Summer Under the Lily Moon
In the long ago faraway I took symbolic logic. My freshman year of college. I’d never struggled academically and German had already taken my measure in the first semester, so I was in no way ready for another problem.
Larry Hackestaff was the professor, a philosopher who carried a six-pack of Bud attached to his belt through the plastic rings holding it together. He was a young guy and he enjoyed the campus gatherings which were 1950’s typical boozy events with beer kegs and purple Jesus.
Six weeks into symbolic logic my mind had turned to mush. This stuff just didn’t make sense to me. Not because I wasn’t trying. I studied hard, but I wasn’t getting it. After my debacle with German, my self-image was in trouble. I took my green copy of our text to the library for one last go, before our first exam.
Somehow that evening, the propositions and logical symbols and proofs and fallacies jumped off the page for first time and entered my brain. Never worried about logic or my self-image in that way again.
I’ve been studying Latin for 2 and a half years now, starting almost from scratch and aiming toward my goal of translating Ovid’s long poem, The Metamorphoses. The grammar made sense to me; the vocabulary is not difficult, but the application of the two in translating Ovid has proved hard.
Lots of reasons for that, reasons that reflect my still developing grasp of both grammar and vocabulary, the nature of poetic Latin and, I learned yesterday, my own overly analytical approach to the task.
I wrote down every word and every possible meaning and case or conjugation. Then I began to assemble a translation, matching the singular neuter ablatives with other singular neuter ablatives, checking out the various meanings of the words and locating verbal forms and their possible use in the sentence.
This was satisfying in one respect. I ended up with a lot of notes and information. And I imagine that did me some good. I had, however, missed the primary point Greg had been trying for over a year to get me to see.
I saw it yesterday. Look at the verb. Translate it by itself. Find a noun that is the subject of the verb. Find an object if there is one. Everything else modifies one of these three. Greg has championed this “mechanical” style of approaching translation as best for novices.
I believed him. I thought I was doing that; but, I wasn’t. Now, I see it. The next 10 verses fell into place quickly. It was an aha moment even greater than that one at Wabash all those years ago. More satisfying, too.