Monthly Archives: June 2014

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Climbing the Cliff to the Final Plateau

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Beltane                                                           Summer Moon

On Friday I had a hard Latin session with my tutor Greg. And I’m glad. When we finished, he said, “You need to go back to basics, gender and number.” Oh, I thought. By god, he’s right. I’ve been pushing myself, trying to get faster so I can get this work started in earnest, thinking it’s maybe time, maybe past time for having gotten to this point. Doesn’t matter.

I am where I am. But. What I need to do to advance, to start climbing the cliff which leads, I’m pretty sure, to the last plateau, is slow down, pay exquisitely close attention to grammatical detail.  That means not entering my conclusion about a word’s grammatical identifiers until I’m sure. That often means holding all or most of the words in a sentence in my head while I try out different combinations.

Then, and I started doing this today, I translate the sentence. At that point I go to Anderson and Lee and Guanci (commentators) and Giles, a literal translation, to check my translation. After I take in that information, I go back over my translation, checking what each word means in the very best literal translation I can muster. Then, I enter the grammatical detail under the words.

Here’s what I mean. We’ll take Book I: v. 452 and v. 453 as a for instance.

Primus amor Phoebi Daphne Peneia, quem non
fors ignara dedit, sed saeva Cupidinis ira.

Under primus I wrote, adj. s. m. nom. (adjective, singular, masculine, nominative). Under fors I wrote s. f. nom. (female, singular, nominative).  Dedit got 3. perf. (perfect tense, 3rd person). And so on. When I wrote these descriptors under the word (I print out the Latin text using 5 spaces between lines and write the descriptors under the word and the translation over it.), I already had a translation done and knew that in it these words had to have these descriptors. Before this change in my process, I’d been trying to get pretty close, not worrying about being exact. Not good enough anymore.

When this comes naturally, I’ll be a Latinist on my own terms.  I can see this not very far ahead, just as, when I was deconstructing the dog crates, I knew I would get them done the next day though it didn’t look like I’d made much progress. I could see the whole and what to do next then to make it come apart. With the Latin it’s the reverse, now I’ll see the parts and make them whole.

Dogs

Dog Escape Diary: Epsiode # unknown

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Beltane                                                               Summer Moon

Walked the perimeter, checking for holes under the fence line, about 2,500 feet (.5 mile). Nothing. My guess is that the neighbor across the street returned Gertie, our German shorthair, and inadvertently left the orchard gates undone. Gertie can jump in the orchard on her own, Rigel has to dig in (Vega always follows). Over the last 5 years however I have laid down barriers to digging that now extend all along the orchard fence line. Rigel did not enter the orchard under the fence, nor did she dig out under the chain link (the perimeter).

The only other exit is the gate on the deck. It was closed though unlocked. It swings onto the deck making a dog’s exit one requiring pawing. Not impossible, though less likely, I think, than the neighbor scenario. Anyhow Rigel goes to the pet groomer’s at 12:30 pm for a wash. She needs to smell better. Probably better put, we need her to smell better

Dogs

Wet and Smelly

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Beltane                                                                    Summer Moon

While Kate and I investigated green options for our new home, our dogs got out. In the rain they explored the neighborhood, discovering, somewhere (could be on our property) something really smelly. Perhaps dead. A neighbor corralled them and brought them home, so we were notified of their wanderings by phone and their discovery by smell.

Rigel, chief escapist and (literally) dogged hunter, is the smelly one. Whatever she got, it was rank. They all slept late this morning, tired out from an exhausting day of freedom.

These guys differ from our other packs in that they typically leave, then come to the front door to be let in. Our Wolfhounds, if liberated, took full advantage. At one point several years ago, back when the dog feeding stalls were in full use, all five of our Wolfhounds escaped and were discovered by a dog lover over 2 miles from home. She called the vet and got our phone number. Turns out she was the mother of a patient of Kate’s.

I feel like I have a Ph.D. in dog containment, but this just goes to show that even the experts can exceed their knowledge base. Shouldn’t have left them outside so long. Convicts have all day every day to decide their escape strategies. As long as we let them in on a regular basis, this pack won’t escape, but if left in the rain for too long. Well…