• Category Archives Translating De Bello Gallico
  • Cultural Appropriation

    Beltane                                                                           Rushing Waters Moon

    Transformation Mask, Richard Hunt, 1993
    Transformation Mask, Richard Hunt, 1993

    Cultural appropriation. I’m not sure I understand this argument, but this wikipedia entry contains a long summary. I get it when the issue is the Redskins as a football team name or Indians as the basketball team name in Anderson, Indiana with its related arena named the Wigwam. I understand it when the issue is blackface, Aunt Jemima, the wearing of war bonnets as fashion statements. I fully understand and appreciate, for example, the Northwest Coast First Nation’s desire to own their artistic heritage, a good example of which is the Transformation mask at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

    The argument begins to fray for me when I see complaints about using traditional cloth in new and different ways or even when others choose to reinterpret traditional art. Or, particularly, when I read books that create characters from different cultural traditions, gender perspectives, or ethnicities. I don’t understand how the life of art can go forward without all kinds of cultural appropriation.

    culturalIf, as a Western white male, a U.S. citizen of mostly European genetics, I cannot create characters in my novels that are outside that narrow slice of the world’s reality, my work is restricted in ways that make no sense to me. Would I always get it right? No, of course not. But how do we understand other’s understanding of their others unless we can see it or read it or watch it? And is not the fraught interaction between and among cultures important to understand from all perspectives?

    Of course intentionally stereotypical representations are abhorrent, but should not the critique of them be left up to the reader or the viewer? At least in the way I write self-censorship is the ultimate enemy, a foe to be fought off. This notion seems to introduce so large an element of self-censorship that an artist could find themselves crippled. This does not create cross-cultural understanding, it undermines it.

    Minstrel_PosterBillyVanWare_editAs a former student of anthropology, I know that cultural diffusion is always happening. Look at pidgin languages. Look at the appreciation of art in the different departments of encyclopedic museums. Look at the cultural diversity within the fabric of our nation. Go to Singapore and see the merging of several South Asian cultures into one nation.

    I’m interested in reactions to this piece since I’m sure I don’t have a complete understanding.


  • Back At It

    Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

    I’ve found my rhythms. Back at Latin, going to turn today back to Ovid from Caesar. Writing. I’m 4,000 words plus into Superior Wolf and my brain is buzzing, following trails here and there with characters, research, narrative structure. Working out is back, too, 6 days a week right now. I’m not where I was in terms of fitness, not sure how the altitude has affected me, but I’m improving and that’s the key. The whole fitness area is still in flux, but I have a pattern I’m using.

    A new element, too. I’m going to make some art. Not sure what quite yet, though I’ve got some ideas and lots of material. When my center room work space gets finished, I plan to get at it. There’s also, with art, the research and work with art history, theory. Not there yet in that work, but it will come.

    Even, if you managed to get through my long posts under Beyond the Boundaries, Original Relation and Reimagining Faith, you’ll know, my reimagining project has finally begun to take off. Why now I’m not sure, but there you go.

    This blog, of course, has remained a constant.

    Now, if we could just sell that house.


  • Plateaus

    Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

    Struggling with Caesar. Two things keep me at it. This quote: confusion is the sweat of the intellect. And, struggle is the first and painful step toward flow. There is, too, that stubborn insistence that I can learn this.

    I’ve not discussed learning plateaus in the Latin for some time, but I passed one last week, when I began to be able to read the Latin without referencing vocabulary or grammars. This lasted only for a couple of sentences, but I did it. This capacity has resurfaced since then, but the ease I experienced last week is gone. For now. What I mean here is that I’m struggling on a much different plateau than in the past.

    This process has been excruciatingly slow. It’s very similar to working out though. You keep at it, do a certain amount regularly and the benefits slowly accumulate. Right now I’m doing an hour to an hour and a half of Latin a day. That’s about all my mind can tolerate without becoming resistant to further work.

    I’m midway through today’s work in the Gallic War, book 4, section 26. Caesar’s troops have landed near the White Cliffs of Dover and are fighting their way ashore. It’s tough going for them right now.


