Category Archives: Translating Metamorphoses

Art and Culture, Latin, MOOCS, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Just Glad For Them To Be Over

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Samhain                                                            Thanksgiving Moon

Finished the quick page through of Missing and have decided on key steps to take next. There will be some formatting, substantial rewriting at the end, amplification of descriptions in certain parts and a bit of rearranging.  My goal is to finish before we leave for Denver.

My capacity to translate while “in” the Latin seems to be growing.  In the passage from today Jupiter is very mad and has decided to destroy the mortal race.  Which he will do, later on in the book.  How?  By means of a flood.

I’m down to the last two poets in ModPo, plus the four assessments of other’s writing assignments.  After two and a half months of considerable work in ModPo and Modern/Post Modern, I’m experiencing that end of the quarter blah.  I don’t really want to finish the work, but I’m going to because I’ve invested so much now.  I get this filled up feeling, brought on by choices I’ve made, yes, but it’s still there.

These were two really good courses and worth the time and effort, more than repaying the work.  Just glad for them to be over.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Humanities, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Photography, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Missing, In the Dark Wood, Lycaon

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Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Involved with what is, I believe, technically the fifth revision of Missing.  20,000 words went out today, a whole story line about a goddess and her giantess assistance.  It included, too, a favorite part of the book for me, the Wyrm and the Weregild, a group of expert giant dragon hunters.  But this storyline does not intersect directly with the primary story in Missing and it’s now in the pile for Loki’s Children, which now has over 50,000 plus words available from the drafts and revisions up to now of Missing.

Some key names got changed, transitions made more clear.  I got about half way through a quick review.  Probably will finish with that tomorrow.  Then I’ll go back in and start adding some more description, some character development and I may, probably will, change the ending to give it more punch.  Thanks to Stefan for the idea.

Translated another four verses in the story of Lycaon today, too.  These were hard, either the Latin was thick or I was.  Maybe both.  Still.  Done.  That’s my goal per day.

Also worked on ModPo’s final week.  Two very interesting poets today.  Erica Baum is a conceptual poet who combines photography and found language to create intriguing works.  Here are two images we reviewed in class:

 

The first is from a work called Card Catalogues where Baum photographed certain portions of the New York University Library’s old card catalog.  Each photograph is a poem of juxtaposition created by the strange constraint of alphabetically organizing knowledge.  The second is one of several pieces from a work, Dog Ear.  These are all large photographs, Card Catalog is too, and she hangs them in galleries together, though each photograph stands alone.  This is part of the conceptualist idea that ambient language contains all we need as far as poetry.  We only have to work to find it.  But that work can be difficult.

The next poet is Caroline Bergvall, a French-Norwegian who works in English.  Her work is a ten-minute recitation of 47 different translations of the famous opening lines of Dante’s Inferno:

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.  from the Mandelbaum translation

This is a strangely evocative, haunting experience.  You can hear her read it here.

(Frame from a 1911 Italian film version of the Divine Comedy. The director’s name was Giuseppe De Liguoro. from this website.)

Latin, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses

Off the Plateau

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Samhain                                                         Thanksgiving Moon

It’s been a week since Greg recommended I get to the place where I can read the Latin and translate as I read.  This means doing what I’ve already done, looking up words, writing out a translation, but there is now another step.  I look only at the Latin and translate it without reference to Perseus (on the web) or even to my notes.  If I stumble, I go back to Perseus and the notes.  Then back to the Latin alone.  Only when I can look at the bare Latin and translate the sentence with no outside aides, can I feel finished.

I thought this would slow me down and at first it did.  As I grew used to doing it though, staying “in” the Latin, as Greg called this method, began to make things easier.  I began to to see the shape of sentences quicker, the subjects and objects popped out faster.  Verb tenses and noun/adjective/pronoun declensions are becoming more automatic.

Staying “in” the Latin is winching me up, slowly, from the long plateau I’ve inhabited.

