Hughlings Himwich

Forget Me Nots and Rue

Errores sunt flores,

expectantes florescere. 

 

Advice to my students on preparing for their first Latin test

Nouns and Verbs, Verbs and Nouns: the Chiasmic Wheels that Turn the Stars

You should know I aced an advanced course in pedagogy in which we learned how to identify what our students don't know or have forgotten or thought too confusing, trivial, or nonsensical to be on the test -- thinking, perhaps, the teacher surely will have mercy. Wrong! The objective of the course was to identify such lacunae and then test the students on them. If your antennae are atwitter and you have the necessary WIQ (Wichian Intelligent Quotient), you already know I will ask you what the heck 'lacunae' are, albeit only on the Mighty Miscellany aka the Real Test. You don't want to be caught lacking or slacking. Thus, it is said, that it is possible to drown in a puddle of water. For those less equipped with WIQ that last sentence relates intimately to 'lacunae'. How do you study for such marginalia? Be curious, be playful, and if you don't know the actual answer, makeup something that will bring a gleam to your teacher's eye. Once when a student (Bryce might not want me to mention his name and would perhaps even protest this preterition), whose performance on a test was otherwise characteristically deplorable (Hilary's word), found an opportunity on the test to write this never-to-be-forgotten gem: Truth is to Factual as Synonym is to Cinnamon. Clearly, He-Who-Is-Not-To-Be-Named's WIQ was exceptionally high and waltzed right into an A+, which is, as we all know, the end all and be all of studentdom. So let it be written! If all this is confusing or disorienting, Welcome To My World.

Here are the more mundane live-or-die minutiae that will allow you to reach the longed-for Hinterlands:

1. Know the noun chart perfectly!
2. Be able to demonstrate an understanding of the 'uses' of each of the cases! (Question: (If the verb do or narro or demonstro is in the sentence, what case should you watch out for?)
3. Know the ProScadies perfectly! Don't let your 'ex' be your downfall. Such an 'aberration' would be 'atypical' of your otherwise excellent preparation. 
4. Know the PAIN words perfectly and be able to explain why they are a pain in painstaking details. Ouch!
5. Know not only the 'official' vocabulary of Chapters I and II, but also the additional words in the Sententiae of each chapter! You won't want to be caught eating 'biscuits' in the commissary. You will not be 'exonerated'!
6. Be able to translate the principal parts of a verb!
7. Know how to write out the principal parts of any regular but otherwise unfamiliar 1st and 2nd conjugation verb.
8. Be able to conjugate a 1st or 2nd conjugation verb in the present tense.
9. Is it 'essential' to know 'amo is to amare' as 'sum' is to '_________'?
10. Know the rule for forming singular and plural imperatives, positive and negative! (Are there other possibilities to these seemingly binary categories? WIQ Alert)
11. Know whether 'is' or 'are' is a linking or helping verb and the difference it makes in Latin! What's wrong with, Cur est magister currit in circulis? (i.e., not what is wrong with your magister but with the sententia ipsa).
12. Know how to change an adjective to an adverb in Latin.( I was laetus/laeta, Mr. HImwich, until I saw how laetēyou were running circles around us.) 
13. Know how to use the two enclitics you have learned, -que and -ne? (Theoretically, could there be others? Are there such enclitics in English? Anyone's guess is as good as another's) (Love these double parentheses!)).

What else can you do to prepare?

1. Translate the English sentences back into Latin in the answers for the self-tutorial exercises for Chapters I and II. 
2. Be resourceful! Often on a test, a detail you can't remember may be found waving a red flag elsewhere on the test. 
3. The way to OZ is paved in macrons.
4. Know what you don't know and study that! It's useless to tell me you don't know what you don't know just as it is pointless to study over and over what you already know. It may be comforting to do so, but it won't get you where you want to go even if you don't know where that is (that was the motto of the aforementioned graduate course called 'Not Knowing Is Not An Option' (unless, of course, you have some playfulness in you like these double parentheses )), (better yet, now triple!))). It was also in that same course I learned the life-defying dicta, "Memorization is a socially accepted form of cheating' and the never to be forgotten but oft-repeated like some backward Ave Maria, "Anything less than perfection is complete and utter failure', which has as its derivative, “The only A’s you’ll get in this course are the A’s in your name'.
   
