• Tag Archives Diana and Actaeon

  • Busy Friday

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                                           Waxing Last Frost Moon

    Finally.  One chunk of the Metamorphosis finished in a literal (sort 0f) version.  That’s Book III:138-250.  My learning curve has been steep, sometimes so much so that I thought I might tip over backwards, but I seem to have reached a point where moving forward goes faster now and the hill no longer looks quite so daunting.  The next step is to take it apart and put it back together in idiomatic English, then compare it to other translations, see what insights that adds.  As a guy who thought the world of language had invalidated his passport years ago, I’m pleasantly surprised and pleased with myself.  It means a lot to do something at 64 that I’ve spent a lifetime imagining I couldn’t.

    After that I drove into Little Sezchuan and had lunch with Justin and Margaret, the Sierra Club’s lobbyist and Executive Director.   We discussed evaluating our legislative work this year, wrapping things up and getting ourselves squared away for the 2011-2012 session.  This has been a difficult year and it’s not over.

    Came home, ready for my nap.  But.  Vega lay in the kitchen, scrunched up in pain and bloodied from some kind of a fight.  No clue what happened, but we first examined her, then took her over to the vet who sewed her up, gave her antibiotics and pain pills and we brought her home.  She’s resting now, but the vet says she be very sore tomorrow.  She’s such a sweety, she just let them work on her.

    Now, I’m sleepy, but can’t get my nap because it would interfere with going to sleep.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Great Work Humanities Politics 📎and tagged

  • Sickle Moon

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                     Waxing Last Frost Moon

    That last frost sickle moon hung in the western sky as I drove home from sheepshead last night.  The sickle’s always seem to have somebody sitting on them when I look up.  An old woman with a conical hat and a skirt filled with stars.  A boy dangling his legs.  Or, as in one meditative state long ago, Moses on one side and Jesus on the other.  These moons are pregnant with possibility, with the dreams and the hopes littering our lives, just waiting for fullness.  It will swell, grow fat.  May your dreams.

    Those card gods that have been so good to me over the last few months abandoned me last night.  In the first four hands I didn’t have enough total trump to pick up the blind and play.  A night of 7’s, 8’s, 9’s and the occasional 10.  Two decent hands the whole the night.  As Ovid points out over and over, the gods are fickle.

    Today Latin.  I’m down to line 228 on the Diana and Actaeon story.  I still need to watch those words separated from each other but with the same endings.  I also need to watch the situation which Greg, my tutor, analogized to fixing a car and having a part or two left out.  I translate sentences and from time to time I have a word or two left over.  Hmmm.

    We’re just getting to the good part where Actaeon’s own dogs tear him to pieces.  That’ll teach him to to see naked goddesses.

    Leslie and I had our next to last meeting and she encourage me to attend an event at UTS for those of us who have been mentors.  A tough sell, but I decided, for Leslie, that I would go.

    Afterward had to drive back into Minneapolis because I forgot to pick up fliers for the mining conference I’m attending in Duluth tomorrow.


    📂This entry was posted in Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Using Tech Tools

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                Waning Bee Hiving Moon

    This morning Kate and I had our weekly business meeting.  Those Amazon books add up.  We’re well into the first growing season with Kate retired.  It makes the whole process seem less urgent, more manageable from my perspective.  I like that.  Having Mark here right now helps, too.

    After that I checked my translation on Diana and Actaeon, the 10 verses I’m preparing for my reading/translation lesson on Friday.  The second time through I found several things I missed the first time.  I believe my translation is improving, improving quickly right now.  Some sort of developmental break through, I suppose.

    After that I fiddled with Firefox 4.0.  It’s the latest version of the favorite non-windows browser though I understand Chrome (Google) has begun to catch up.  It seems to be a bit slower with g-mail and the MIA website, but it makes up for it with its cool new feature, Panorama.  Panorama allows you to group frequently used tabs together in transparent collections accessible through a small tab at the top of the browser.

    This way, when I move into Latin, for example, I can click once and up comes Perseus with my section of the Metamorphoses already loaded, along with the word find tool.  Another example, a weather tab holds my Andover NOAA page, Paul Douglas’ blog, Chanhassen NOAA weather story and a moon phase calendar.  All one click away.  Pretty neat.

    It’s also time to start working on my Spanish tour for next week.  I called up Microsoft Notes, a program I wonder how I worked without now.  I opened a new notebook, titled it Art History Research and put in a tab, Spanish Tour May 5, 2011.  Now I’ll have my tours all in one handy place with talking points beside each piece.  Pretty neat.

    A guy like me, who switches between diverse interests with regularity throughout a day and a week, finds work accelerated in pleasant ways with these organizational tools.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Family GeekWorld Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Daffodils Are Up. The Bees Are Coming. Growing Season Is Underway.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                              Waning Bee Hiving Moon

    Tomorrow afternoon is the day the bee’s come to their new home.  They will have traveled by truck from Chico, California, spent a night at Jim’s Nature’s Nectar and will leave Stillwater for Andover around 2:00 pm.  Back home here at Artemis Honey they will go into their colonies, one per package, a tuft of grass tucked in the entrance reducer for the first 12 hours to keep everybody home the first night.  Sounds like 3 folks will come for the festivities.

    Today is the first Latin day in three weeks.  I’ve had an unusually full period that eliminated the full day slots I like to use for translating Ovid. I find I have to get into a flow with it which takes some time.

    In addition to bee hiving I have vegetables to plant this week, too.  Succession planting plus new veggies, cool weather veggies like peas and carrots.  My potatoes came two days ago.  They’re on a cookie pan while the eyes grow a bit more before I cut them up and plant them, probably late next week.

    Mark will have been here two weeks tomorrow.  He takes long walks here in Andover, goes into the city with me when I won’t be long and takes walks in the city.  Still calming down after a tough period.

    On to Diana and Actaeon.  I’m getting there with this story.  When I finish my first pass on the translation, mostly literal (which is not easy for me), then I’ll take on the next, equally difficult challenge, putting my translation into idiomatic English.  Prose, most likely.  Translating it as poetry feels like a different, more complex process, one I’m not ready to take on right now.

    Also, Grandson Gabe’s 3rd birthday.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Family Garden Great Work Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Ovid and Me

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                               Waning Bloodroot Moon

    The Latin work has gone past difficult learning, though there is still that, too, into a different, almost ecstatic place.  Reading the words of another language and making sense, poetry, from them still seems magical to me.  I’m really doing it.  The closest analogy is my first set of glasses that corrected my far vision.  All of a sudden I saw individual stars in the sky.  william-turner-ancient-italy-ovid-banishedThe moment was extraordinary.  What had been a fuzzy, blurred night sky became black velvet set with bright points of light.

    Now it appears I will finish Diana and Actaeon before the Titian show closes on May 1st and I might make my way through Diana and Callisto, too.  I’m enjoying translating the different stories, so I think I’ll move on to Medea, Pentheus and other discrete stories rather than try the full frontal assault I had planned, start with Book I, verse 1 and soldier through to the last verse of Book XVI.

    Another idea that seems possible now is to investigate the Latin texts behind other objects in the museum:  Theseus and the Centaur at the Lapith wedding,  Ganymede and the Eagle,  Lucretia,  Germanicus.  I’m sure there are other objects that have particular Latin texts behind them.  I have no particular reason for doing this except to deepen my knowledge of mythology and of the specific objects in our collection with Latin connections.

    Taking up a new intellectual challenge later in life is not only possible, it’s exhilarating.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Humanities Myth and Story Retirement Writing 📎and tagged