Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
It’s been a week since Greg recommended I get to the place where I can read the Latin and translate as I read. This means doing what I’ve already done, looking up words, writing out a translation, but there is now another step. I look only at the Latin and translate it without reference to Perseus (on the web) or even to my notes. If I stumble, I go back to Perseus and the notes. Then back to the Latin alone. Only when I can look at the bare Latin and translate the sentence with no outside aides, can I feel finished.
I thought this would slow me down and at first it did. As I grew used to doing it though, staying “in” the Latin, as Greg called this method, began to make things easier. I began to to see the shape of sentences quicker, the subjects and objects popped out faster. Verb tenses and noun/adjective/pronoun declensions are becoming more automatic.
Staying “in” the Latin is winching me up, slowly, from the long plateau I’ve inhabited.
Here’s an example: “Hac iter est superis ad magni tecta Tonantis
regalemque domum.” This is a line from the story of Lycaon in the second large section of Metamorphoses, Book I. Just looking at this line, with no aids, I will read it to Greg this way: Hac, on this, est, is, superis iter, the exalted way, ad magni tecta, to the great temple, Tonantis, of Thundering Jupiter, regalemque domum, and his royal home. So the translation reads: On this is the exalted way to the great temple of Thundering Jupiter and his royal home.
(Lycaon wants to test the omniscience of Iupiter and serves him human meat. Hermann Postumus, 1542)
It has taken literally years to get to this place and I’m not all the way there yet. But I’m moving faster and better now.
