Plateaus

Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon After the Swede saw, lunch and a nap followed by another sentence, 6 verses long, in […]

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A New Way to Translate

Winter                                          First Moon of the New Year May have found a new method for working on the latin.  Translate it as well as I can, let it sit, then come back to it and go […]

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Ovid. Again.

Winter                              First Moon of the New Year An Ovidian morning.  Holding words, conjugations, meanings, clause types, prepositions and adverbs in the head while whirling them around like a Waring blender.  It’s satisfying when a sentence finally pops up, like a good […]

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More Fun With Ovid

Lughnasa                                                 Waning Harvest Moon More fun with Ovid.  The curtain has begun to roll back a bit more. Many of my friends have second and third languages, but until now I only had the one.  A bit of French.  A little Hebrew.  A little Greek.  But nothing solid.  The ability to look on a page […]

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Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth

Lughnasa                                                           Waxing Honey Extraction Moon Much of yesterday and today spent amongst the Latin text of Metamorphoses.  I translated ten lines of the story of Pentheus.  In my effort to peek behind the curtain of translation I have learned several things already, even at my very modest skill level.  First, the choices translators make have […]

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A Day in the Life

Mid-Summer                                                                                                   Waning Garlic Moon “God has no religion.” – Mahatma Gandhi If there is one, Gandhi has it right. Another day of Latin.  This stuff, at least right now, is hard.  It requires holding several different ideas in the head all at one time, then juggling them to see how they all fit together.   Here […]

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Still At It

Spring                                                    Waxing Bee Hiving Moon Below freezing tonight, howling winds all day, gray clouds scudding across the sky.  Ah, Minnesota in springtime. A full day translating Ovid.  I’m now down to verse 201, only 49 verses to go.  I’ll probably make it before the end of the Titian show.  The impetus here was to try […]

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Ovid and Me

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 […]

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Lost in Translation

Winter                                                                    Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice   What happens in the act of translation?  After years of reading translated texts and noticing the often wide discrepancies among various translations of the same underlying words, I have wondered how such drastically different English versions can come from the same work.  Understanding this, really translation as […]

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Still Learning

Samhain                                                                    Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice The moon light, bright in the southern sky, casts shadows, thin skeletons of trees and shrubs splayed out upon the snow. This Latin stuff is fun.  Going back and forth among dictionaries, grammars, websites, puzzling out the verbs and the nouns, trying to fit it all together into […]

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