Category Archives: Translating Metamorphoses

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Latin and Art

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Beltane                                                                 New (Early Growth) Moon

I passed some kind of milestone this week with the Latin.  My copy of Anderson, the commentary on Ovid’s first 5 books in Metamorphoses, fell apart.  I went online and found a hard back version, something that can withstand the repeated referencing, turning back and forth, putting my placeholders across it.  That this should happen just as I decided to begin work on the translation/commentary seems fortuitous.

(Daphne and Apollo)

In celebration of beginning the translation I have posted a Translating Metamorphoses page on the site where the most recent work will go up.  At some point I may begin posting work on the commentary, too, but that’s a ways off.  Right now Greg and I have just begun to note stuff down as we move along.

Translating in this manner is harder work than what I’ve been doing up to now, which has been essentially learning through translating Ovid.  Now I want to produce idiomatic English that is still faithful to the Latin text.  Also, I want to know more about the problems and content that I encounter.  That’s why I’ve begun reading the Ovid texts I’ve collected over the last year or so.  This is close reading, a different animal from just translating to learn.

At the same time I’ve created a new page, Art: A Journey.  This page will be the repository for my work on and with art following my time at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  The first published material there, two sheets of questions answered by me about Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, represent an attempt on my part to use exegetical techniques I learned studying the Old and New Testaments on art.

This draws me firmly into the realm of hermeneutics, a discipline about which I believe I may have some things to say.  We’ll see.  I’m still reading there.

Friends, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate, Writing

Cartography and Snow

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Spring                                                                                       Planting Moon

Spent the morning redrawing a map of the Winter Realm and Summer Realm on Tailte.  Tomorrow I’ll work on detailed maps of both separately, the islands and the Dark Range.  This was a constant among the beta readers and I agreed.  Doing them now will help the rewrite.

This afternoon I hit a wall on the next four verses of Book I, the Metamorphoses.  My mind seized up and would go no further.  So, I went upstairs and took videos of the dogs play in the already 5-6 inches of new snow.  And, it’s still snowing.  Supposed to get heavier over night.

Worked out, aerobic only because my back still complains from my lifting the hive box with honey on Tuesday.  I could have done without this, but I caused it so what can you do?

Sheepshead canceled.  With the snow coming down heavy now and predicted to be heavier still we decided to put it off.  It was a wise decision, but I will miss the conversation and camaraderie.   Wanted to hear what the Jesuits thought about the new pope.

 

Cinema and Television, Family, Latin, Letters, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate

Rainy, Gray, Blah

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Spring                                                                      Planting Moon

Moved books and sorted files.  Finishing up that long study and file reorganization, clean out begun some weeks ago.  Went out for dog food and got a hamburger at Culver’s.  They make a good burger.

Read some more Robert Jordan, now in the second volume of the Wheel of Time.  Watched three Supernaturals and one Danish show, The Eagle.  A lazy Sunday.

Did get started on Book I of Metamorphoses.  Not far.  Verbs pulled out and conjugated.  I checked the Perseus (classics website) text with the most scholarly text available right now and there was one small difference in the first four verses.  Started a word list which will feed into the commentary.

Needed a psychic bump today and Kate provided it.  What would I do without her?  I know it’s a canard; but, with buddy William Schmidt losing his wife Regina last year, it’s no longer something that has happened to others.

This gray, cold weather has many Minnesotans in a bit of a grumpy place, all of us waiting for daffodils and sun.  As Garrison Keillor said today, “The snow will melt.”  You betcha.

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

The End of the Beginning

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Spring                                                               New (Planting) Moon

The story of the golden fleece has been entirely translated, though I’ve not yet checked my work.  I feel ready now to go back to Book I and begin the task I set myself a while ago, the translation of the Metamorphoses.  As I wrote here earlier, this will mean a change in the mode of translation, with more careful note-taking, review of other versions of the myths in other authors, comparison of my work at some point to other translators, then working toward the best English I can imagine.  I will start notes for a commentary, though how long that project will last alongside the primary one, I can’t tell at this time.  Maybe the whole way.

(Golden Fleece pub in Heidelberg)

It’s deeply satisfying to have reached this point, the end of the beginning.