  • Emerging

    Imbolc                                                                        Settling Moon II

    The loft is slowly coming together. One section, the workout space, is close to its eventual configuration. It still needs the pull-up bar. After that it will be as I envisioned it. Doesn’t mean it won’t change after I use it for a while.

    The books, as I’ve said before, are clustered and now await built-in bookshelves. As the bookshelves go up Ruth and I will organize them. All my art is, for now, still in boxes or rolled up in tubes. Until the wallspace is more defined, I’ll not be hanging or placing anything.

    The IKEA standing desk still needs it work surface brought up from the garage. The twopieces are very heavy. Jon is going to build a round wooden table as a project space. He recommends Paxton Lumber as a source for the table top. This is a national chain owned by Bill Paxton’s family. (actor)

    Storage space for office supplies is non-existent right now, so that’s a future project. Filing, which I thought I’d get started over the weekend, I’ll get to this week.

    Aside from tweaks though, I’m ready to get back to a regular workout and translation schedule since the remaining work here will be some time in the realization.

     


  • Classic

    Samain                                                                              Closing Moon

    Back to the Latin over the last few days. It’s surprising how much like weight lifting and cardio-vascular work outs studying a language is. It needs constant effort. I let go of the discipline of daily translation for about a month and my ease of work with the language suffered considerably. I’m back to it now, but it’s a challenge, will take awhile to get the flow back.

    (Philemon and Baucis)

    Surprised myself on Friday by telling Greg that I’m hoping for a synthesis between my study of Latin and my study of art history. I thought I was doing this to implant the stories of the Metamorphoses in my head. Turns out I have an additional agenda.

    What would the synthesis look like? Not sure right now, but one obvious route in is to look at all the art inspired by Ovid, then translate all the relevant stories (I did several for the Titian exhibition at the MIA) and learn the backstory about artists, paintings, the myths, and the Augustan context for Ovid’s work. Somewhere in there is probably something pretty interesting.


  • Regret, like resistance to the Borg, is futile. In all ways but one.

    Fall                                                                                Falling Leaves Moon

    Not sure why, but today I told Greg, my Latin tutor, why I was doing this. Or, maybe I’ve told him before and don’t remember, but I don’t think so. (Of course, by definition, how would I know?)

    The story begins with my traipsing off to college, already doubting my Christian faith for a number of reasons, not the least of which was what I perceived as a holding back by my native Methodism of (to me at that point) elegant proofs for the existence of God. I got them from the local Catholic priest. I didn’t know that he re-iterating Aquinas.

    It was not far into my first history of philosophy class that we dismantled each one, piece by piece. Oh. My.

    Philosophy set my mind on fire week after week. I signed up for Logic in the second semester and the second history of philosophy segment. Even though I left Wabash I had already earned half a philosophy major’s worth of credits in my freshman year.

    All this excitement led me quickly to the conclusion that I wanted to be able to read German, so I could pursue Kant, Hegel and Heidegger in their native language. So, I signed up for German, too. From my point of view it was a disaster. I struggled in every aspect of it and was faced with getting a D at the end of the second semester. That was not going to happen, so I dropped it.

    A youthful decision, one I regret. It took me 45 years to get back to a language; but, I decided I wanted to challenge myself, see if my conclusion, defensively drawn in 1966, that I could not learn a language, was in fact true. It was not true.

    Now I have a deeper regret, that I didn’t pursue German further and that I didn’t do Latin and Greek while in college, too. The classics and art history seem to be my natural intellectual terrain, but I never took a course in either one. Regrets are pointless, of course, the retrospective both wallowing in a past now gone and not retrievable, but I believe there is one good thing about them.

    They can be a goad to action now, or future action. That is, we don’t have to repeat the actions we regret. We can change our life’s trajectory. So, I intend to spend the third phase of my life, as long as body and mind hold together, pursuing the classics and art history, doing as much writing about both as I can.

