Category Archives: Latin

Garden, Great Work, Health, Latin, Politics, Sierra Club, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate, Writing

The Week Ahead

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Imbolc                                                              Valentine Moon

Weather has warmed up over 40 degrees from the last few weeks and it’s still cold. That’s about where we live.  No volcanoes erupting to interfere with our lives though.

Today or tomorrow I’ll finish reviewing the edits made by Bob Klein to Missing.  Then it’s off to the agents.  I’ve probably taken more time getting to this point than a novel of this type warrants, but I’ve wanted to produce as good a book as I can.  The first two or three books sold can determine success over all (that is, being allowed to continue publishing) and I want to present clean, focused stories.

 

Also tomorrow I’m going to resume my P90X workouts.  I’ve taken a week + off to allow my chest to heal and it seems mostly calmed down now.  Dave Scott, the handy-man I mentioned a bit ago, has installed the new pull-up bar, the Stud Bar (Tm).  It will not pull out of the ceiling studs (aka Stud Bar) and I will not drop unceremoniously onto the concrete anymore.  This last makes me happy.

When Kate and I discussed my attendance at an Ira Progoff workshop, I initially wanted to go to an event in early May.  It was in Asheville, N.C. and the thought of contemplative work in the Blue Ridge mountains appealed to me.  But, she rightly observed, this was soon after our Colorado trip for Gabe’s birthday and at the beginning of the growing season.  Other dates and places I liked were either in the middle of the growing season or at the time of the honey harvest.  That’s how we chose the end of March.  No planting, no bees.  And I can make Denver on the way home, wishing an early birthday to granddaughter Ruth.

Another way of saying Tucson was not on the top of my list for places to go.

The polishing begins on the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha this week. Back to the beginning with careful attention to commentaries, dictionaries and other English translations.  The goal:  as well spoken a translation as I can muster plus commentary notes.

(st. jerome, patron saint of translators. and yet another great beard model)

It’s also week 7 of the Climate Change course.  This course has proved as influential for me as a weekend Kate and I spent in Iowa City with PSR, Physicians for Social Responsibility, a conference on climate change. That one propelled me into my work with the Sierra Club. Just where I’m headed now is not yet clear to me, but I’m for sure going to increase my activity level on adaptation.

Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate, World History

Flood Narratives

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Winter                                                          Seed Catalog Moon

Hmmm.  I do like it when I’m scratching my head and I turn to the commentary to find, “Medieval and modern Latinists could make nothing of this.”  Ah. At least I’m not alone.

Today I’ve started in the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha.  This is an ancient flood narrative with parallels in Greek authors.  In Ovid Deucalion and Pyrrha end up on the top of Mt. Parnassus and have to rebuild the human race after the flood.  Right now Ovid is still describing the earth as the sea and extensive plains suddenly become water.

I don’t remember if I mentioned yesterday the image of dolphins swimming among the trees.  Nice.  Ships scrape their keels along the tops of hardy oak and mountain peaks.

There is controversial, but not crazy geological evidence for a flood in ancient, ancient times involving the Black Sea, sometime around 5,600 b.c.e.  That’s this corner of the world and, of course, the Middle East is nearby, too.

Interestingly, in earlier translation work I ran across the Latin word, ararat.  This is the pluperfect singular of a verb which means to plough or to till.  It can also mean to cultivate land.  Could the “flood” have been a period of wandering due to some natural disaster, maybe a flood, that resulted in Jews ending up on new land to farm?  Don’t recall enough of my studies in Genesis to know if this is probable or not, but the Latin is suggestive.

I don’t know enough about the hebrew word or the Latin translation of it either.  This is probably a coincidence, but it’s a weird one if it is.

Health, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Doing Stuff

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Winter                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

I have a ways to go before I get up to 7 or 8 verses in an hour.  There’s still too much to learn, too often.  This is not a bad thing, just the way it is.  But I’m pushing myself, trying to get faster and more accurate at the same time.

P90X will be the same.  Right now I’m having to hit the pause button a lot.  The various exercise require precise movements and I’m not exactly quick at picking them up.  Even when I get the form right, I have to monitor myself.  Today, in the shoulder and back workout, there were a lot of moves I had never seen:  Congdon curls, for example.  Still, as with the first resistance day, I found this much easier than the plyometrics.  Much.

Tomorrow is yoga.  Right now all these exercises are new and that makes the sessions take longer.  That will pass; the sequence uses twelve different workouts so the repetition’s a bit slower than I would like.  Still, I’ll get there.

Tomorrow Missing shows up on the computer screen.  Looking at Bob’s work, making decisions.  Just as soon as I get it finished, it starts going out.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Sprinting

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Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

Huh.  “90, no more like 95%, right.”  Greg said this during my sight reading this morning.  “You’ve jumped several levels since our last session.” I’d felt it over the last few weeks of translating, a more than gradual emergence of learning, not like moving up a plateau, more like sprinting past a plateau or two.  This is an overnight sensation it’s taken me four years to reach.  I’m grateful for it.

(ok.  I don’t actually know what this guy’s saying.  Anybody else?  Probably something scatological but it’s a cool graphic.  It could be, note the necking.)

I feel accomplished.  I can actually see a Charles Ellis translation of Ovid’s masterwork, the Metamorphoses, coming into existence. Wow. Give me the geezer high five folks.  It’s happenin’.

My next goal is to increase my speed.  I’d like to get to 12-15 verses an hour with the goal of doing around a 100 verses a week.  At that rate I could translate the typical Book, there are 15, in around two months to two and a half months.  The translation would not be polished, of course, but I’d be laying pipe at a credible rate.  Add in polishing and I could maybe finish in four years, perhaps a little more or a little less.  Probably less since presumably my facility would grow as I worked.

