Summer Most Heat Moon
While the Olson generations have driven north to the world’s largest lake (by area), I remained behind for my regular session with Latin tutor Greg and lunch with friend Tom Crane.
When I work with Greg now, I sequence out loud the Latin words in the order in which I will translate them into English, then offer my translation. Since so much of my work has involved either Greg’s question and my answers or my translating then listening to Greg’s careful parsing of the grammar, silence confuses me.
Today had lots of silence. It turns out that means he’s translating along with me, waiting for me to go on. Silence, in other words, is good. To get to this level of translating still takes a long time for me. I translate the verses, 4-6 in a typical one hour to one and a half hour session. This involves consulting the online classics website, Perseus, the commentaries by Anderson and Lee, and occasionally checking an English translation if I’m hopelessly confused.
After I’ve done a bunch, maybe 50 or 60 or so, I’ll go back over them, making sure the declension and conjugation notes I’ve written down are accurate and making sure as well that the word I’ve chosen is written over its Latin counterpart. I might be done then, at least for awhile. If, however, there is some time before I have a session with Greg, I may go over them again, writing out a new translation as I read, not consulting my previous work.
When I get down to the serious work here, I imagine the process proceeding much the same. It would differ at the point of my session with Greg. Then I will go through the verses I’m working with and try to create as beautiful an English translation as I can. When I feel I’ve done my best, then I will review other translator’s work on the same passages. At that point I’ll revise again, or not.
I may be at that point this fall. I’m very close right now.
Lunch with Tom is about friendship, about that ineffable, yet essential quality of being known by another and, in turn, knowing. The topics don’t matter, though they do, of course. Today it was grandchildren, visits, friends and, as you might expect, the sixth great extinction on planet Earth.
On this last point Tom and I share a desire to grasp the dilemmas facing the human race right now in fine detail, but also in the larger, broader scope of planetary evolution. I think we agree on this perspective, being human is natural and the things we do as human are, therefore, natural. That’s not to say they don’t have unintended consequences. Nor does it mean that we have to lie down and say, we can’t do anything about that!
Not at all. But flagellation gets us no where.
