Daily Archives: May 10, 2013

Latin, Letters, Translating Metamorphoses

Coeptis

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

Greg, my Latin tutor, and I have begun moving through Ovid with an eye to a possible commentary, noting where I have difficulty and where we both have trouble.  These are the kind of things that can be expanded on in a commentary, as both aids to future translators but also as educational tools to broaden an understanding of this particular work and Ovid in general.

It’s difficult to describe my level of excitement about this.  After spending so long getting ready, we’re actually doing it and I’m a full partner, not as skilled as Greg at Latin but I’m focused on Ovid and have a lot bring to the conversation.  My translations have begun to raise fewer and fewer flags and my choices bring a fresh perspective to the work.

It’s fun.  I know that must sound weird, but I really enjoy this.  It’s detective work, history, poetry, mythology, philology and straight out brain work.  Complex and a bit arcane, my favorite.

At this point I can actually imagine translating all 15 books, 15,000 verses.  Who knows?  I’m also expanding my reading to Virgil and Horace, perhaps some Catullus, too.  I need to know other Augustan poets and their conventions to better understand Ovid’s work.

Here’s another oddity in all this.  When I finish a session with Greg, every two weeks, I feel like I’m done with classes and all I want to do is relax, read something or putter in the garden.  This is an old, well ingrained feeling, put into place over many, many years of education.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Latin and Art

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Beltane                                                                 New (Early Growth) Moon

I passed some kind of milestone this week with the Latin.  My copy of Anderson, the commentary on Ovid’s first 5 books in Metamorphoses, fell apart.  I went online and found a hard back version, something that can withstand the repeated referencing, turning back and forth, putting my placeholders across it.  That this should happen just as I decided to begin work on the translation/commentary seems fortuitous.

(Daphne and Apollo)

In celebration of beginning the translation I have posted a Translating Metamorphoses page on the site where the most recent work will go up.  At some point I may begin posting work on the commentary, too, but that’s a ways off.  Right now Greg and I have just begun to note stuff down as we move along.

Translating in this manner is harder work than what I’ve been doing up to now, which has been essentially learning through translating Ovid.  Now I want to produce idiomatic English that is still faithful to the Latin text.  Also, I want to know more about the problems and content that I encounter.  That’s why I’ve begun reading the Ovid texts I’ve collected over the last year or so.  This is close reading, a different animal from just translating to learn.

At the same time I’ve created a new page, Art: A Journey.  This page will be the repository for my work on and with art following my time at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  The first published material there, two sheets of questions answered by me about Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, represent an attempt on my part to use exegetical techniques I learned studying the Old and New Testaments on art.

This draws me firmly into the realm of hermeneutics, a discipline about which I believe I may have some things to say.  We’ll see.  I’m still reading there.

Cinema and Television

Dystopia

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Beltane                                                                                New (Early Growth) Moon

Dystopian cinema has a long history.  Think back to Mad Max which featured the rise of an unknown, Mel Gibson.   I know it goes further back than that, Planet of the Apes, for example, and Blade Runner and Soylent Green, even Metropolis in the way back, at least as far as cinema goes.  The Road. Minority Report.  Pleasantville. Stepford Wives.

I saw Dredd last night, a remake of a terrible Sylvester Stallone movie, Judge Dredd.  This one posits 800 million people living in an enclosed mega-city stretching from D.C. to Boston, the rest of the US an irradiated wasteland.  Just why the key corridor of power and population remained more or less intact is not explained.

It’s a not unfamiliar story of police trapped inside a high rise controlled by the dark powers, in this case, Ma-Ma, a female maker and distributor of slo-mo, a drug that makes the world slow waaay down, and matriarch of the Ma-Ma gang that runs this 200 story apartment block.  The Raid: Redemption, a recent Indonesian martial arts film, features the same plot line.  This is a much better movie.

It is, in a sense, Vishnu against the dark side of Siva, order trying to rest stability out of chaos.  This type of entertainment might puzzle a viewer who questions the need for this kind of story.  What’s the point?

(Pleasantville)

It can serve a conservative political outlook, highlighting the stakes our contemporary world faces when attempting to maintain order against the forces of social entropy, whether terrorism, drug cartels or low hemlines.  It can serve a liberal political outlook: see what happens if we don’t address social injustice while we have the resources and stability. They remind us of the dark impulses struggling in our own souls, the urges toward incoherence that each of us manages, more or less, each day of our lives.

Darkest of all, of course, they serve notice that the second law of thermodynamics will tear apart everything we love.  Time, that silent executioner, works with it.

(On the Beach)

When we watch these movies, contained in an hour or two of story, of course, we get the pleasant sensation of boundaries to the destruction.  Its story finishes, we turn off the TV or leave the cinema and it’s all over.  In this sense these movies are the opposite of what they seem, a pacifier stuck in the mouth of our infantile desire to live forever.