Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

Huh.  “90, no more like 95%, right.”  Greg said this during my sight reading this morning.  “You’ve jumped several levels since our last session.” I’d felt it over the last few weeks of translating, a more than gradual emergence of learning, not like moving up a plateau, more like sprinting past a plateau or two.  This is an overnight sensation it’s taken me four years to reach.  I’m grateful for it.

(ok.  I don’t actually know what this guy’s saying.  Anybody else?  Probably something scatological but it’s a cool graphic.  It could be, note the necking.)

I feel accomplished.  I can actually see a Charles Ellis translation of Ovid’s masterwork, the Metamorphoses, coming into existence. Wow. Give me the geezer high five folks.  It’s happenin’.

My next goal is to increase my speed.  I’d like to get to 12-15 verses an hour with the goal of doing around a 100 verses a week.  At that rate I could translate the typical Book, there are 15, in around two months to two and a half months.  The translation would not be polished, of course, but I’d be laying pipe at a credible rate.  Add in polishing and I could maybe finish in four years, perhaps a little more or a little less.  Probably less since presumably my facility would grow as I worked.

Samhain                                                                     Winter Moon

Another 6 lines of the Lycaon story.  Sort of.  Lycaon’s story per se ends with the piece I published the other day.  It continues, however, as Ovid recounts how the enraged Jupiter goes from transforming Lycaon into a wolf to plans for a deluge, a wiping out of humans. The other gods are mostly okay with this except they do ask, “who will carry incense onto our altars?”  A bit of divine pragmatism.

Must of been eating my Latin wheaties because the translation is coming faster and faster now, the results of my work most often squaring with the Loeb English translation.  That’s not to say they match but I understand how Miller got his translation and how mine differs in a way that makes sense.  The Loeb’s purpose, as I understand it, is to offer a close to literal reading of the Latin, though once you learn the Latin it’s clear how far from the Latin even the literal readings are.  This is not criticism; rather, it shows the gap between languages and how bridging those gaps is a quirky business, yielding all manner of contraptions from elegant trussed spans to rickety ropes.

This is what I got into it for, yeah these many years ago.  After studying the Bible, written in Hebrew and Greek, you learn the need for careful attention to this work, exegesis.  I never mastered either Hebrew or Greek, but I really wanted to experience the world behind the Wizard’s curtain of the translator.

As a vehicle for that journey, I chose the Metamorphoses because it is the reference text for the entry of Greek and Roman mythology into the Western stream of the humanities. This way I ground myself in mythology while satisfying a more abstract desire.  It’s working.