Category Archives: Translating Metamorphoses

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

A Banner Day

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                          Lughnasa Moon

Today I went from verse 505 to verse 524 in Book I of Ovid, translating as I went, with only two errors and those both nuances I had not yet learned. My confidence grows now with each lesson.

We pay for 8 sessions at a time. Greg and I do a session every two weeks. Or so. The next session on August 23rd will be the 6th in this series. By the final one, the 8th, I’m planning on renegotiating our arrangement, moving toward more working alone, perhaps story by story, developing a polished translation and not contacting Greg until then. Something like that.

(Apollo and Daphne w Peneus.  Tiepolo)

Kate reminded me the other day of my original purpose in starting this journey. I wanted to challenge my own belief that I could not learn a foreign language. Translating the Metamorphoses was a goal I dangled in front of myself, a reward for staying with the work. Over time I began to believe that my purpose was to translate the Metamorphoses, but that was not it at the beginning. A metamorphosis, it just occurred to me.

Art and Culture, Asia, Cinema and Television, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Latin, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Purging We Will Go

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                     Lughnasa Moon

Over the weekend and as deep into this week as I need to go, I’m packing up my former study. I’ve purged one file cabinet and consolidated its content into boxes for moving. A horizontal cabinet awaits attention. A large plastic tub full of art supplies went into the move with care pile. One small bookcase has been emptied and moved. The shop work bench I’ve used for storage is empty, too. That old printer, the one I bought in 1994, is in the truck and ready to go to a recycler.  An HP laserjet, it still functions.  That leaves three larger bookcases and some miscellaneous things on various surfaces, plus the art on the walls.

(what I hope to create in Colorado, my own version of this.)

When this room has been tidied up, the next and last big push begins. My study. This room has walls of books. Many will go in boxes with red tape, but most will not. The other areas have gone well, but this one will present some difficulty. So many projects. Some of the past, some of the future, some of today. Which ones do I imagine I’ll continue in Colorado? Which ones have enough spark to be valuable in the final third of my life? These are hard decisions for me and packing this room will be both valuable and difficult.

This is a chance to prune my work over the last third of my life, clear out the branches that have grown across each other. Take out that large branch that flourished then died. Increase the circulation amongst the remaining branches so they have air, can breathe. Pruning gives renewed vigor to plants and I hope to achieve the same thing when I pack up these materials, those closest to my heart, leaving behind what I no longer need.

Cooking, Garden, Latin, Science, Translating Metamorphoses

Matters Thorny

Leave a comment

Summer                                                              New (Lughnasa) Moon

croppedIMAG0360Kate destemmed and clipped the wispy end off all the gooseberries I picked. Gooseberries are just this side of not being worth the effort. She put them in a bowl with our blueberries, mixed them and made tarts. Tasty. We also had green beans and carrots tonight, one day out of the garden. With fish.

The Latin I reviewed over the last couple of days continues to come more easily. Incremental jumps, consolidation of past learning and, by now, long practice have combined to push me forward. Kate reminded me (I’d forgotten.) that I started on this because I doubted I could learn a foreign language. But, I wanted to try.

I’ve felt for many years the same way about calculus and step by slow step I’m learning pre-calculus through the Khan Academy. Somewhere back in my education, maybe junior high or so, I got into the habit of racing through exams, wanting to finish well ahead of everybody else and have the rest of the time to myself. As I work on these math problems, I find that same self-pressure, a hurry-up attitude has not left me. It gets in my way. I make bone head mistakes, having to take more time going back over what I’ve done. So, I’m slowing down. Making sure.

Why am I doing this? I enjoy challenging myself, pushing myself into strange places, foreign lands. Latin was a foreign country four years ago, though I’m now a resident alien. Calculus continues to be a faraway land, but I’ve found a path and I’m on it. These are different ways of looking at the world, different perspectives. With Latin I’m going deep into an ancient culture and the deeper I go the more mysterious it becomes. I imagine calculus will prove the same.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Ovid and Quilting

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                    Most Heat Moon

Latin has begun to feel similar to Kate’s sewing. In her sewing she can work for a bit, accomplish a small part and still feel she’s made progress. Now, I can work for an hour or so at a time (about the limit for me) and move my whole project forward a few verses. At the same time, like Kate and her sewing, I reinforce my skills and reaffirm them, giving me a sense of mastery. The aim is to put many shorter sessions together to make a whole quilt, or an entire translated story.

More and more I’m feeling like I may be on my own by this fall. An exciting and fulfilling feeling.

(Apollo_and_Daphne, Antonio_del_Pollaiolo_)

Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Long Projects

Leave a comment

Summer                                                      Most Heat Moon

In regard to work on a new food crop as a part of our move. I want to find a native plant, native to the eco-region of our new home, then work toward domesticating it with as much help as I can get from the academics. As I wrote this, I recalled that there is a Spitler apple, named after a great uncle who developed it. Maybe botany has a gene.

