Friday, March 02, 2007

First Week Back At Uni

And I've spent enough time on campus to long for the halcyon days of summer when there aren't all those pesky students hanging about getting in the way. It's mainly first years I think, they have things they need to queue for and they get lost easily.

Apart from that things are going well enough. Im having a bit of a problem in Latin right now in that translations are taking ages and I'm not understanding things as well as I want to, which will hopefully come right soon when I get into the right mindset again. Old English is in fact going better than expected - the three week swot before the class started has paid off, and Christine (the lecturer) is really nice. She seems to have given me and the other couple of newbies temporary immunity from being called on in class. I have slightly more news on the Mystery of the Head - other members of the class tell me that it's all in the Life of St Edmund, which they translated last year, so when I get through reading it, I'll update people on the story.

And Alasdair came down from Northland to have lunch with me today. This was something we did practically every week last year, when we were both on campus at the same time. Felt just like home.

3 comments:

Mark said...
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Mark said...

What you are reading in Latin? I can't remember who is teaching and what they decided to do. First translations take a long time. It usually gets better in time.

Stephanie said...

Plautus' Amphitruo in 300 Latin with Judy, and a bunch of Church texts in Medieval Latin, with Judy again. (She gave us cake today.) The latter text has so far ranged from descriptions of monastery rules, panegyrics on how wonderful scribes are, to extracts from the Bible. The David and Goliath section was quite straight forward but went on and on and on, the Song of Songs was trickier and only in extracts which, I note, managed to avoid the steamier bits (jewelled joints of thighs, anyone?) sigh, and I'm about half way through St Luke's version of the Crucifixion.

Yeah, the last lot of translation I did went a lot faster than the first bunch, and I think it will all improve over time. It's just the time inbetween that's frustrating.