A Christmas Carol

My sister has just asked me to translate a carol for her from her Medieval songbook. It's quite pretty so I'm passing it on.

Quem pastores laudavere
Quibus angeli dixere
Absit vobis jam timere
Natus est rex gloriae

Ad quem magi ambulabant
Aurum, thus, myrrham portabant
Immolabant, haec sincere
Nato regi gloriae

Christo regi, deo nato
Per Mariam nobis dato
Merito resonet vere
Laus, honor et gloria

The king, the king whom the shepherds praised,
The king with whom the angels spoke,
He is separated from you now, with awe,
The king of glory is born.

To he whom the wise men travelled,
To whom they carried gold, incense and myrhh;
They burned these things with sincerity
To the born king of glory.

To Christ the king, the born God,
Given to us through Mary,
He resounds truly with merit,
To Christ the king: Praise, Honour, Glory.

Translation notes: This poem is holding back the subject to the last line of each stanza as an intensifier. This works well in Latin syntax but less so in English, hence some of the repetitions of 'Christ the king' inserted where there were none before: they aid comprehension and I think add to the poetic effect. The third line of the first stanza I'm not terribly sure about, it doesn't quite seem to fit the rest of the verse and 'timere' could be a form of verb. I'm choosing to translate it as adverbial by comparison with the equivalent line in the other stanzas.

Pronunciation notes: (Cat asked how to pronounce it, with particular reference to 'c's.) Bah humbug. 'c' is the worst of the lot. In the Classical period it's believed to have sounded like a 'k' does now. In the Medieval period it could be like an 's' or like a 'ch' depending on where you live, and that's before you take into account the spelling confusions between 'c' and 't'. I refer you to someone with more knowledge on the subject and suggest you go with the Southern Continental / Church Latin instructions, hence pronouncing 'c' as 'ch' and 'g' as 'j' when coming before most vowel sounds.

Scansion notes: The poetically inclined will have noted that this poem is both rhythmical and rhyming, developments in Latin poetry which were pretty much concurrent with the rise of Christian poetry. Classical Latin poetry is quantitive, the music that comes out of recitation is based on patterns in the length of the vowel sounds, not in patterns of stressed syllables. Rhythmical techniques did exist in part, but were mostly reserved for rhetorical prose. I suspect that one of the drivers in the early days of rhythmical poetry in the Christian Church was its use in singalongs - rather than performance pieces that one speaker presents to a crowd, many of the early hymns were written as group pieces for use during services and to keep people's spirits up in the middle of a purge. Later on, of course, when Latin was only ever learnt as a second language, rhythmical poetry became a lot easier to write than quantitive, it's easier to hear stressed syllables than vowel quantities that you have to look up in a book because nobody pronounces them that way anymore. There were still people writing the latter, but I don't know of any really good pieces.

Last Essay.

All done and handed in.

I somehow managed to pick the three hour period of today in which the weather was soaking wet to swim into town to hand it in. I feel that the Gods of Academia are punishing me for my lateness or something. :-(

Commonplace Book

There is an obvious danger in the business of examining a labyrinthine world such as that of the Confessions from the kind of perspective I have assumed. Any optic one chooses risks setting certain features into a prominence that may turn out to have been exaggerated; it may at the same time minimize the importance of features which, examined through a wider lens, turn out to be far more prominent than the narrower vision could allow. Every scholar fears the moment when he may have become prisoner to a point of view he has cultivated far too long than was good for his objectivity. And yet, his only therapy is to present the findings that his point of view enabled him to uncover, even at the risk of being premature. Others, then, may succeed in widening his vision before it is too late. In presenting his findings, he must (for sweet clarity's sake if for nothing else) suppress the ever-nagging temptation to resort to the subjunctive: "If my view of the matter be correct, then it would follow that Augustine means this." But the indicative mood, habitual in English exposition, tends to convey an air of greater confidence than the writer himself often enjoys: give me a scholar and he will know what I mean. My hopes are that whatever features of the Confessions' landscape I may have left in the shade were not deliberately ignored, or half-consciously excluded, because their message positively militated against the thesis propounded here, and that the Augustinian scholar will be sensitive to the number of hesitant subjuntives that still tremble behind my regular use of the indicative mood.