(a possibility, Creeping Thistle)

A pattern for translating the Metamorphoses is emerging. I will translate individual stories whole.  For example, the one I’m working on now, Daphne, is in Book I:452-566. The preceding story of the Python was Book I:416-451 and the next one, Io. Argus. Syrinx., Book I:567-745 and the story of Phaethon ends Book I, running from 746-778.

Here’s the method I see from how I’m working right now. I will continue translating a few verses (4-7) a day, hopefully increasing these numbers somewhat over time. While doing these translations, I will consult my usual resources: Perseus, the commentaries, grammars and occasionally the consensus Oxford text going to the english translations only when I’m confused and find myself unable to move forward.

Once I get a story done, I will set it aside for a day to a week while I continue translating into the next story. At some point before a week passes, I will pick up the story from the preceding week and using my notes, retranslate it without reference to the translation I created. If I believe I have as good a literal translation as I can make, I will then proceed to trying for a more lyrical prose translation, one using the best english I can muster. Again, I will proceed by using the resources mentioned above, but not check the english translations.

Only after I have created my best english translation, and then only after letting it sit for a couple of weeks, a month, will I then work with my translation in light of other english translations, resolving conflicts and improving my translation where I can.

I’ve not yet decided whether I want to try to make a commentary or not. It’s a big, big project, but much of the work will be done already and I’m still a naive learner, therefore able to see what another newcomer might most appreciate or need.

When I put together the classics and art history, I find myself where I belong.

 

Friends, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Woolly Mammoths

Amicus

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                        Most Heat Moon

While the Olson generations have driven north to the world’s largest lake (by area), I remained behind for my regular session with Latin tutor Greg and lunch with friend Tom Crane.

When I work with Greg now, I sequence out loud the Latin words in the order in which I will translate them into English, then offer my translation. Since so much of my work has involved either Greg’s question and my answers or my translating then listening to Greg’s careful parsing of the grammar, silence confuses me.

Today had lots of silence. It turns out that means he’s translating along with me, waiting for me to go on. Silence, in other words, is good. To get to this level of translating still takes a long time for me. I translate the verses, 4-6 in a typical one hour to one and a half hour session. This involves consulting the online classics website, Perseus, the commentaries by Anderson and Lee, and occasionally checking an English translation if I’m hopelessly confused.

After I’ve done a bunch, maybe 50 or 60 or so, I’ll go back over them, making sure the declension and conjugation notes I’ve written down are accurate and making sure as well that the word I’ve chosen is written over its Latin counterpart. I might be done then, at least for awhile. If, however, there is some time before I have a session with Greg, I may go over them again, writing out a new translation as I read, not consulting my previous work.

When I get down to the serious work here, I imagine the process proceeding much the same.  It would differ at the point of my session with Greg. Then I will go through the verses I’m working with and try to create as beautiful an English translation as I can. When I feel I’ve done my best, then I will review other translator’s work on the same passages. At that point I’ll revise again, or not.

I may be at that point this fall. I’m very close right now.

Lunch with Tom is about friendship, about that ineffable, yet essential quality of being known by another and, in turn, knowing. The topics don’t matter, though they do, of course. Today it was grandchildren, visits, friends and, as you might expect, the sixth great extinction on planet Earth.

On this last point Tom and I share a desire to grasp the dilemmas facing the human race right now in fine detail, but also in the larger, broader scope of planetary evolution.  I think we agree on this perspective, being human is natural and the things we do as human are, therefore, natural. That’s not to say they don’t have unintended consequences. Nor does it mean that we have to lie down and say, we can’t do anything about that!

Not at all. But flagellation gets us no where.

 

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

Writing

Leave a comment

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, Humanities, Letters, Translating Metamorphoses

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                         Summer Moon

Got to thinking about the standing on the shoulders of giants meme. It’s a great contribution of Isaac Newton, a quotable polymath and giant like last century’s Albert Einstein. The more I thought about it though the less satisfied I was with it.  [Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (Poussin, 1658)]

It introduces a necessary humility to any advancement in human thought, emphasizing the debt owed to the past. But. It seems to me a forest works better.

The giants of the past remain just that. The General Shermans, the Methuselahs of the forest, but they protect the growth of new, younger saplings and smaller giants who grow up among them. They are nourished from the same soil, in the case of Newton and Einstein, western civilization, and they don’t disappear under a long chain of legs and heads and shoulders, but remain in their place, already tall, eternal and the guarantors of the forest itself.

Too, I can easily imagine my own journeys into these groves, wandering among woodlands growing since the days of classical Athens, old kingdom Egypt, republican Rome, the Renaissance. And consider Newton. Perhaps the mythical apple tree of his life might have been the Islamic scientist Averroes.

This ancestral forest lies just beyond the edge of this material reality, its sylvan nature dependent no longer on the laws of physics but on the memories of the future. We are its caretakers, responsible for its continued health.

 

Art and Culture, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Phone Latin

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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.