Latin lessons...

Forgive the lack of posts but I have been very busy these last few days. It's good to be ''back to normal'' after such a long, and somewhat stressful, holiday. I am still tired. I was dragged out by my mother to the country today - normally I enjoy days out to the country but it was damp and miserable out, and I was tired. And I have work tomorrow, o me miserum!

On Thursday I had my first Latin lesson of the Michaelmas term, and enjoyed it thoroughly. We did various ''warm-up'' exercises, one of them being a poem by Catullus about Clodia (since it was apparently ''national poetry day'') which reads: Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. My translation was: ''I hate and I love. You will ask wherefore I do this. I know not, but I feel it being done, and I am tormented.'' Certainly an ambivalent poem. The next ''warm-up'' exercise was from the works of Ælfric of Eynsham, a 10th century Anglo-Saxon monk and homilist. The work itself is called Ælfric's Colloquy, written for boys learning Latin in a monastery at the end of the 10th century. It's quite humorous actually, and easy to read. What struck me though was this: Unusquisque scit si flagellatus erat an non [''everyone knows if he has been beaten or not'']. Now, when I read that, I asked the teacher whether ''erat'' should not be ''esset,'' naturally because ''si'' makes the sentence a conditional clause and that the verb should take the subjunctive. I was right! I was then told to go and do a Classics degree (I would if I could), but apparently this is incomplete - since I have opted to use the subjunctive ''esset.'' then ''an non'' should then be changed to ''necne'' - so said a most erudite Latinist to me yesterevening. My teacher explained that this was because of the general declension in the knowledge of Latin at around this time...

Afterwards, I went into the Library and photocopied a few chapters from De Imitatione Christi (a 1900 edition) and translated the first three paragraphs of Book I, Chapter I. I aim to have this translated by the end of Sunday. I won't look at it this evening, I am too tired. I shall just retire to my room and read some Tolkien. I am currently working on a post about J.R.R Tolkien and 20th century liturgical reform (inspired by the edifying events of Tuesday), but I wouldn't expect that anytime soon! Maybe next week sometime, it's quite long. Now that would be a great doctoral thesis! The above image is from a manuscript by Ælfric depicting the construction of the Tower of Babel - how appropriate for a post about languages!