   
   There is a pluraplenty (Is that a neologism?!) of MM on this page. On Tuesday, I'll lend you Tristen, that Know-It-All, for 15 short minutes. After three years with me, she has learned how to live with this nonsense and knows the byways round and about what may euphemistically be called my mind-brain.

Translation and Catullus 85

Catullus 85

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
         nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

(literal: I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask?
         I don't know, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.)

My translation

Hates she I love. Don't ask!
My tongue's ripped out.

This will hardly seem a translation. What I have tried to do is to preserve the emotion.

1.  In the Latin, odi et becomes through elision odet, creating a semantic confusion, the -t identifying a 3rd person subject. Thus, the "she" in my translation. The words themselves become jumbled, suggesting turbulent emotions.  'hates she I love' - is arranged as a chiasmus (A B B A - think of the Greek letter χ), and may be represented as a cross. For the relevance see the 3rd comment.

2. Again, by ellison quare id (why it) becomes quarid, suggesting that the question itself is an additional source of pain.

3. In the second line of my translation, I was attempting to convey in a single image both the anguish and the poet's inability to speak about it. The verb excrucior (I am tortured) suggests a crucifixion (crux: cross), a punishment reserved for slaves in Catullus's time. 

All well and good, I say to myself, but is it a translation of Catullus's poem or is the original so changed in translation as to become something else? If something else, what would we call it? It's not really an original poem. Perhaps, a creative translation. It may or not be creative, but in my judgment, it is in fact a translation, one that tries to convey the emotion of the original as opposed to the dictionary meaning of the words themselves. Think: how does anyone but God join a soul to a body? With less fanfare, a translator is trying to transfer the soul or emotion of a poem in one language into the body of another. 

 

Uva uvam vivendo varia fit (explained)

Uva uvam vivendo varia fit. 

This Latin phrase from Lonesome Dove is neither nonsense nor bad Latin.  It means "A grape becomes mottled by being a grape," with the sense: it is the nature of a grape to become "mottled" as it ripens.  In the context of the novel, this means, "Character is destiny" -- the truth of which is illustrated time and again in the novel.  The repetition of the 'v' strengthens the point. It is lovely Latin.

vivendo here is a gerund of vivo, in the ablative (instrumental).  uvam is a cognate or internal accusative (a play on vitam vivendo), a not uncommon feature of ancient Latin. Most often in Classical Latin the gerund and its object are rendered into the same case and gender, but the usage here is also well attested. The grammatical formation of the gerund and its object are too involved to discuss here, but for a Latinist it would present no problem. I have seen elsewhere the claim that vivendo is a "false gerund." That's absurd on the face of it (the gerund form of vivo is actually quite common, e.g. modus vivendi), unless the author of the post meant that vivendo was simply thrown in without any regard for its grammar or meaning. In either case, the claim is unfounded. The effort to derive this superb Latin sentence as a corruption of a line from Juvenal is likewise misguided and is likely responsible for the "false gerund" claim. At best, Juvenal's line is a red herring. Clearly, an accomplished Latinist, perhaps an acquaintance of the author if not McMurtry himself, is responsible for Uva uvam vivendo varia fit. 

Just as a grape or a man can become nothing other than what each is, pigs remain true to themselves. "We don't rent pigs. . .  Goats and donkeys are neither bought nor sold," only cattle and horses whose character man has fundamentally changed.  

 

 

My Brick at Albuquerque Academy

 

Photograph by Ber Himwich (Translaton: "Don't follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek out new paths to truth."

 

In libra rerum

 

    In rerum libra lacrimae auro gravius pendunt. 

Ad Fabullum Confabulatum

Come, dear friend, and dine with me
and bring with you what I have not:
wine to wet our lips and wit to laugh
at what I do not say. Bring dinner too
and all the cupids you can catch
and any venus who’s gone astray.
Do all this, I say, Fabúllus, and you
will dine well with me tonight, 
though you may blush, you handsome man, 
to see yourself chopped up in verse,
just the thing to please the gods
and that saucy girl, who stays at home
and, as I've learned, not alone.
So, Fabúllus, dine with me tonight.

