Daily Archives: January 24, 2014

Health

Muscle Confusion

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Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

Started a new exercise program, P90X.  The X stands for xtreme and the dialogue of personal trainer Tony Horton is just that.  Xtreme in a weird way.  Self-congratulatory and self-denigrating.  A jarring mixture.

(That’s Tony in panels 1 and 3)

That aside, I believe this program will energize my workouts which had gotten stale.  P90X is a 90 day package of alternating resistance and cardio workouts, each one taking around an hour.  The first one, chest and back, which was tonight pushed me, but in a good way.  Tony’s big thing (yes, Tony and I are on a first name basis already) is muscle confusion.  That is, he works muscle groups from several different angles.

It is true that repetitive workouts begin to lose their punch because your body adapts to them and doesn’t work as hard.  I want to avoid muscle loss associated with aging, to get stronger so that the outdoor work I do is less tiring, and to give myself the advantage that regular, intense exercise has to offer.  I’ve been doing the first and the last with a self-designed program, but I wasn’t progressing.  We’ll see if this program will produce different results.

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, Translating Metamorphoses

4 Years In

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Winter                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

The Latin this morning.  Going over my translations, preparing for sight reading with Greg.  This means reading the Latin aloud, in the order in which I translate it, then translating.  Even with a word’s meaning written over it and the declensions and conjugations indicated below them (annotated by me), this is still a challenge, even after preparation.

(This is a fresco inspired by the passages I translated today.  Lycaon’s servant brings a platter of human meat to Jupiter.  This is the affront for which Jupiter will transform Lycaon into a wolf.)

Preparation essentially means going over the passages I’ll translate with Greg and translating them in my head, checking the translation I get with the translation I’ve written down earlier.  Because I’m translating faster now, we get through much less in a session than I translate, so I’m on verse 300 of Book I, but Greg and I are at verse 216.  This means I’m working with him on material I’ve translated often several weeks ago.  Verse 216, for example, is post-Thanksgiving work.  As a result, reconstructing my thinking then is sometimes difficult.

Today, though, for the first time, I found stuff I struggled with in that post-Thanksgiving translating coming more easily as I went back through it for review.  More easily is not the same as easily, but I’m getting better faster now.