Daily Archives: December 31, 2010

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Myth and Story, permaculture, Retirement, Weather +Climate

It’s About Time

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Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” – T.S. Eliot

Though the calendar, as reformed by Julius Caesar and then Pope Gregory XIII*, rolls over tonight at midnight, and, confusingly to me, has already rolled over on several midnights already, you might notice that the time I keep remains the same.  Tomorrow we will still be in Winter and the Moon of the Winter Solstice will still be waning.  The Great Wheel does not recognize a calendar; it counts time by terrestrial movement through the heavens, moving, instead of hands, solar radiation and expressing itself not in hours or minutes but by days and nights and seasons.  Of course, an accurate calendar makes sense for the world of humans because we figure time in much smaller units and like to be able to do things according to spans of weeks, months, years though these are not, no matter what some might say, natural measures.  They are measures created by the human mind, invented to follow our fascination with chronological time, that is linear time, probably occasioned by our awareness of death.

Note, however, that measuring time does not create more of it, nor make of it less.  All calendars and clocks do is divide up the turning days and advancing nights, make smaller divisions in the more basic cyclical time generated by spaceship earth in its star-loving path.

We can choose which time we want to emphasize in our lives.  I prefer the cyclical time, the turning of the Great Wheel of the heavens, the coming of light and dark, the changes of spring, summer, fall and winter.  As much as possible I try to order my life and encourage myself to respond to seasonal change, but I, too, live in a world in which I am 63, soon to turn 64 in the year 2011, the third millennia after another bout of terrorism in the Middle East.  In this world people will only release money to me based on the linear trajectory of this body.  As for me, I cherish now the inner life brought on by the long nights, the cold and snow.

When spring breaks winter’s grip and flowers begin to push through the earth, when the garlic and the strawberries and the asparagus start anew to grow and flourish above ground,  then too, will I cherish the smell of moist soil carried to me by moist early spring air.  It will not matter to me whether that time comes in March or April or May.  Oh, it may matter to the horticultural me who needs to get leeks and peas and lettuce and other vegetables planted in their due time, but even those kind of changes cycle, too.  The bees will re-emerge to begin their dance with the blooming things, driven not by the clock, but by the presence or absence of the sun, the bright colors of flowering plants and the demands of the colony.

We have our preferences, I know, and mine for many years was the dayplanner, meeting time, always moving stream of time.  No longer.  At least not when I’m at my best.

*wikipedia  “The Gregorian calendar, also known as the Western calendar or the Christian calendar, is the internationally accepted civil calendar. It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom the calendar was named, by a decree signed on 24 February 1582, a papal bull known by its opening words Inter gravissimas.[4] The reformed calendar was adopted later that year by a handful of countries, with other countries adopting it over the following centuries. The motivation for the Gregorian reform was that the Julian calendar assumes that the time between vernal equinoxes is 365.25 days, when in fact it is about 11 minutes less. The accumulated error between these values was about 10 days when the reform was made, resulting in the equinox occurring on March 11 and moving steadily earlier in the calendar. Since the equinox was tied to the celebration of Easter, the Roman Catholic Church considered that this steady movement was undesirable.”

Humanities, Letters, Literature, Writing

Lost in Translation

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Winter                                                                    Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

 

What happens in the act of translation?  After years of reading translated texts and noticing the often wide discrepancies among various translations of the same underlying words, I have wondered how such drastically different English versions can come from the same work.  Understanding this, really translation as a whole, and understanding Ovid’s Metamorphosis in particular, is what led to my current project, learn Latin and make my own translation of this Roman masterwork from the time of Augustus Caesar.

Some of that learning has already begun to happen.  Though I’m only 60 verses into the first of 5 books in the Metamorphosis, I have learned a complex truth about translation.  There is no such thing as an exact translation, probably not even such a thing as a literal translation.  Why?  Several things.  First, grammar has rules, sure, but the application of those rules can lead to different English.  In Latin a good example is the participial phrase.  Latin uses participles much more often than English and in ways we never do.   One such use, the ablative absolute, can consist of as few as two words, perhaps neither of them a verb, that gets translated into a subordinate clause in English.  Sometimes, in order to translate, you have to add a verb, almost always you have to add a conjunction.  There is no right conjunction nor is there one way to translate the participle into a verb in the clause though in both cases you can make an educated guess from the context.

Second, the words themselves, as in English, are polyvalent.  Example:  nebula.  It can mean mist, smoke, vapor, fog, exhalation.  Again, context helps, sometimes the desired English word is obvious, often not.

Third, at the level of a sentence or a paragraph, it may be impossible to render in any exact way what the author intended.  Instead, the translator has to read the Latin, understand the author’s intent as well as possible, then create an English sentence or paragraph that conveys the sense of the Latin rather than an accurate word for word translation.  In other words, translation is interpretation from the very beginning, in essence.

Fourth, as Greg and I found in today’s Ovid, texts themselves vary.  His text had three words in one phrase that mine did not have, one missing altogether in mine and two with different cases.  This is a phenomenon very familiar to me from study of the Bible, that is, textual criticism, where judgments must be made about the authenticity of the original text.  Usually, in textual criticism, it is assumed that the more difficult rendering is the older and therefore closer to the original, while the easier is assumed to be a scholarly “cleaning up” of a problematic passage.  So, the text used for translation matters.

Fifth, once you’ve cleared these hurdles, in a text like the Metamorphosis, you have to deal with the difficulties the text presents because it uses poetry rather than prose.  This means words may be in odd locations to justify rhyme schemes, metaphor or other poetic devices.  In particular words that need to be together in English may be separated by several other words, the relationship only apparent at all because of endings.

Sixth, in the case of poetry you have to consider the challenge in creating English poetry from Latin poetry. Often the decision is to render the whole in prose, because making Latin rhyme schemes, for example, work in English may be next to impossible.

So, even though I’m still far from my goal of fluent translation, I’ve already learned, from the inside, several things that explain vast differences in translated texts.