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.