Category Archives: Myth and Story

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Off the Rhythm

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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.

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

Chaff

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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)

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Writing

Oh. Yeah. I Remember That.

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Imbolc                                                                    Valentine Moon

A few days back I wrote this post.  In it I admitted my yearning for the mystical, the mysterious, the contemplative; but, the metaphysical superstructure for them had been stripped away. (by me.  and for the most part happily so.)  Those impulses, partly stirred by the long, cold winter and its isolation, welcome, but draining at the same time, have been niggling away at me for some time.

(Progoff)

Then, I remembered.  I know how to get those elements back in my life.  The Ira Progoff Journal Workshops. I’ve done two of these, the three part series.  I’ve included some introductory material on them below.  Progoff was a Jungian analyst who worked over his career to develop a means of self-work rooted in Jungian method.  His efforts produced the Intensive Journal ,Process Meditation and these workshops.

Here’s what I like.  The work is yours, for you and reviewed by no one.  It’s a method, which I’ve used off and on, for many years.  As some of you know, I was in Jungian analysis, also off and on, for many years.  That means the worldview behind Progoff’s method reaches into deep work I’ve already done.

There are no guru’s here, no dogma, no path other than the ancientrail of self-wisdom. There’s no follow up, no encouraging you to do more.  Yet, there is a deep passion for the work individuals do on their own through Progoff’s methods.  It fits me and I’m glad I remembered it.

In fact, I’m headed off to Tucson, Arizona in late March for a six-day retreat to do all three workshops.  There will be, too, side trips to Carlsbad Caverns, Chaco Canyon and grandaughter Ruth just before her 8th–no longer required to ride in the car seat–birthday.  Ah.

 

Introduction to the Intensive Journal Program

Experience a life-changing process to give your life greater direction, vitality and purpose. Developed in 1966 by Dr. Ira Progoff, our nationally-recognized program has helped 175,000 people lead more fulfilling lives. Discover resources and possibilities you could not have imagined. The Intensive Journal method can be your honest friend in the creative process of shaping your life.

Article 1: The Intensive Journal Process: A Path to Self-Discovery
by Kathy Juline
Article 2: The Write to Fulfilling Life: An Interview with Ira Progoff
by The New Times
Article 3: The Way of the Journal

How can you benefit from this method?

  • By using an integrated system of writing exercises. It’s much more than a diary.
  • Gain insights about many different areas including personal relationships, career and special interests, body and health, dreams and imagery, and meaning in life.
  • Apply fresh approaches to access your creative capacities and untapped possibilities.
  • Work in total privacy. Neither you nor anyone else will judge or analyze your life.
  • Use a method that is without dogma. The Intensive Journal method is a process that can be used by people of all different backgrounds, interests and faiths.
  • Attend workshops at leading centers for reasonable prices.
  • You do not have to like to write or be a good writer. You are the only one who reads what you write.

Part I: Life Context (LC) Workshop: Gaining a Perspective on Life

Develop an inner perspective on the movement of your unfolding life process. Gain greater awareness of the continuity and direction of your life as it reveals what it is trying to become.

Generate insights about major areas of your life, including personal relationships, career and special interests, and body and health. The dialogue process provides a unique way to gain feedback and momentum as you deepen your understanding of these areas.

Part II: Depth Contact (DC) Workshop: Symbolic Images and Meaning in Life

Deepen your experience as you focus on the exercises in the second half of the Intensive Journal workbook. Learn how to use Progoff’s unique non-analytical method to draw forth messages from you inner symbolic experiences which can provide important leads in your unfolding life process.

Using Process Meditation™ techniques provides specific ways of developing your spiritual process in the context of your entire life. Explore experiences of connection that had significant meaning, gain insights about your ultimate concerns, and explore major themes in your life. Progoff’s advanced meditation techniques provide an avenue for greater reflection.

Part III: Life Integration (LI) Workshop/Journal Feedback™ Process: Integrating the Life Process

Progoff said the Journal Feedback process is the “essence of the Intensive Journal method and one of my main contributions.”

Experience the cumulative dynamic process created from working with material in one workbook section and how it can lead to entries in other related areas. This progressively deepening process generates an inner momentum and energy as you apply Progoff’s non-analytical Journal Feedback techniques. Your workbook becomes an active instrument as you approach situations from different perspectives.

New awareness and growth become possible as you realize connections between diverse areas. You are drawing your unfolding life process forward as you move toward greater wholeness and integration.

Art and Culture, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Apres Deluge

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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.

Holidays, Memories, Myth and Story

Heart Shaped Cakes

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

Back in the far away long ago my mother used to bake heart shaped cakes, devil’s food, for my birthday.  This Valentine holiday birthday has always been one of the semi-secret joys of my life.  I get to celebrate my annual pilgrimage, my odometer turns over, on a day now celebrated for love; special enough to remember, not so special that it overpowers my birthday, like I always imagine Christmas would or July 4th.