 

Humanities, Latin, Letters, Literature, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

At It

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Spring                                                             Bloodroot Moon

Still reading through Missing, making notes, trying to integrate beta reader observations and questions.  It’s slower right now because I’m also trying to integrate lessons about description and pacing from Robert Jordan’s amazing The Eye of the World.

The general plan for revision III has begun to take shape.  Some shifting of certain narrative threads to book II or to a book of their own, expanding the ending, putting the climax in earlier, making descriptions beefier, more lush and adding narrative in sections where what I wrote was, as Judy observed, outline like.

How long will it take?  I have no idea.  As soon as I can finish it, but just how long that is, I don’t know.  Why?  Partly the removal of certain narrative lines will create disruption as well as clarification.  Partly because the climax I have doesn’t satisfy me and I’m not clear what it should be.  Partly because adding descriptive material is a whole manuscript task and a personal style changer, too, since I tend to be spare.  There will be a learning curve.

Closing in on the last few verses of the Jason and Medea early story.  When I’m done with it, before Friday, and have checked and revised my work, also before Friday, I’m ready to go to Book I and begin the work I first decided I wanted to do back in 2008 or 2009.  That’s exciting.

It’s exciting for more than the obvious reason; that is, that I can now do it.  It’s exciting in addition because it will feed a new work, one I will not start until all three of the Tailte novels are finished; but, a work I hope will utilize all I’m learning about writing and about mythology and Latin and Ovid and Rome.  Working title:  Changes.

 

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Translating Metamorphoses

An Old Idea Whose Time Has Come

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Spring                                                                           Bloodroot Moon

In May some docent friends from the class of 2005, a rowdy class and proud of it, will go to
Chicago for a time with the arts scene there.  Like my visit to the National Gallery a couple of weeks ago this too will be an exercise in part in discovering how to keep the arts active and alive in my life.

One of us has decided to offer a mini-tour on an object at the Chicago Art Institute.  I decided I would do one, too.  My plan is to focus on methods of analysis, including the praxis idea I wrote about yesterday.

Ever since I got seriously interested in Ovid, my seminary education in biblical criticism has niggled at the back of my mind.  Why?  Well, biblical criticism, the higher criticism in particular, uses scholarly methodology for exegesis.  Exegesis tries first to get at the plain meaning of the text in its context.  It precedes the task of hermeneutics, that is, interpretation of the text for a contemporary audience.  What’s niggled at me is that neither exegesis nor hermeneutics is peculiar to the study of scripture.

In fact, exegetical method can be applied to other texts, whether in a foreign language or not, just as hermeneutics can be applied to the resulting exegesis.  As this thought persisted I kept wanting to create a method for using exegetical tools designed for literature in the service of art history.

Well, that day has arrived.  “Exegesis includes a wide range of critical disciplines: textual criticism is the investigation into the history and origins of the text, but exegesis may include the study of the historical and cultural backgrounds for the author, the text, and the original audience. Other analysis includes classification of the type of literary genres present in the text, and an analysis of grammatical and syntactical features in the text itself.” wikipedia article

Not sure yet whether I’ll venture into the realm of hermeneutics.  That may, in art, best be left to the viewer.

This also raises another profound idea I learned from the philosopher of religion, Paul Ricoeur, second naivete.  Ricoeur developed this idea to explain how a student of the higher criticism might use its critical methods on scripture, then return to the text later with a second naivete, one that includes the scholarly work, or incorporates it, while at the same time allowing the text to speak again as scripture.

My sense is that the idea applies to analysis of art as well.  That is, we can engage formal analysis, praxis analysis, style and methodological analysis, school, content analysis, then step back from all that and return to the piece with a second naivete which allows that work to enrich our immediate engagement with the work.  Anyhow, this is on my mind right now.

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Where Can I Find A Sherpa?

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Spring                                                                       Bloodroot Moon

 

At my next session with Greg, Latin tutor Greg, on April 12th, I’m going to tell him that I’m going to go to Book I and start my for real translation of Metamorphoses.  In that process I plan to not only translate but make notes, careful notes, for a commentary.  I don’t know to what extent it will ever see the light of day, but the effort will embed Ovid and his work even more firmly in me.

