Category Archives: Translating Metamorphoses

Humanities, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Latinum

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Summer                                                                     Solstice Moon

Latin today.  Two weeks ago I got dejected about it, feeling less than able, starting to talk to myself about letting it go.  Then I got into the material on plateaus that I wrote about a week or so ago.  Learning to love the plateau, that’s a real key, so I adjusted my attitude.  Result?  A very good session today where we went into two particular verses that I had had a lot of trouble with.

Greg helped me untangle them.  Find the whole, first.  That is, Subject-Verb-Object.  Then work on the pieces.  That’s not always so easy when the verses grow long and convoluted, but it is the method that has helped me move up in my understanding.  Now I need to apply it with even more rigor and consistency.

On Tuesday I got Livy’s De Rerum Natura, a three volume treatment with Latin text and commentary and aids.  He’s next for me, or, in addition to, Ovid.

Latin keeps on challenging me on the one hand and giving me rewards on the other.  Today, in the mode of Solstice extravagance, I’m glad I’ve given it so much time over the last 3 1/2 years.  It has enriched my life in many ways.

Latin, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Getting Good

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Beltane                                                                        Solstice Moon

I’ve let the creative writing business slide for a couple of weeks, just got out of the rhythm with garden and other matters.  That Loft class starts in three weeks and I want to get further along in my revision before then.

Been reading information about learning plateaus, as I wrote below and I’m certainly on a plateau in both the writing and the Latin right now.  Just plugging away.  Read a piece drawing on work in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that suggested embracing the struggle, the sameness, the lack of progress or even the regression.  Makes sense to me.  When I can remember it.

It’s easy for me to fall into the despair trap.  The one where lack of progress proves lack of talent, lack of smarts, lack.  I fell into it for several years with the writing.  I had this mindset, either you’re doing it or you’re not.  Obviously not true.  Learning anything takes time, often lots of time.  That 10,000 hours stuff, I don’t know about that, but it does take a long time to get good at anything.

(Dreamer of Dreams, Edmund Dulac)

 

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Plateaus

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Beltane                                                                            Solstice Moon

Up early.  Thank you, noisy dogs.  Breakfast, read paper then out to the apple trees for more bagging.  On two of our trees, the honeycrisp and the northerly tree (whose variety name I can’t recall), we have well over 200 apples, closer to 250.

( a honeycrisp last year)

The third tree (whose name I can’t recall either right now) has ten.  Not sure what happened to it.  It only blossomed on the most westerly branches and then sparsely.  Like the other two it had leaf rollers active early, but the leaves otherwise look healthy and the leaf rollers don’t explain, at least I don’t think they do, the minimal blooms and even smaller fruit set.  Anyhow the apples have all got bags and within, roughly, the best time.  Best time, when they’re larger than a pea, got rained on and on and on, but at the first dry moment, we’re done.

Also laid down leaf mulch in the vegetable garden, at least until the sun got high in the sky and my skin began to give off a faint burnt odor.  Back at that one tomorrow morning.  At that point the time critical chores for the garden will be done.  That will mean I can adopt my writing in the am and translating in the pm schedule again.  I’m ready.

Latin last time was hard.  I missed several obvious elements in my translation and in general felt like a schlub.  My first reaction in those instances is to wonder if this is the time to throw in the towel.  Have I gone as far as it’s reasonable to have gone.  And besides it costs a lot to have a tutor, maybe if I do gone on, I should just do it on my own.  If I haven’t gotten this stuff by now,  what makes me think I’ll ever get it?  You know the drill.

(Justus.  transferred to I.S. 318 at age 10.  Already had a 2000+ rating.  Is now the youngest African-American national master ever.)

Then I watched Brooklyncastle.  This remarkable movie, available for instant streaming on Netflix, details a year and a half in I.S. 318, a public junior high in the NYC school system.  Here’s a quick plot summary from IMDB:

“Brooklyn Castle is a documentary about I.S. 318 – an inner-city school where more than 65 percent of students are from homes with incomes below the federal poverty level – that also happens to have the best, most winning junior high school chess team in the country. (If Albert Einstein, who was rated 1800, were to join the team, he’d only rank fifth best). Chess has transformed the school from one cited in 2003 as a “school in need of improvement” to one of New York City’s best. But a series of recession-driven pubic school budget cuts now threaten to undermine those hard-won successes.”