     


  • Slowed

    Fall                                                                            Falling Leaves Moon

    Been moving at a reduced pace the last four days. Latin each day, getting further into Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Today he set out on a characteristic fast march from Rome to protect “our province”, a part of which is now Provence, from marauding Helvetians. Whom he’d set up with a betrayal by a wealthy leader of their people, Orgetorix. This is the war when Caesar, in the ever expanding effort of Rome to secure its borders, bleeds himself into world history. He speaks of himself in the third person.

    Beyond the Latin, not so much else. Picked a few raspberries. Electrified the visible fence. (Kate says I should call it the invisible fence, except I didn’t bury it, I strung it on an existing fence line.)

    Finished up the Southern Reach trilogy. Not sure how I felt about it. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it might have been good. In essence it presents an alien invasion that is so alien we can’t even be sure we’ve been invaded. Its central idea, that an alien might come to earth in a way so outside our experience that we would have difficulty recognizing it, seems valid to me. Anyhow. Check it out or not.

    Watching the news, picking up positive threads about the environment. Bill McKibben’s 350 organization’s 400,000 person march in NYC was good news. Increasing public disapproval of the Polymet mine project is another. Coal seems to have been knocked back on its heels, at least here in Minnesota and by Obama’s actions, in the rest of the country. Little El Hierro has gone 100% renewable as did the Danish island of Samsø. Even the President’s decision to reach out to a smaller club of wealthy countries for action on carbon emissions is a positive sign, maybe the most positive of all these.

    Still, as a Sierra Club staffer said when I gave her the same list, “Yeah, but doesn’t it make you nervous?” She’s right. Gaining ground would be so unfamiliar to us that we might make mistakes. But we have to take the risk that our message might finally be gaining in both public and political circles.

    Feeling like I might get back to the packing side tomorrow. Clean up some clutter left behind after the SortTossPack push. Vet yet more files. Pack photographs, office supplies. There’s still more to go.

     


  • Scottish Independence? Yes.

    Lughnasa                                                                               College Moon

    The global market in television programs, which has increased its reach now that aggregators have entered the market, offers insights into other cultures. I’ve found a clue about the English/Celtic divide in one of them.

    Kate and I have converted our television viewing to Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime as I’ve mentioned before. A knock on effect (as the Brits would say) has been an increase in watching BBC shows: Waking the Dead, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Line of Duty and others whose names I can’t recall. We’re currently watching MI-5, a long running show that features Britain’s internal security service, a combination of the CIA & the FBI.

    It’s interesting as drama. They have us on edge at least once during most shows. It’s equally interesting as a reveal of stereotypical British views, especially of other countries. The Americans are loud or devious or arrogant, or, often, all three. The French. Well, they’re French and can be dismissed pretty much.

    The Celts have representation on the show mainly through the IRA which MI-5 portrays as ruthless, blood-thirsty and callous. Which mirrors exactly the Irish attitude toward the English, their long time occupiers. The Welsh show up occasionally and the Scots appear mostly through the Glaswegian accent which I’ve learned to recognize.

    The other night Harry Pearce, head of MI-5, made a remark about the Celts. I’m paraphrasing: Oh, you know there’s no such thing as a Celtic race. Doesn’t exist. This is an ethnocentric point of view, one which posits English culture as the norm (not really a big surprise in that attitude) and uses it to dismiss the cultural roots of the Celts.

    Culture does not equal race, never has. Race, in fact, is a nonsense phrase in terms of the homo sapiens gene pool. Yes, people discriminate on their folk understanding of race as discernible by skin color, but genetically? The differences that do exist (and they are minor) have no correlation to racist typologies.

    One clear marker of culture has always been language. Find a different language from your own and you’ve usually found a different culture. All the Celtic lands have some form of the Celtic language as their historical tongue: Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic chief among them though there are variations on the Isle of Mann, Brittany (Briton) and Galicia (a Celtic province in Spain’s far northwest). Probably Cornwall, too, but I’m not sure about that.

