead, just as, when I was deconstructing the dog crates, I knew I would get them done the next day though it didn’t look like I’d made much progress. I could see the whole and what to do next then to make it come apart. With the Latin it’s the reverse, now I’ll see the parts and make them whole.

Latin, Our Land and Home

Learning’s Limits

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Beltane                                                                    Emergence Moon

In the basement, next to the softwater tank, is a blue pressure cylinder that holds water from our well as it waits distribution to the rest of the house. Coming out of it is a copper pipe that goes straight up for about six feet, has an elbow, then penetrates the envelope of the house to connect our well to the irrigation system. This pipe has a small butterfly valve, often locked with a lead seal though not this year. After screwing in a bolt that prevents water from bypassing the irrigation system and landing in our orchard, used for fall blow out, I hopefully opened both blue butterfly valves.

Then I plugged in the irrigation clock and hit run on an overhead water zone for our one half of our vegetable garden, the north half where I’ve planted tomatoes, bush beans, egg plants, swiss chard, cucumbers, collard greens and peppers. Waiting expectantly, my contrarian thrill ready to exult, I. Waited. Nothing. Hmmm. Let’s see, water on. Yes. Clock running. Yes. What was I missing?

I went to the valve outside and turned one butterfly valve in the opposite direction, imagining I had turned them off instead of on. Water gushed out against the siding. So. The water has gotten from the well to the valve itself. I turned that off and noted that it meant I had in fact turned the water to the system off with the other valve that gates the water from the well to the system itself. This must be it. I turned that one to the open position and went back to the clock.

Punched manual start on zone 1 which is in the front. Waited for the spume of water to arc out. Nope. OK. RTFM. I got on the web and discovered I’d missed pressurizing the lines. Sigh. At that point I decided my self-education in all things sprinkler start-up had exceeded my willingness to learn.

sprinklerThat was when the hose came out, three hoses really, and, connected to a house spigot, the yellow, three-armed irrigation spinner began to twirl in the vegetable beds. I have no need to learn how to start up the irrigation system, I just wanted my plants to get water and I thought the startup would be simpler than it was. Something I could learn, no doubt, but with probably only one more spring to practice my knowledge, I’d rather spend the time on my Latin.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Taking the Past to Anchor the Present

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Beltane                                                                    Emergence Moon

Ah, an irony. Bringing myself into the now is as simple as clicking on Perseus, opening up Book I of the Metamorphoses and starting to translate. There is no room for the past or the future (except of course the reality of the past present in Ovid’s Latin, thus the irony) when I have to consider the muddy earth, heated by the sun in the high heavens, bringing forth countless forms, some from before the flood, but also some new monsters. This is ancient science which understand the moist earth as a creative force.

(Eugene Delacroix, Apollos slays the python, 1851, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France)

As long I stay with the act of translation, I’m in the moment. That tether, established by the hour or so spent with four verses, continues to anchor me even after I’m done.

Now, considering the move is not enough to draw me away from the present once my tether has been fixed. In the moment I can identify tasks related to the move that I can handle now. And do them with no propulsion into the future. Ah.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Inspiration

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Beltane                                                                 Emergence Moon

The Inferno Ballet and the courage it took to tackle the project has inspired me. I have an Ovid/Metamorphoses novel in me, one that excites me. I’m not ready to write it and won’t be soon, too much translating and reading yet to do, but I’ve decided that unless or until Missing gets representation and sells, I’m going to work on the Ovid novel.  Who knows how much time any of us has as we move toward what friend Tom Byfield calls the Great Perhaps.  Once the little Medicare card goes in the wallet you know the sand will run out. Not might. But will. So, I don’t want to die not having tried to tackle a big, the big, project I have in me. And that’s how Ovid feels.

(Turner, Ovid Banished From Rome)

I’m still going to work on the short stories, revising and submitting, and I’m still going to go back and revisit other novels, revising those that seem worth it and submitting them, too, but from now on my primary creative energy has a Roman stamp on it. This will create synergy between my Latin work and my writing, a synergy I wanted way back four years ago when I started learning Latin. Now I’m able to make it hum.

 

 

Humanities, Latin, Letters, Writing

Home

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Spring                                                                                New (Emergent) Moon

Since listening to the TED talk I posted below, I’ve been trying to decide what my home is. Certainly writing is a contender. Two or three times a day I sit down the computer and pound out a post for this website. I’ve written novels and short stories over the last twenty years plus all those sermons over the last forty. When I need to clarify fuzzy thinking, I head to the keyboard, trusting the One Who Types as less addled than the One Who Only Thinks.

The other contender is scholarship. I’m hesitant about this one, since it seems the realm of the academic and I left the academy long ago. Still, I translate Latin, take the MOOC courses and follow up, stay in touch with the literature in several fields: hermeneutics, biblical scholarship, ecologial thought, climate change, certain sub-disciplines of philosophy like aesthetics, pragmatism and metaphysics, neuro-science and classical literature. And, perhaps more telling, I approach life with the mind of a scholar, critical and analytic, wanting to be confident of my data, my sources, always pushing toward synergy, toward new ways of thinking.

These are not, of course, exclusive.  The writing requires research and research requires writing. Perhaps my home is the liminal zone between writing and scholarship.