4 Years In

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.