    Then, there is the matter of history. The Picts (Scots), Welsh, Irish, Manx and Cornish were the indigenous people of the British Isles. Yes, they were immigrants likely, too, sometime after the culture that built Stonehenge and before the Roman and Anglo/Saxon invasions, but the various tribes of the Celtae were in place long before the Anglo/Saxons, the direct ancestors of the English.

    The English have a subdue, occupy and rule mentality that did not begin in the days of the British Empire writ global. No, it began, like most good empires do, close to home. The Scots held off the British (and the Romans, Hadrian’s Wall) the longest, succumbing only after a Scottish king, James Stuart, inherited the British throne, but Scotland has a long, long history of self-rule, the longest of all the Celtic lands.

    Harry Pearce of the television show MI-5 had it partly right, there is no Celtic race (no black race or yellow race or white race or brown race either), but the bald attempt to dismiss the Celtic reality, its long and distinctive history and culture, is not, again as the British say, on.


  • Moving on

    Lughnasa                                                                           College Moon

    It’s been another full tilt day. Business meeting in the morning, then shed cleaning. We worked, ate lunch, napped, and worked some more. Geez. I told Kate after this experience that I believe we should do the same in our new place. Every 20 years just like here.

    We’re over half done with packing and decluttering, the momentum seems to be shifting now.  More like we’re moving toward Colorado than away from Minnesota.

    In my Latin yesterday with Greg we decided I would keep on with every two week sessions, reading Caesar and Ovid and whoever else, I think Vergil’s Georgics, too. Apparently at my particular place in the learning curve reading and more reading, grappling with each nuance is the way forward. After the amount of time I’ve invested so far, I’ve decided to go all the way. I want to become a fluent reader of Latin. That’s a ways away, but no longer imaginary.

    It’s odd, I realized, but every two weeks for one hour is 26 contact hours in a year. A language class for a 12 week quarter would meet at least 3 times, usually 5 with a lab, which is either 36 or 60 hours a quarter. We’re not even doing a full 26 because we have sessions that we miss or extend for three weeks. That means I’m advancing ok given the number of contact hours of teaching.

    Plus, while it’s certainly luxurious to have a personal teacher, a tutor, there is additional learning from being with a group doing the same exercises-a class. All this is self-talk, really, about taking 4 years plus to get to this level. Seems like a long time to me. But maybe not.

     

     

     


  • A Celtic Neo-Renaissance?

    Lughnasa                                                                                           College Moon

    Two matters Celtica in my life right now, causing my early writing interests in things Celtic and ancient to resurface. The first is Caesar and his commentary on the Gallic War. There is, in fact, a Roman gauze thrown over the lives of the Celts, first by Caesar and Tacitus, then by that other world dominating super power, the Roman Catholic church. After the Romans left around 400 or so A.D., the Roman church filled in behind them.

    It was these two literate oppressors who recorded both the religion and folkways of the Celts. There is, as you can imagine, considerable disjunct between the likely reality of the Celts and their description by people looking down from positions from authority. Especially in the case of the Catholics who combined power with a demand to change the old ways.

    The second is the upcoming vote, on September 18th, on Scottish independence. The English, in some ways the political and national extension of both the Romans and the Roman Catholics into the contemporary world of the British Isles, overthrew Celtic lands (Wales and Ireland) and later merged with Scotland.

    They first took Wales, which never managed to govern itself as a nation, divided too much by its steep mountains. That was Edward I, Longshanks, in 1284. In 1536 Henry VIII took Ireland and, ironically, tried to supplant Catholicism by sending over Protestants. That is, members of the Church of England, a church created by his famous conflict with the Papacy over his failed attempt to find a wife who would give him a son. Then, in 1707, through a dynastic inheritance by the Scottish king, James Stuart, of the throne of England, Scotland joined England.

    Over the course of the last century and this one those bonds have become loosened, first by the Irish struggles, not entirely over even today, and the independence movements in Wales and Scotland. The Welsh movement has not got much momentum, but the Scottish one seems to be gaining favor with the country. If Scotland shakes loose, we might see again a more recognizable Celtic culture with both Ireland and Scotland looking both back to their roots and forward to their own, independent futures.