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.