One of the chess coaches makes a remark about learning chess to the effect that many students just learn and learn and learn, don’t do well, then their knowledge jumps up a notch.  It’s that sudden leap in learning, up to another plateau, that I recognized from Latin education so far.  Which means that I’m slogging right now in the swamp between plateaus, the dense plant life and boggy water pulling me down, but what I need to know is keep at it, just keep at it.  Then, I’ll jump to the next plateau, which will be a whole new swamp, perhaps a Grand Marais as we might say in Minnesota.  But those kids taught me to pay attention to what I already know.

(Rochelle.  On her way to being the first African-American female Master)

 

Garden, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

What Comes First?

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Beltane                                                                                       Solstice Moon

Still trying to work out a way to give the garden what it needs and my other work what it needs.  Right now, this week, I’ve decided to work outside in the morning (my best work hours) until I’m caught up on critical garden chores:  broadcasting and transplant aids, bagging the apple trees and laying down leaves for mulch for example.

(Reinier Willem Kennedy – The source of life)

I’m done with the broadcasting and transplant aids.  I have the honeycrisp done and will move on to the other two trees tomorrow.  They have fewer fruit sets so they’ll probably be roughly the equivalent of the honeycrisp.  When that’s done, I’ll use the leaves from last fall to mulch the vegetables.  Probably finish on Wednesday.

Then I’ll focus back in on the writing and translating.  Getting a regular rhythm down was a primary reason I set aside the Sierra Club work and the MIA, but this interruption comes from decisions we made long ago to grow as much of our own food as we can and to do it in a way that improves our property over time.  So it may be that the real rhythm lies in recognizing the horticultural imperatives gardening brings during the growing season, making them number one during that time and fitting the other in around them.  Probably the sensible way to go.

Any ideas a reader might have would be welcome.

Garden, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

The Wall

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Beltane                                                                          Early Growth Moon

I’ve hit some kind of wall.  All this straight at it time, working on Missing and translating Ovid, reading about the numinous and researching Edward Hopper, modernism and romanticism, all fun, all core to what I’m about in this phase of my life, but the weather and the constant intellectual push has me wanting some relief.  The garden often provides that balance for me, but the rain has kept us out of there and it looks like it might for the next couple of days, too.

Those tomatoes and peppers are in some UPS warehouse, supposed to be here today.  Kate bought annuals, laid in some root stimulator to support the transplants after they move from pot to ground.  So we have planting to do.  She also found a possible source of garden help for us while shopping at the Green Barn.  That would be nice.  We could do much more if we had an extra hand for the heavy and tedious stuff.

These walls come.  Then they go.  Right now I’m feeling over-stimulated, I think, too much going in and not enough going out.  Rewriting is no help in that it involves a lot of analyzing, decision making, recrafting.  Doesn’t have the same juice as writing from scratch.

Cooking, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Beets, Romans and High Fantasy

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Beltane                                                                       Early Growth Moon

Kate has been trying to reconstruct an amazing beet pureed soup we had at Fika in the American Swedish Institute.  The chef gave us some of his or her ingredients, all of them?  I’m not sure.  But Kate’s done a good job of closing in on it.  It’s delightful, tangy and creamy with a great feel in the mouth.

I’ve spent the Sunday beginning to check my Latin translations against the commentaries and entering notes into the file I’m keeping for the commentary Greg and I may write.  This is fun work, finding better words, puzzling over the thoughts of Ovid scholars.  Once I’ve finished the recheck, I’m going to start reading the Ovid scholarship I’ve collected.

In the afternoon I’ve proceeded with the revision, rewrite of Missing.  I’m well into the first third, adding thicker description, plumping up character development, making the narrative a more coherent whole.  This is fun, too.

Even so, my mind can only take so much fun before the brain that supports its work begins to wear out the rest of my body. That’s where I am now.  Tired. Enough for the day.

 

Garden, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Good Day, Even If It Is 95

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

Got outside around mid-day and planted chard, kale and carrots.  Need to get a second round of beets in the ground, too.  We’re well under way now, with beets emerging, leeks going well, garlic beginning to curl skyward though a bit behind, onions still a bit pale at the top, but progressing.  No bees today due to the cloudy morning, the best time to check on them, but not when its cloudy and rainy.  So tomorrow.

Using the time, the mornings for Missing, writing and revising in turn, trying to remember all the pieces.  A little difficult.  Like juggling chainsaws, bowling pins, feathers and knives.

Not unlike the afternoon’s translating.   Holding those words and ideas in the air, not committing, or at least not over-committing, to a particular meaning until all the pieces have been considered.  Mentally tired.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Literature, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Like Attending My Own Funeral

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Beltane                                                                                 Early Growth Moon

Sort of like attending my own funeral.   All day today notes have come in from docent classmates responding to my resignation from the program which I sent out in a private newsletter we have just for our class.  Mini-eulogies.  It’s interesting because it is often this kind of stuff that we don’t feel liberated to say until a relationship has been severed, either by death or by saying a permanent good-bye.  Would probably be good if we could learn to say these things more often.  Thanks to all of you who’ve written.

