Back studying Latin - plus Anthony Grafton

At one time I had high hopes of how much Latin I might be able to do over the Christmas break. I would learn all the vocab to date, the noun declensions, verb conjugations, adjective cases and so on. An exercise that asked us to choose the precise form of an adjective to go with the list of nouns would be a doddle for I would instantly know what type of noun each was and what case it was and so could instantly select the correct adjective. Sadly this has not been the outcome of the Christmas break.

But at least I have started doing some Latin again. Alison had given us an additional translation that we could have a look at if we wanted. This was a series of selections from the Gospel of Luke. I was not clear if the text was the original Latin or whether Alison had doctored it to make it an appropriate level for us, but in any case, I was prepared to give it a go. Results were mixed. Some sentences were very difficult for me, others were ok. However we don't have a copy of The Bible in the house (we have a couple of copies in various boxes in the garage), so I didn't have anything to check my version again, or get some hint of what was causing the problems in the difficult sentences. Only later did it occur to me that I could probably have found the text on the internet.

It was good to get back into the swing of doing Latin though. I ended up with about 30 pages of translation (including various notes) and it did provide another example of the sort of working practices that a translator needs to develop - strangely I have found it very hard to find anything on the actual day-to-day work practices of translators, something that would be a really big help.

Other work has included an initial dip into one of the books I recently bought by Anthony Grafton. He is astonishingly well-read and the level of scholarship displayed is miles above what I think I could ever do myself. Even the pieces on Kepler cover areas of his thought that I know little about (Kepler's humanistic approach to classics, for example) and relations to other thinkers that I have never heard of. Either this is a target of what the very best academic writing might consist of or something so intimidating that it is severely demotivating. Not sure yet what I think.