It did make those elementary school rituals, often laden with important messages not quite understood, hoped for, but more often missed than received, even more fraught.

Now that I know it’s the mid-day of the ides of February, 13-15th, and that Lupercalia followed it in Roman times, it makes this whole approaching time more special.  February was the Roman December, the last month of the year and the ides, those mid-month days sacred to Jupiter, usually had festivals and celebrations.  On this last month of the Roman year the Romans took care to purify themselves and offer sacrifices to absolve themselves of whatever needed to be left behind in the old year.

We could approach Valentine’s Day as a day for clearing up any uncertainties or unpleasantnesses built up over the previous year.  Seek a way to resolve them, then go out for a meal to seal them off, leave them behind.

Art and Culture, Asia, Family, Friends, Holidays, Myth and Story, Retirement, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Ecce Homo

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Imbolc                                                             Valentine Moon

Scott got reservations at David Fong’s, a long time Chinese restaurant in Bloomington. David Fong, Yin’s brother, started a chow mein takeout on the same location about 50 years ago.  This was eating in a Chinese restaurant on Chinese New Year’s, not eating a New Year meal.  The food was very good, especially since Scott came complete with recommendations from Yin as to what we would like.  Handy.

Frank, Warren, Tom, Scott and I were there.  We shared our steak kow, mongolian beef, lo mein, honey crusted walnut shrimp, pot stickers and a crumbly chicken dish whose name I can’t recall.  You put the chicken in a lettuce leaf, sort of like a taco.  All of them were tasty.

We spent a lot of time talking about grandkids.  Scott and I had a similar experience of five-year old grand-daughters who decided we were not “real” grandpop’s because we were not the biological father of their parent.  As with Ruth, this has passed in Scott’s case, too.

Tom has set up an intriguing question for our February 17th meeting:   What does it mean to be a male in our culture?  He has also asked that we bring three images of men that will start off our conversation.  I’ve got a few posted here, but as I’ve gone hunting for images it made me wonder if there is a book called the male image in art.  Lots of such books for females, many of nudes, but of men?  A quick google search in the books section shows none.  Probably are some, but that they’re not obvious says something.

Another thought that occurred to me, and it relates to third phase life for men, is this, what is our image of a man at home?  That is, beyond the guy with the fly-rod, golf club, barca-lounger, or woodshop.  And these are based on the silly, even pernicious idea of third phase life for men as the replacement of work hours with a favorite leisure activity.

With no positive image of a man at home it’s difficult to understand how to be at home when one has left traditional work life behind.

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

Flood Narratives

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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.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Sprinting

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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.

Latin, Memories, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Focused

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Winter                                                           Seed Catalog Moon

Made a concerted push and finished Climate Change, Week 2, today.   Always surprised at how concentrated mental effort exhausts me.

A bit of Latin today.  It was interesting, so I’ll post it here. Ovid describes the state of the countryside in Lycaon’s kingdom after the flood:

This occupies the high ground, a hooked ship sits

294  And draws its oars here, where not long ago a farmer plowed,

295  Above the fields or sails over the top of buried villas,

296  This ship on the surface catches fish in elm-trees.

 

This apres deluge piece from the Metamorphoses reminded me of a story I followed with fascination as a high school student.  The Army Corps of Engineers put a dam on the Salamonie River and submerged Monument City (pic) and two other towns.  The Corps bought the towns in 1965 and moved everyone out, including, which intrigued me at the time, all the cemeteries.

In this case you can literally catch fish in the elm-trees.  There was a dark glamour to the whole project. These towns flooded regularly and the dam sought to end the problem of rising waters in the area by covering them with water so that hooked ships might draw their oars there.

Kate’s sister Anne has been here the last couple of days sewing.  She’s got a couple of days off from the jail in Shakopee.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Grrr

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Winter                                                                      Seed Catalog Moon

My Latin skills have begun to increase.  I can almost see myself learning.  Most of the time for the last four years it’s been slog, slog, slog, slog, insight.  Repeat.  Now something has begun to happen, like that learning has begun to snowball, building on itself.  Which, I guess, is what’s happening.  It’s weird, but fun.

(pic:  Ta Dah)

Microsoft, I’d forgotten how much you used to frustrate me.  Now that I no longer work as much in Word my animus toward Microsoft had softened, but getting Missing back from Robert Klein reminded me.  I can’t open the damned file.  I’ve had this problem ever since I “upgraded” to Word 2013.  It has some protective mechanism that is very suspicious of outside documents.  I’ve unlocked most of them, but so far this one, one I really care about, won’t open.  Grrrr.

Still, I’ve looked at some of Robert’s work and he’s very thorough and helpful.  I can’t utilize his work to its full capacity until I can get the document into Word however.  That’s where I can manipulate the editing and see exactly what he meant.  Grrrr.  Again.

One step closer to finishing up the final draft.  Might get it done before Denver.  If I can open it in the first place.