Here’s an example: “Hac iter est superis ad magni tecta Tonantis
regalemque domum.”  This is a line from the story of Lycaon in the second large section of Metamorphoses, Book I.  Just looking at this line, with no aids, I will read it to Greg this way:  Hac, on this, est, is, superis iter, the exalted way, ad magni tecta, to the great temple, Tonantis, of Thundering Jupiter, regalemque domum, and his royal home.  So the translation reads:  On this is the exalted way to the great temple of Thundering Jupiter and his royal home.

(Lycaon wants to test the omniscience of Iupiter and serves him human meat.  Hermann Postumus, 1542)

It has taken literally years to get to this place and I’m not all the way there yet.  But I’m moving faster and better now.

 

Latin, MOOCS, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses

The Weight of the Inert

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Samhain                                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

I finished the fourth and last writing assignment for ModPo.  I’m attaching it because it was fun, a riff on the Chance poetics of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Bernadette Mayer (pic).

Next week we finish up and my 3 months excursion into the modern and the post modern through Coursera will be at an end.  The gardening season has come to an end.  And Holiseason is just beginning.

Over the next weeks and months I plan to consolidate my learning both in poetry and the post modern.  As I’ve said before, I want to include these concepts in reimagining my faith.

BTW:  Some of you have expressed interest in the MOOCs.  Here are the two I’ve worked with and can recommend:  Coursera and EdX.

 

The Weight of the Inert

Version I

“5 Before the sea and the sky that hangs over all the lands and

was one of the faces of the whole of nature in the world,

I have spoken of the chaos, the amount of raw indigestaque

and nothing but an inert and heaped up in the weight of the same

not well joined the seeds of discord of things.

10, supplying light to the world, no one has as yet the Titan,

not renew the waxing moon horns,

or hanging in surrounding air

balanced by its own weight, or long arms

edge of the lands stretching out her arms;

15 and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”

 

Version 2

5 and and which covers

One look in the whole world,

the said, the amount of raw

and only if the weight of the inert

things do not go well.

10 Nothing in the world,

neither growing Phoebe

or in the surrounding region

their own weights, and not long

15 and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.

 

Since I’m currently engaged in translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I performed the following operation. First, I copied a Latin section of Book I: 5-15 from Perseus, a classics aides website. I took that section and put it into google translate. I then went through the Latin and eliminated all words with the letter a and ran it again through google translator. The result is version 2.

I retained the first version here so you could see that the translation was far from smooth and contained some chance operations on its own. In that sense version 2 is more than 1 step away from the Latin version of number 1 since it introduces the still clunky results of the google translation algorithm into the altered text.

Version 2 surprised me. It makes almost as much sense, if not a bit more, than Version 1, not in the Latin, of course, but in the English machine translation.

I hear a surprised boy saying, “And, and which covers one look in the whole world.” Another voice, perhaps a chorus replies, “The said, the amount of raw and only if the weight of the inert.” Another, deeper voice, an adult male weary with experience says, “Things do not go well.”

The boy again, chastened now, “Nothing in the world, neither growing Phoebe or in the surrounding region…”

And finally a resonant female voice, mature and wise, “Their own weights, and not long and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”

All this on a stage bare except for the actors, a broken Greek column and a small tripod holding a basin in which a bright fire burns.

A fluxus moment, perhaps performed on an off-Broadway sidewalk, the stage improvised with concrete blocks and plywood.   The air is cold, midnight of the Winter Solstice, and a flier announcing the performance reads, “Saturnalian Words. The voice of Sol Invictus.”

This has a Harry Haller, magic theater resonance for me. The whole thing could be a performance in one of the side stages, feeding the Steppenwolf in all of us.