*   *   *   *   *

This poem began as a translation of Catullus XIII, a witty invitation to his friend Fabullus, promising that if Fabullus brings the wine, dinner and good cheer, he – Catullus—will provide an unguentum, a perfume, that will make Fabullus beg the gods to make him totum nasum, all nose.  It’s a poem with priapic possibilities.  My original intent was simply to do a playful translation that was true to the original. Somehow I got the idea in my head that Catullus was inviting his friend to dinner because he had learned that the reason his girlfriend, the notorious Lesbia, was not able to come to his dinner party was that she was having one of her own, a tete-a-tete with this same Fabullus, a perhaps too handsome man.  There are such. The invitation in my version becomes a clever way of telling his good friend Fabullus that he knows what is going on.  Is this in the original? Not obviously, but there are intimations, especially since Lesbia, more disparagingly known as the quadrantaria Clytemnestra and Palatina Medea (her real name was Clodia Metelli, herself of distinguished though promiscuous breed), had lost interest in our besotted poet (see Catullus VIII, At tū, Catulle, dēstinātus obdūrā). Who is that candida puella in line 4 and who is being referred to in line 11 as meae puellae? Are they the same? Just what sort of sacculus, purse, is it that is full of cobwebs? Is Catullus asking Fabullus to bring Lesbia along, whom Catullus hopes to enchant with his verse about Fabullus and win her back? I could go on, but it would amount to little more than a satyrical leer and would be in any case too unseemly, though it can perhaps be said that Catullus hopes to have his cena and sniff the unguentum too. Few folks are going to appreciate the classical background or possess the requisite prurience or even be able to read the original in Latin, so I am hoping that the poem will stand on its own hind legs.  

    Below is the original Latin poem and a literal translation in full undress:

Catullus XIII

Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me                 You will dine well, my Fabullus, at my house
paucis, si tibi di favent, diebus,                        in a few days, if the gods favor you,
si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam          if you will have brought with you a good & large
cenam, non sine candida puella                       dinner, not without a sparkling girl
et vino et sale et omnibus cachinnis.                and wine and wit and every sort of laughter.
Haec si, inquam, attuleris, venuste noster,       If these things, I say, you will have brought, 
                                                                                you charming man,
cenabis bene; nam tui Catulli                           you will dine well; for your Catullus’s
plenus sacculus est aranearum.                        purse is full of cobwebs.
Sed contra accipies meros amores,                  But in return you will receive pure love
seu quid suavius elegantiusve est:                   or if there is anything more sweet or refined;
nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae       for I will give you a perfume, which to my girl      
donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque;                     Venuses and Cupids have given;
quod tu cum olfacies, deos rogabis                  which when you smell, you will ask the gods
totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum.                 to make you, Fabullus, all nose. 

Flores in nocte

Puella, cui multum et nimium dedi,                     

Redde mi meam laetitiam et meum mundum,    

Quem amoris causa perdidi;

Redde mi milia basiorum quae tibi dedi ,

Et dabo tibi flores in nocte florentes.

 

Girl, to whom I have given much and too much,

Give back to me my happiness and my world,

Which I destroyed for  love;

Give back to me the thousands of kisses I gave to you,

And I will give you flowers blooming in the night. 

Amor

Amor, mori velim ab asperis vitae abesse

sed mors me a litore tuo repellit

donatque mi tantum gaudium 

ut mare meo in corde tuum inveniam. 

Love, I would wish to die

and be far from the harshness of life

but death drives me from your shore

and grants me such great joy

that I find your sea in my heart. 

 

 

Musa Sepulta / The Buried Muse

 

                        Hic poetae omnibus incogniti

                        iacent sine nomine aut ulla voce

                        sui. Aves venerunt et cantant

                        de longo itinere a mari

                        et naviculis nos huc ferentibus.

 

                        Here poets unknown to all

                        Lie without name or any voice

                        Of their own. The birds have come

                        And sing about their long journey

                        From the sea and the little boats

                        That bring us here.

 

Merum or Pure Wine

Merum aut lacrimae caerulei maris

Ab amantibus aestivis amissae.

 

(Pure wine or tears of the caerulean sea

By summer’s lovers lost.)