A Latin-ish day

Dear Void,

If you’re new here, Ahoy! Or Ahoid!

As an overview you can go back through the posts to see what my project is. Here’s a quick welcome. This one has a closer look at a detail of the manuscript. And in these two here and here I talk about keeping a research journal and managing your research.

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So today I’ve gone back to the Latin in the commonplace book. I picked a random page, one that starts, perquam triste, ‘extremely sad.’ I began to make my way through the text trying to keep note of my own responses as I attempted to pin down the words. Slippery little suckers. It’s slow going. Raw translation data:

…extremely sad when, a Christian man, who in his Day to look out for [dying Day?] that many religions promise & nevertheless be as wrong as pagans / I hate / he,it will have [fellows] declare to his ancestors and love for their family, their brothers, but yet however nevertheless live/exist opposite.

It’s raw. Yes. I can’t help but begin to interpret. The text has switched on the word operations that function within me. 

Looking at a language you don’t know is like holding up the pieces to a machine and not knowing how they all fit together: you could pick up a cog and see that it might fit into another one but then there’s a piston or a nut, and what?! Also, the pieces function in different ways and are, in fact, powered differently. What I'm saying is a text is made of cog-words, piston-words, nut-words. Some are powered by the heart, some by the stomach, some the groin, some a pay-check, some a patronage, some are powered by pleasure, some by hurt. These words in the commonplace, what are they powered by? 

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There’s a gorgeous scene (they’re all gorgeous) in Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia where Julia Child (Meryl Streep) is sitting with a French tutor and struggling to find the words to describe her experiences shopping for produce at market, and she slips back into English without realising it. When the tutor prompts her, ‘in French please’ she stops and says O, I thought I was speaking French. Something like that anyway. O good! An excuse to go back and watch the movie so I can get this quote more accurate. Yippee!

I had a moment like that today. There was a switch in my brain when I thought I was reading Latin: quasi fundamentum came into view but I didn’t really know what it meant. Perhaps my brain got tired from not knowing and started faxing the work in to me: ‘yep. got it,’ it was saying, stupefied. 'Moving on.'

Well, anyway. Quasi fundamentum is something like ‘as a foundation’. So, that’s a start!

Look at this handwriting (left)! Look at the words! 

Still here. Still here.

Isn’t that remarkable, Void?

Jx