O'Connell, Robert J. St Augustine's Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969, pp viii-xi.

Well it made me laugh. I know the feeling.

The Phone Is Dead. Long Live The Phone!

I am now in mobile communication again, having gone out to buy a replacement phone in my post exam celebration phase. It has a light. And takes photos. And will hopefully not forget what time it is anytime I should acidentally jar it, all of which are features which my old phone did not have. The shop assistant at Vodaphone was weird though. He had this thing about not meeting my eyes, and seemed in general not particularly interested in selling me anything. Seriously, ReptonInfinity who had come along with me did most of this guy's selling for him.

In other news, has anyone had the experience of studying really hard for an exam and then realising just before it starts that they ought to have been studying for a different exam entirely? I just have - I twigged halfway through yesterday that it wasn't Old English today, it was Latin. So Stupid! Argggh! And it isn't like people don't tell me these things anyway. In the aftermath, and despite the panic, I think I did OK. There were some bits that I didn't do as well as I'd wanted to, but I remembered a lot more of the course work than I was afraid I would. Phew. And now I'm well ahead in study for Old English on Monday. Now that's a relief.

Hang on, my new phone has just rung from the other room...

So there was this guy...

...called Sejanus. He did pretty well for himself, in 1st C AD terms, came from a poor family (with some decent breeding), was liked by his boss Tiberius (the emperor), got a lot of power and prestige, had it off with the emperor's daughter-in-law even. Good going for a small-town hick. Then it all went wrong and he crashed and burned. And everybody hated him then, if they hadn't hated him already, and lots of historians said really nasty things about him, especially a chap called Cornelius Tacitus.

Then the Middle Ages happened, and people pretty much forgot about Tacitus, and Sejanus, until some guy called Boccacio found an old manuscript and thought that old Cornelius was pretty cool. Soon, lots of people thought that Tacitus was pretty cool. Not Sejanus, though. They really really hated him. Lots. Even when they'd changed their minds from Tiberius being a shifty dissembler to being a cool and cunning planner, they still hated Sejanus. You could even go to prison for suggesting that someone, like perhaps the King of England's country-bred pretty-boy favourite, was just like Sejanus. Lots of hatred, and even more comments about the thunder of heaven's rage crashing down on those pesky social climbers. Sounds like a lot of rage. But hey, this is the Renaissance by now, and there's lots of political stuff going on that no-one can do anything about, maybe it makes people feel better to have a nice simple villain to rage at. And they can even point out how he died, horribly, so they can feel all righteous about the existing social order. Gosh.

2000 words, somewhat less eloquently expressed, all handed in. Yay! (I am such a hack.)

Another project to hand in tomorrow, another due in two weeks which I've...kind of started, and then all I have to worry about is exams. Phew. It's not so much that I'm on the downhill stretch as that I can see the top of the hill. To all the students who have made it to the end of the semester in somewhat better order: I hate you I hate you I hate you.* That's the favourite phrase of my Latin teacher. Clearly, I'm learning something here. :-)

(*) The fact that many of my woes are entirely self-inflicted is entirely beside the point.

EDITED TO ADD: The Old English project is now done and being printed. My, it's a wonderful view from the top of the hill...

On Oral Presentations...

Today I had to give a presentation to my class on the play we've been studying, by a chap called Plautus, called Amphitruo, which is about Jupiter and Mercury disguising themselves as human and arranging an elaborate scheme that allows Jupiter to have it off with the general Amphitruo's lovely and virtuous wife, Alcumena. I hadn't actually picked the topic of my talk with any care, just seen out of a list of suggestions the title "Roman Comedy / Roman Construct" that had a recommended reading on 'Roman street theatre' and figured, "Hey, it'll be something to do with how Romans put on plays, that'll be interesting."

I should have chosen with more attention. The reading turned out to be about triumphs and Scipio swanning around implying that he was a quasi-Jupiter, and I ended up going rather off the beaten track and heading into the surreal world of grotesque realism and whether Alcumena was a stand-in for Juno in the play. It's always worrying when your lecturer suddenly sits up and pays extra close attention to what you say. (Hoping I pulled it off.)

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.

My Eyes Are Covered With A Double Night...