OK, I know I’ve gone pretty far afield with this, taking it from chance to dialogue and from dialogue to theater and then positioning the theater in Hesse’s imagined dramatic space. But that very journey speaks of seed text and deterministic method, that somehow flensing an ancient text, then using a very contemporary technology to alter it, can create haunting, yes, I’ll say it, meaning. Meaning created in that most artistic of ways, with the caesura as important as the content.

What did that one look over the whole world see? And why does a rejoinder to it reference the raw and the inert? The next line seems very apt in a Kafkaesque, Hesseian way: “Things do not go well.” How could they?

Finally the last two spoken lines speak of loss and seem to refer back to that one look over the whole world which saw what? “The air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”

Latin, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses

Keeping On

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Fall                                                                       Samhain Moon

After a lackluster come back to Latin on the 17th of October, my confidence wavered. Kept at it though and today I finished my 60th verse since then.  That was my goal for the two week period.  Unless I’m way off, I’ve found my trireme legs again.  Far from easy, but very far, too, from being opaque, as Latin was to me for the first 63 years of my life.

In fact, with the time I’ve got left over this next three days I’m going to start on Lucrectius’ De Rerum Natura.  Some variety is helpful Greg says but Vergil and Caesar didn’t work for me.  Couldn’t hold my interest.  Lucretius will.

Started the last third of ModPo today with the Language poets.  I’ve only read one piece so far, Albany, by Ron Perleman.  It’s a 100 line autobiography in what he calls new sentences, each sentence personal and political.  And, not in sequence.

It sounds strange but I found reading it a pleasure.  A gestalt forms from the scraps of

More later on these contemporary poets working in an unusual way with poetry, memory, and story-telling.

Garden, Latin, MOOCS, Our Land and Home, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Changes Are Coming

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Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

With Modern/Post Modern in its last week and Modpo with only three weeks to go, I feel like the end of the quarter or semester is in sight.  Since it will roughly co-ordinate with Samhain, this means a distinct change in my daily life.  The garden is almost put to bed and will be by the end of this week as well.  The bees, too, will get their cardboard outer sleeve, the moisture absorbing top board and corks in the lower two entrances, plus the entrance reducer.

This year part of that outdoor energy will get focused in the garage which can use a major cleaning, rearranging.  It’s gotten cluttered and we could use it for more if we eliminate a few things like the five stall dog crate and feeding platform.

Writing Loki’s Children and keeping up with the Latin will occupy the bulk of the time.  I’ll huddle downstairs with the green gas stove burning, my Zojirushi kicking out tea temperature water and visions of old Rome and Ragnarok.

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

Still At It

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Fall                                                                         Samhain Moon

I’ve picked up the pace in translating.  Not a lot.   But I have.  My intention is to time myself from now on, figure out how I can increase my speed.  That will be important, as I said before, if I’m to translate the whole Metamorphoses.  (Ovid)

You might ask, why?  A few years ago I decided to read classics for a whole year.  I read the Koran, Faust, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the Metamorphoses among others.  As I did this, I also read commentaries and essays on these works to give myself a broader and deeper perspective.  When I got to the material on the Metamorphoses, I realized it stood at a critical juncture between ancient Greek religion (and, I imagine now, the Egyptian influence on the Greek) and Western civilization in the common era.

During the Renaissance it was Ovid’s work that moved Greek mythology into the mainstream of Western intellectual life.  The older sources were either unavailable at the time, as yet undiscovered, or simply missing.  That’s why the versions of the mythological corpus you know are most often Ovid’s version.

(Banquet of the Gods-Frans Floris)

If I could imprint Ovid’s stories into my brain, then I would have a vast resource, one with deep resonance in the entire Western literary tradition.  How to do that?  I had always wanted to learn a language but had told myself I couldn’t.  How about learning Latin, then translating the Metamorphoses? It could vanquish a self doubt, allow a peek behind the curtain of translation and help me absorb these wonderful stories.  All in the same project.