The revision process has legs now, new material being written, older material rewritten.  I’m back in the fictive dream of Missing, inhabiting the two worlds and living with their characters, their flora and fauna.  It’s a homecoming of sorts.  Though I’ve been into for a month or so in terms of writing, I’ve been at it for longer with reading material from beta readers, re-reading the text myself and plotting a strategy for this third revision.

Put another 5 verses of Book I into English today, making better and more notes about items for the commentary.  I really want this commentary to synch with Perseus, but I also want it to live on smartphones and tablet computers.  I want it to be the commentary for this media age.

Greg and I talked last Friday about how this kind of reading necessarily becomes close reading, a sort of reading often promoted, but less often executed.   You might call it slow reading.

Speed reading has its place, I guess, and I certainly tried to put it to use, having taken the Evelyn Woods program when I started college in 1965.  This program preaches adapting your speed to the kind of reading you’re doing.  So, say Time magazine or Sports Illustrated (of equal depth most of the time) might take your quickest scan, finger moving down the center of the page with some speed.  Philosophy on the other hand would go much more slowly, say 150 words a minute.  The idea preached by speed readers is that the quicker you go the more your mind concentrates on reading alone, not wandering away.  Maybe.

What I do know is that if you want to learn, slowing down to the pace translation forces, often word by word, looking up the word, its grammatical forms, figuring out how they fit together before the sense of the sentence begins to emerge, then you read slowly.  Letting the mind wander when it will, tracking words down through paths already in the mind, making connections, asking questions, probing the text.  This is how you make a work your own.

So, I’m for slow food, slow travel, slow reading, slow thinking.

 

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

Laboravi

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Beltane                                                                     Early Growth Moon

Out to Famous Dave’s at 11:20 this morning, just ahead of the Mother’s Day rush.  We had a nice meal, discussing family, as the restaurant slowly filled up, the number of very large patrons noticeable unfortunately.

I’ve been back at work on Missing, now writing new material, most focused on John’s origins, where he came from and what if any implications that might have for his time on Tailte.  This will lead into the work of experimenting with point of view, which I’ve given a lot of thought but have not made any decisions about as yet.

Greg, Latin tutor, began to push me a bit this last time, saying how many verses he wanted me to tackle before our next time.  Up til now I’ve been learning at a pace comfortable for me, maybe a bit slow for him, but ok since I was the student.  Now, I’m closer to a colleague and we need to have adequate material before us each time we meet.  We’ve met in person once in the last three and a half years, at Kate’s retirement party at the MIA two Januaries ago.  Odd.

I sat down and pounded out five verses in a little more than an hour.  This includes making commentary notes in Microsoft Notes, words to highlight, helps, ways in which Perseus confuses the matter, words Perseus doesn’t have.

Here’s a strange, and a bit disturbing, thing.  I turned in my resignation from the MIA last Tuesday.  I’ve heard nothing from them.  12 years.  Nothing.  Weird.  And confirming of my decision.

 

Latin, Letters, Translating Metamorphoses

Coeptis

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

Greg, my Latin tutor, and I have begun moving through Ovid with an eye to a possible commentary, noting where I have difficulty and where we both have trouble.  These are the kind of things that can be expanded on in a commentary, as both aids to future translators but also as educational tools to broaden an understanding of this particular work and Ovid in general.

It’s difficult to describe my level of excitement about this.  After spending so long getting ready, we’re actually doing it and I’m a full partner, not as skilled as Greg at Latin but I’m focused on Ovid and have a lot bring to the conversation.  My translations have begun to raise fewer and fewer flags and my choices bring a fresh perspective to the work.

It’s fun.  I know that must sound weird, but I really enjoy this.  It’s detective work, history, poetry, mythology, philology and straight out brain work.  Complex and a bit arcane, my favorite.

At this point I can actually imagine translating all 15 books, 15,000 verses.  Who knows?  I’m also expanding my reading to Virgil and Horace, perhaps some Catullus, too.  I need to know other Augustan poets and their conventions to better understand Ovid’s work.

Here’s another oddity in all this.  When I finish a session with Greg, every two weeks, I feel like I’m done with classes and all I want to do is relax, read something or putter in the garden.  This is an old, well ingrained feeling, put into place over many, many years of education.