Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
I’ll stop saying this, but I am amazed at the facility I’m now enjoying with Latin. Of course, I’ve been working at it off and on for over 5 years, so there’s that. But the jump in ability is what fascinates me. How did that happen? Sometime soon I’m going to test it in other texts: Caesar, Lucretius, maybe Tacitus. Just to see.
(Medea and Aeson: Giovanni David, 1780)
I’m getting close to having Medea and Aeson finished. Here’s an excerpt:
Metamorphosis Book VII: (Medea’s Prayer)
180 After the fullest moon shone, and the whole moon beheld the earth through shadow
181 Having dressed she came forth, having ungirded her clothes under the roof,
182 With naked feet, exposed hair spread over her shoulders,
183 And unaccompanied
184 She takes a wandering pace through the deep silence
185 of the middle of the night. The quiet has set free
186 men, high flyers and wild beasts: when often (there is) nothing with a roar,
187 the undisturbed leafy branches are silent, the moist air is silent;
188 stars sparkle (over) the land. Her arms stretched out, turned
189 three times by themselves toward something, three times she sprinkled her head with water taken up by hand from the river,
190 and loosed her voice
191 with three ululations. On the hard earth she sank down on her knee,
192 “O night, most safe with secrets,” she says, ” whoever looks toward the stars with the golden moon
193 and by day toward the fiery sun,
194 and you, tri-form Hecate, who is aware of our undertaking,
195 and of incantation, of knowledge, of magics, she that helps, come,
196 whatever magical songs, whatever you, O Earth provide with powerful herbs,
197 and to the air and the winds and the mountains and the streams and the lakes
198 and all the gods of the forests, the gods of all the night-works, attend.
199 By whose help, when I wished, the streams turned back in their marveling banks
200 Into their sources themselves, I calmed the shaken streams,
201 Standing I aroused the seas to song, I banish the clouds and
202 I call them back, I drive away the winds, and I invoke them,
203 I destroy monsters with words and by invocation I force open their throats,
204 After I shattered the boulders themselves and the hard-wood trees, on the living earth
205 I move the forests, and command the mountains to quake
206 and to rumble alone, and spirits to go forth from the grave.