This translating will find me moving beyond the literal English and the good English to what I find to be the best English, at least from my perspective.  This means I will be comparing translations, doing research into the myths, etymology, Ovid’s life and times, frequency of a words occurrence.  I’m not really quite ready to do this, but it feels like this is what will take me to the next gate through which I need to pass.

 

 

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

In A Dark Wood Wandering

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Spring                                                                               Bloodroot Moon

Another Latin session with Greg finished.  We went once a week for about two years, perhaps a little less, then shifted to every two weeks, the pace we continue to follow.  At first we followed lessons in Wheelock, the grizzled Latin classic, updated, but following in the original’s historic pattern.

(Ovid)

About midway through it Greg said he felt I was a global learner, more like himself, and we switched to work with the Metamorphoses itself.  I translate as best I can then we go over my translation when we meet.  By phone.  All of my lessons, every one, has been done over the phone, not skype, but over the old fashioned landline telephone.  At least in my instance.  Greg uses a cell phone.

It was my passion for learning what lay behind the English translations of Ovid’s masterwork that started me on this path and Greg felt I’d learn best following it.  He’s been right.  It means I encounter things I don’t know from time to time, but that provides an opportunity to learn and not only that but to learn in context, not in the abstract as a textbook does.

(The Young Cicero Reading, Vincenzo Foppa, 1464)

At first I wandered through the Latin like I was lost in a briar patch.  I’d come up scraped and raggedy with sentences to match.  As I have put more reading behind me, it has been more like following an ancientrail through a strange forest.  I can follow it, even if I don’t always know where I’m going.  And, at times, I turn down the wrong path and have to find my way back or, if I can’t do it by myself, Greg shows me the way.

At some point, I think after I finish the story of Jason and Medea, a long one, I will return to the start, Book I, and begin to work my way forward.  At some point, too, I want to read some other authors, follow different trails through the Big Woods that is ancient Rome.  But for now Ovid is enough.

Garden, Health, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Sowing A Fallow Field

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Spring                                                                                Bloodroot Moon

And the Latin keeps on coming.  I’m sure I’ll reach a plateau here at some point, but I seem to be learning faster and faster.  Of course, it’s taken me 3 years to get to this point, so it’s not like it’s an overnight phenomena.  Still, it feels good. Session with Greg tomorrow.

Jason plowed a fallow field, seeded it with dragon’s teeth and an army sprung up, only to take after each other with weapons grown with them.  Men.

My shoulder pain retreated a good bit while in DC.  That was after the third week of rest, including two before I left.  Today I started back with the same exercise routine, trying to discover exactly what’s going on so I can have good data for my visit with the orthopedist on April 17th.

Kate and I have on our calendars garden clean-up starting April 1.  April fools!  We’d have to shovel snow off it to get started.  We may straighten up the garden shed, clean and sharpen tools.  That we can do now.  Of course, I still have that book and file moving/removal project that’s about half done.  No dearth of things to do.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Latin, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Solid Day

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Imbolc                                                                                 Bloodroot Moon

Missing in the a.m.  About 1/6th done.  As I read, it’s hard not to jump in, start line editing, but getting the story and the transitions and the big picture clear is necessary.  I have to reenter the story when I begin this 3rd rewrite, reenter the story in order to change it.  Only by having it again in mind will I be able to do that.  I can already see the value of this approach.

I have a list of characters, things and places that I’m writing down as I read.  The first time a character appears or a place gets mentioned or a thing like a particular sword gets used.  A long list and I’m only a little ways in.

Translating today went well, two sentences, about 6 verses.

The mechanical inspector came to examine our new furnace.  A cursory look.  “Fine.”  And he was on his way out.  To show though the things you do not know.  He stopped at Kate’s long arm quilter.  “My wife just died.  She was a quilter, left me with a lot of quilting things.”  Then, he buttoned up and left.

Still reading the competition.  Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

And, hey!  How about that Pope.  Argentina, eh?  But, from a good Italian family.  And a Jesuit?  Interesting though.  Look at a graphic  that shows Catholic strength by world region and you will see that it has bulged for some time in the Southern Hemisphere.  As the West has gotten more secular, Africa and Latin America have grown more Christian.  And more conservative.  It will be a while before we can see what this means.