Catullus #51

That man is equal to God,
or so it seems,
to me.

He even, may I say it,
exceeds divinity, for he sits
near you, again and again,
he sees you and he hears
you laughing sweetly.

All my senses have escaped,
they flee my misery, for
as soon as I have seen you, my Lesbia,
no voice is left to me.

Words numb my mouth,
creeping flames seize my weak limbs,
my ears ring with their own sound.

Oh Lesbia. My eyes are covered with a double night.

(Procrastinate? Who, me?)

The Parrot Poem

Because it's after midnight and I can't sleep. And it's funny.

"Alas, the Parrot"
The Parrot, imitator bird from the Indies of the East, has died.
     Go in throngs to his funeral, birds, go in throngs;
Go, pious winged ones, beat your breasts with feathered limb,
     go, and tear your tender cheeks with rigid claw.

All you who balance your course in the liquid air,
     but you before others, friend turtledove, mourn.
He was full of the harmony of life to you
     and lasted to the long end, tenacious and faithful.

What use that faith of yours, what use that form of scattered colour,
     what use that ingenious voice of shifting sounds,
What use that you are given to please my girl?
     Unhappy glory of the birds, you surely now lie dead.

He died, that burbling ghost of the human voice,
     the Parrot, a gift given from the far edge of the world.
The seventh day came, with no hope of another and
     he shouted out his dying words: "Corinna, be well."

Ovid, Amores 2.6, abridged.

One exam down...

...which had rather a lot of De Bello Gallico in it, and a lot of stuff about Dido and Aeneas. We didn't just have to translate out of the Aenead, but the sight passage from Ovid was a pretend letter from Dido to Aeneas. It was really sad, too. But we also had the Parrot poem, which is lots of fun.

I have one more exam to study for, in which I will write about Paradise Lost for about 3 hours. Sigh.

I have madeira cake in the oven. I only bake so I can lick the dough out of the bowl, really, but the smell as it cooks is just lovely.

EDIT: Death to typos! Stab! Stab! Stab!!!

Sometimes it's the smallest things that make your day...

In my case, it was waking up to a warm room because my lovely boyfriend had turned on the heater before he left this morning. Bliss.

In other news, my Latin teacher has said that it might be possible to run a specialist course next year on Medieval Latin for Naomi and me, for which we are both crossing our fingers. (Naomi is the other medievalist in the English department.) Judy Deuling (aka our Latin teacher) has said that she'll investigate options, so currently I'm tentatively bouncy.

Yet Another Infliction Of Poetry...

Catullus No.13
O, come with old Catullus, that we may dine:
a loaf of bread, a flask of wine, you, a girl,
it will be Paradise!
So long as you bring some wine,
  and maybe a bit of bread,
  and definitely a girl,
  and you.
For your well-salted wit
you shall have all my love,
(though my pockets are home for spiders)
and a little something more elegant,
  or smelly, I should say -
for my latest girlfriend left a bottle of the
most stinkiferous, redolent, exotic attar
of roses that you ever did smell.
(You will beg the gods of love to make you
  All Nose.)

Heaven.
-- Stephanie Pegg, May 2006.

(Our class assignment for today was to rewrite one of Catullus' poems in the style of a poet that we liked. I started off with whatsisname Fitzgerald and the Rubaiyat and then got a tad distracted.)

((Today I've had a signing test worth 20% and handed in a 2000 word essay worth 33% and a language assignment worth 20%. So I'm feeling tired but accomplished. Yay!))

tristissimam mortem Q. H. Flacci lugebimus

Yesterday in Latin we reached the chapter in which Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the daring hero of the epic tale of life, love, battles, and the pursuit of poetry which has been informing our Latin class for the last year and a bit, finally pops his clogs. So we wore black armbands in his honour. (Also, it's the last chapter of the book, and now we shall be reading Catullus. It looks hard.)

And in other news, one of our frisbee teams won the game last night, and the other drew. It was a very good turnout actually.

I just wrote a really long and interesting post about my birthday and then the internet connection failed and it was all lost...

So I'll leave everyone with the news that I had a good birthday.

Also these words from my Latin teacher:
felicem tibi
natalem diem!
felicem, O Steph,
natelem diem!