It’s not been, nor is it now, easy.  It is hard part of the time, difficult the rest.  But I’ve learned to enjoy that.  There are new insights often and results that I know are mine.  I’m learning the stories and advancing towards the skill level I need to go the distance.  This is the fourth year of learning and translating.  Many more to go.

BTW:  There is, somewhere in this, the novel I want to write.  A big one, a fantasy, because that’s how I think when it comes to fiction, but one deep in this material.  What it will be like, I don’t know, but I keep looking for fleeting images as I work.  Perhaps behind the story of the golden age?  Philemon and Baucus?  Medea?  Pentheus?  Perhaps in Ovid himself?  First century C.E. Rome?  All of these?  I don’t know.  But it’s the Moby Dick I’ve set sail to find.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Around and Around and Around We Go

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Fall                                                                       Samhain Moon

Interesting convergence.  In Ovid today I translated some verses about the silver age in which Jupiter created four seasons from summer, brief spring, winter and autumn.  After finishing this work, I went out and joined Kate, already at work in the garden.  Small pellets of snow fell.

(The Close of the Silver Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1527-35)

We went into the orchard.  Kate pulled back the landscape cloth around the remaining trees while I broadcast the fertilizer, sprayed with biotill and then worked them both into the top three inches of soil.  While she replaced the landscape cloth, I shoveled soil, mostly sand, back into two large holes dug by our energetic girls, Vega and Rigel.

At one moment I looked up at a tall Norway pine and felt a kinship with Ovid and those farmers in long ago Latium.  We had similar things to do at similar times of year.

The word annum popped up from today’s translating.  You know, I imagine, that it translates as year, but you might not know that its primary meanings are: a circuit, circular course, periodical return.  In one sense this is obvious of course, but that term we use frequently could orient us not to linear time, as we tend to use it, but to cyclical time.

When I say, I am 66 years old, we tend to think, oh.  Born 66 years from this date.  But that’s not what it really means.  It really means I have experienced a full year 66 times.  The year itself, if we’re true to its Latin roots, is not a one after the other marker of chronos, but a complete set, 4 seasons here in the temperate latitudes, finished and done with each winter, begun anew each spring.  Or whenever you want to break beginning and ending.

We then start over again.  Another year as we often say.  Yes, just so.  Another year.  This time in the next year I’ll be fertilizing the orchard.  As I have this year.  So that moment of apocalypse when the earth becomes changed and brand new?  Spring.  When the earth becomes desolate and barren?  Late fall.  Happened before, will happen again.  Amen.

 

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Latin

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Fall                                                              Samhain Moon

Back in the SPQR.  Translating Metamorphoses this morning, 6 verses and I didn’t pull my hair out too often.  That’s because, of course, there’s so little left.  The Latin has had me going this way and that.  It’s too much, takes too much time.  Maybe I’ve gotten from it what I want, what I intended.  Then, but I’ve invested 3 + years at it.  Finally, ok, I’ll try it again for a while.

Then, this morning. I had a great time.  Always wise to suspend judgement until some data is at hand.

Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Surprise!

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Summer                                                                   Solstice Moon

Several readers of my book have expressed surprise at its almost young adult focus and the fantasy elements.  I suppose this comes from two sources; that is,  people don’t know all of my interests or fascinations and there’s probably an expectation that my writing would be as cerebral as my public persona.

(The Musician and the Hermit – Moritz von Schwind)

Awhile back I read an interview with Phillip Pullman author of the fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials.  In it he said he’d like to write serious, literary fare, but whatever subject matter comes to him, comes in the form of fantasy.  Same with me.  In a way I don’t think it’s surprising since the religious and philosophical and folk tale/fairy tale/folk lore world has been my constant companion since I came to a conscious awareness of myself.  That’s just the way the world makes sense to me, through the mythic and the archetypal.

The life of the mind, learning and knowledge, also captivates me, and I find a lot of fun there, too, but the core for me, the essence is in the world of the imagination.  So when I sit down to write, well that’s the clothing that drapes itself over my stories.