Daily Archives: February 27, 2013

Memories

The Band

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Imbolc                                                                         Valentine Moon

Listening to the Band, The Weight.  One of my favorite bands.  Up on Cripple Creek.  The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.  I Shall Be Released.  The back up band for Dylan from 1965-1968 when he went on his Electric Tour, they played together until 1976, ending their touring days with the wonderful Martin Scorsese film, The Last Waltz.

Music congeals around it auras and memories, the mental flavors of a time, a moment in personal history.  Our song.  That song they played.  You know the one.  The music now known as psychedelic or acid rock cannot be heard by someone in the Movement during the ’60’s and early 70’s without instant transportation back, old Army jackets, pot, dope.  Looking out for the man.  Gettin’ back to the land.  Stopping the war.  Youth done up in  neon colors and lived to the Jefferson Airplane, Led Zepplin, the Doors.

Think of the Big Band era and World War II.  Glam rock and bubble gum.  Punk.  All have their devotees and their memories.

Magical memory tours.  That’s an important thing music offers.  I don’t go there often enough.

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Plateaus

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Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

After the Swede saw, lunch and a nap followed by another sentence, 6 verses long, in Ovid’s retelling of the Jason and Medea narrative.  When I have a week off from translating, or almost a week, like I had when I spent time rearranging and reorganizing, I wonder if I can still do it.  Sometimes I convince myself that what I’ve learned has dropped away and I’ve wasted all the time up to that point.  Silly, yes, but real nonetheless.

(Medea, Batumi, Georgia)

As a result, it is a relief when I return to the work and find myself able to translate.  This time in fact I managed a translation of a clause without looking up a word.  Something is seeping into the lower crevices of my brain.  Language work, at least for me, is slog, slog, slog, plateau.  Plateau, plateau, plateau.  Slog, slog, slog, slog.  Plateau.  So on.

Right now I’m gaining facility at recognizing words and verb forms and sussing out grammatical forms, though I’m wrong as often as I’m right.  That’s without Perseus (the online classics web engine), without Anderson (the scholarly commentator on Ovid) and without Wheelock (the grammar text).  There’s the plateau.

I can only advance part way into the text without the books.  With the books now I increase my facility by maybe another 25%.  So a lot of the time I can translate the literal sense of Latin correctly, but at least a quarter of the time, I’m lost.  That’s where my tutor comes into play.

(Ovid, Constanta, Romania, 2012)

He unsticks me from my stuck places and has been invaluable as a role model for tactics and strategy when approaching unfamiliar text.  He also guided me through the initial learning phase, about two years, when the grammar and vocabulary were still largely alien (foreign) to me.

My personal goal is to be 90 to 95% successful on my own by the end of this year.  Then, I imagine, I’ll use Greg (my tutor) less often and then as a backup.  That’s unless we decide together to get back on the commentary track.  That still sounds fun to me.

 

Bees, Garden

Removing Roadways. Of the Treekind.

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Imbolc                                                             Valentine Moon

In two separate deconstructive moves the squirrel arboreal highway into our orchard disappeared.  First, last fall, the small ash that had a branch brushing the fence came down; the first tree felled with the new Gransfor Burks ax.  Today, the Swede saw cut off a long limb which also dangled invitingly near the fence and, literally, a hop and a jump away from our Honeycrisp tree.  This four-inch thick oak limb had to come off now to avoid the possible of oak wilt getting transmitted through the wound.  That could happen if the cut were made even in early spring and any time from then until the end of the growing season.

Now the little buggers will have to scale the fence, grab an apple, rescale the fence with the apple, not so easy, and carry the apple up a tree trunk to get into the branches.  Again, not so easy.  But, as we are well aware, hardly impossible.  Squirrels, rabbits, deer, turkeys and dogs all create serious problems for the exurban gardener, problems to which they, I’ve discovered, no permanent solutions, only barriers that can restrict to our moveable feasts of fruit and vegetable.

Also, sadly, I checked the hive that had live bees back in January.  They are now dead.  My management practices were not the best last year, so I imagine I didn’t help them much, but it’s still disheartening.

 

Great Wheel

February

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Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Moon

February has come down to this, 2 days.  This short month, even at its most expansive still the shortest, ends on the 28th.  Then March.  The spring equinox, another magnet for the human urge to celebrate astronomical events, coming up.

We still have some weeks of winter yet, maybe as many as 4, since we have a deep snow cover, though not as deep as many years.  The deeper the snow cover, the more muted the temperature changes even though the sun climbs higher and higher in the sky as we put a lot of space between us and the orbital moment of the winter solstice.

I’m glad the change will come slowly since I’m still in winter mode, not ready yet to shed the coats and the cozy feeling of the cave.  That will come.

Today I’m happy to have snow outside the window, cool air and a long poem to translate.