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

4 Years In

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Winter                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

The Latin this morning.  Going over my translations, preparing for sight reading with Greg.  This means reading the Latin aloud, in the order in which I translate it, then translating.  Even with a word’s meaning written over it and the declensions and conjugations indicated below them (annotated by me), this is still a challenge, even after preparation.

(This is a fresco inspired by the passages I translated today.  Lycaon’s servant brings a platter of human meat to Jupiter.  This is the affront for which Jupiter will transform Lycaon into a wolf.)

Preparation essentially means going over the passages I’ll translate with Greg and translating them in my head, checking the translation I get with the translation I’ve written down earlier.  Because I’m translating faster now, we get through much less in a session than I translate, so I’m on verse 300 of Book I, but Greg and I are at verse 216.  This means I’m working with him on material I’ve translated often several weeks ago.  Verse 216, for example, is post-Thanksgiving work.  As a result, reconstructing my thinking then is sometimes difficult.

Today, though, for the first time, I found stuff I struggled with in that post-Thanksgiving translating coming more easily as I went back through it for review.  More easily is not the same as easily, but I’m getting better faster now.

Latin, Memories, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Focused

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Winter                                                           Seed Catalog Moon

Made a concerted push and finished Climate Change, Week 2, today.   Always surprised at how concentrated mental effort exhausts me.

A bit of Latin today.  It was interesting, so I’ll post it here. Ovid describes the state of the countryside in Lycaon’s kingdom after the flood:

This occupies the high ground, a hooked ship sits

294  And draws its oars here, where not long ago a farmer plowed,

295  Above the fields or sails over the top of buried villas,

296  This ship on the surface catches fish in elm-trees.

 

This apres deluge piece from the Metamorphoses reminded me of a story I followed with fascination as a high school student.  The Army Corps of Engineers put a dam on the Salamonie River and submerged Monument City (pic) and two other towns.  The Corps bought the towns in 1965 and moved everyone out, including, which intrigued me at the time, all the cemeteries.

In this case you can literally catch fish in the elm-trees.  There was a dark glamour to the whole project. These towns flooded regularly and the dam sought to end the problem of rising waters in the area by covering them with water so that hooked ships might draw their oars there.

Kate’s sister Anne has been here the last couple of days sewing.  She’s got a couple of days off from the jail in Shakopee.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Grrr

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Winter                                                                      Seed Catalog Moon

My Latin skills have begun to increase.  I can almost see myself learning.  Most of the time for the last four years it’s been slog, slog, slog, slog, insight.  Repeat.  Now something has begun to happen, like that learning has begun to snowball, building on itself.  Which, I guess, is what’s happening.  It’s weird, but fun.

(pic:  Ta Dah)

Microsoft, I’d forgotten how much you used to frustrate me.  Now that I no longer work as much in Word my animus toward Microsoft had softened, but getting Missing back from Robert Klein reminded me.  I can’t open the damned file.  I’ve had this problem ever since I “upgraded” to Word 2013.  It has some protective mechanism that is very suspicious of outside documents.  I’ve unlocked most of them, but so far this one, one I really care about, won’t open.  Grrrr.

Still, I’ve looked at some of Robert’s work and he’s very thorough and helpful.  I can’t utilize his work to its full capacity until I can get the document into Word however.  That’s where I can manipulate the editing and see exactly what he meant.  Grrrr.  Again.

One step closer to finishing up the final draft.  Might get it done before Denver.  If I can open it in the first place.

Great Wheel, Great Work, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

The Weekend

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Winter                                                           Seed Catalog Moon

Got caught up with the Climate Change MOOC, part of the process involved getting my head turned toward scientific reading, following graphs and numbers and equations. I’m past the first really brain busting part and the flow of the reading went much better this morning.  Another challenge to, as Hercule Poirot would say, “the leetle gray cells.”

Spent some time with an easier task, translating more of the Metamorphoses.  In these verses Neptune rides the waters, urging them on as they flood the earth, then strikes the ground with his trident and creates earthquakes.  Poseidon, earth-shaker, as Homer knew him.  This was an earlier human generated, outsider mediated, apocalypse.  Climate change is our very own.

The Great Wheel blog continues to take shape, a bit here, a bit there.  Changes, tweaks, but growing.

 

Family, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Log Entry

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Winter                                                                       Seed Catalog Moon

Warmer today.  We reached 2.  Not so cold tonight, only -5 right now.

More Latin.  Jupiter is drowning the world.

More Loki’s Children.  I’ve finished the first scene.  A big revelation is set up.

A solid workout.  Time with Kate.  Another good day.

Latin

Advanced Problems

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Winter                                                   Seed Catalog Moon

Wow.  19.  Hard to imagine Monday’s high will be 33 degrees lower.

Today’s focus was Latin.  The sight reading has gotten easier though there are still instances like verse 215.  After struggling with it, I looked over to see what I’d gotten in the slower pace of translating with helps.  Brackets.  215 looked like this  {                               }.

As the Latin begins to loosen its occult barriers, the little things, as I said a couple of weeks ago, loom larger.  Is that a neuter plural?  Yes.  Well, it can’t modify that masculine singular.  Oh.  Yeah.  Sounds obvious and it is, unless it isn’t.  Choosing the right English word to translate a particular Latin word is harder for me.   I still haven’t read enough Latin to know what Latin authors usually mean by a particular word.  All the meanings seem possible.

But these are advanced problems and I’m happy to have them.