Category Archives: Translating Metamorphoses

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

During the Deluge: Ovid

Leave a comment

Spring                                                           Bee Hiving Moon

Spent today reimmersing myself in Ovid.  Pleased to see that I could get in and start swimming right away in spite of the two week’s absence. Preparing for my Friday tutoring session with Greg so I’m back in the beginning of the deluge:  Book I, 262-312.  Here’s a great, long image from the beginning.

(flood-anne-louis-girodet-de-roucy-trioson)

264b …The South Wind flies on water-soaked wings,

265  he covers his terrible visage with pitch-black gloom,

266 his beard heavily laden with violent storms, water streams from the hoary white hair of his head,

267 clouds rest upon his brow, his wings and breast shed water,

268 with his hand he pressed wide the hanging clouds,

269  a crashing noise is made:  here the dense violent storms

270 are poured out from the sky.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating Metamorphoses, Travel, Writing

What Is My Life Reaching For?

Leave a comment

Spring                                                              Bee Hiving Moon

On the last afternoon of the Intensive Journal Workshop we had an exercise focused on what our life is reaching for.  In the first morning we had defined the current period of our life: in my case the time after Kate’s retirement.  By the last afternoon we had worked ourselves into the next period of our lives.  Since we were newly in this next period, this exercise asked us to feel, below the conscious level, where our lives wanted to go.

Here is my sense of what my life is reaching for in this next period:

1. a bountiful, sustainable nutrient dense harvest of fruit and vegetables.

2. a way to use the Great Wheel website to advance the Great Work through literature, science and political activism.

3. a third phase (third lifetime) writing portfolio with short story writing credits as a floor for selling novels.

4. a schedule for translating and commenting on at least several books of the Metamorphoses

5. still more of a stable, wonderful marriage, regular visits and communication with kids and grandkids and friends.

6. more mutual travel opportunities with Kate.

As I work in the inner movement of my life, I can feel a quieting, a confidence that who I am and what I do is enough-no matter the outcomes.  This feeling has grown stronger since Kate retired and continues to strengthen with time.

In my third lifetime I will be calm, steady, productive.

 

Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Garden, Latin, MOOCS, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Now

Leave a comment

Spring                                             Hare Moon

The first of three workshops has finished.  This one, life context, positions you in the current period of your life.  It’s been, as always, a moving and insight producing time.  These workshops move below the surface and defy easy summary, but I have had one clear outcome from this one.  I’m in a golden moment.

I’m healthy, loved and loving.  Kate and I are in a great place and the kids are living their adult lives, not without challenges, but they’re facing those.  The dogs are love in a furry form.

The garden and the bees give Kate and me a joint work that is nourishing, enriching and sustainable. We’re doing it in a way that will make our land more healthy rather than less.

The creative projects I’ve got underway:  Ovid, Unmaking trilogy, reimagining faith, taking MOOCs, working with the Sierra Club, and my ongoing immersion in the world of art have juice.  Still.

I have the good fortune to have good friends in the Woollies and among the docent corps (former and current).  Deepening, intensifying, celebrating, enjoying.  That’s what’s called for right now.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Off the Rhythm

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                              Hare Moon

Boy.  Started working with translations I did a couple of months ago and it was hard.  I’ve not been hitting it every day like I do when I’m on my rhythm.  I don’t know why, but that matters.  I’m way ahead of the work I need to do for my every two week times with Greg, by a hundred verses or so, a bit more.  At this point when I work with him I’m tracking backwards over work I did well before.  But that doesn’t explain the sluggishness. It really seems to be a function of staying at it, almost like staying in shape.

(Deucalion and Pyrrha Repeople the World by Throwing Stones Behind Them, c.1636 (oil on canvas)  by Rubens, Peter Paul (1577-1640))

I would have gotten more done today if I hadn’t decided to fool around with Bittorrent Snyc, but there you are.

More review tomorrow morning, then an hour with Greg.  He monitors my progress, fine tunes my work, keeps me attentive to things I miss.  He also helps me with strategy about how to approach the task of translation.  At this point that helps as much as particular work with the grammar.

Based on his guidance I always look first for the verbs, then the nominatives (subjects) and the accusatives (direct objects).  If I get lost, I do a quick diagram to find my way back. There’s also been an interesting apprentice style aspect of his teaching where I listen to him go through a process of translation, use of the dictionary, what do when you’re stuck and mimic it.  It’s been a surprisingly successful method of learning.

Health, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Body and Mind

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                             Hare Moon

The latin today was a brainbuster.  At least for me.  In the first sentence there was a passive periphrastic with its dative of agent and gerundive plus an imperfect subjunctive. Now if you think that sounds confusing, well, it was to me.  Not sure I got it either.  Two steps ahead, a step or two back into Wheelock to check the grammar, seeking help from the commentaries.

(how I felt after the Latin)

Workout today though was good.  I’ve switched it up a bit, doing high intensity intervals (4 of one minute to one and a half minutes) combined with sections of the P90X workout.  The P90X is the resistance work, the intervals the aerobics.  Seems to be a good fit.

Maybe not what Tony Horton intended, but it’s gonna work for me.  That means two lower intensity days on the treadmill between the three interval workouts.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Chaff

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                              Valentine Moon

Greg had to shift our work tomorrow to next Friday.  This morning I plowed through 7 verses in 40 minutes.  That’s getting closer to the pace I want.  13-16 a day.  In fact, with that pace, two sessions the same day would get me there.

This is all chaff.  I know that.  Who cares whether an amateur succeeds in making what will probably be a poor translation of the Metamorphoses? Nobody. I care. And that’s what matters to me, but I’m not ignorant of the global insignificance of this work.

Same with the novel.  Suppose it sells, does well.  More chaff.  If it doesn’t.  Chaff. Working on climate change.  Closer to wheat, less chaff.  Still, my single contribution?  Mostly chaff.

Why keep at any of this?  Because it is what I’ve chosen to define my ancientrail.  I don’t believe any of us have another path open to us.  It’s either choose or have it chosen for you.

(Eleusinian mysteries)

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

The Week Ahead

Leave a comment

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.

Art and Culture, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Apres Deluge

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Moon

Finished the Deucalion and Pyrrha story in the Metamorphoses.  This is Ovid’s flood narrative, one he shares with other classical writers, the Enuma Elish and, most famously in our culture, Genesis.  Unlike the other long passages I’ve translated I’m stopping here and returning immediately to the beginning.  My goal this second time (third in the case of some of the verses) through is to work on polishing, creating as pleasing an English form for Ovid’s work as I can.  This will force me into the nuances of translating rather than the brute force, literal work I’ve done up until now.

(Léon-François COMERRE (1850-1916)

My pace has picked up though it’s not yet where I want it, but I’m still very much focused on the grammar and the syntax, trying to produce a faithful and mostly literal translation of Ovid’s Latin.  This is a distance from a good English translation for several reasons.  The range of meanings for each word.  The syntactical demands of Latin and English.  Certain grammatical constructions that don’t appear in English or become clumsy when translated.  The fact that Ovid wrote for an audience with far different background knowledge and expectations of poetry than ours.  The meaning of the work in its own time and the inevitable distortion of it when read in ours.  And so on.

None of these are insuperable.  There are many translations of so many works.  Yet each does a certain violence to the home text, wrenching it out of its natural medium and forcibly inserting it in another.  Translating is both art and skill.  I’m finally getting the skill necessary to give the art a try.

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

Flood Narratives

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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.