Guest Blogger on Neil Gaiman

THE REVIEW BELOW IS BY A GUEST BLOGGER AND FELLOW LATINIST.

Although I haven't read any fiction recently which invokes the roles of Greek or Roman gods, I enjoyed one such novel some time ago.  It is titled American Gods, written by the young British author Neil Gaiman.

The plot involves an ex-con released from prison (in America), who goes by the nickname of "Shadow" (he is strictly human but has some of the skills desirable for those working at the margins of the laws).  He is offered a job as bodyguard by a character he knows as "Mr. Wednesday" who turns out to be an incarnation of the god Odin.  The name Wednesday turns out to be derived from "Oden's (Woden's) Day," allegedly the origin of that name of the week.

He and Mr. Wednesday encounter a large variety of American characters in their travels, and author Gaiman invokes a previously-used gimmick to the effect that the strength of a god depends on the degree to which that individual is revered or acknowledged by mortals.  One episode of Star-Trek employed a similar idea.

Anyhow, Shadow and Mr. Wednesday meet a number of other persons who are ancient gods in a modern American version, but most of them happen to be from Norse or Celt or Egyptian origin rather than Greek.

It is quite an original plot, and enjoyable for those who like fantasy.

As it happens, this is not Neil Gaiman's best example of such uses of the ancient past in novels.  My introduction to his work was some years ago when a BBC presentation of his Neverwhere was serialized and shown on our PBS station.  It was just great;  I won't summarize the plot, which is set in modern London, but which does reprise the lives and character of some of the ancient Roman soldiers and heroes who supposedly still live in an underground world accessible via the London subway system.  It is available in book form, and remains one of my all-time favorite fantasy novels.  Gaiman is immensely good at that genre, and has written a list of novels, all distinct and entertaining, since he easily jumps over the boundary between reality and fantasy, without jarring our sense of rationality.

If you pick one of his novels to try, I guess I would recommend Neverwhere ahead of American Gods, but I bet that if you read the first, you will look for the second, too!

The Infinities

John Banville's The Infinities is a brilliant comedy. Since Banville won the Booker for The Sea in 2005, some reviewers (including Laura Miller, who reviewed his new book for The New York Times), have hinted that his literary Joycean style can be excessive and off-putting. What's to complain about? This is such an enjoyable book. Charm, humor, and crystal-clear prose are in abundance. The Sea is now on my reading list, too, though I have been trying to break the Cycle of Awards Addiction and not get carried away by reading every one. The Infinities is a very easy, quick, baroque read, with a gorgeous style, and light years superior to the other contemporary novels I've read this year (though, alas, that is not many).

Adam Godley is in a coma and dying. A brilliant mathematician, he is not good with people. His family, who are also not particularly good with people, have gathered at his bedside. But they are not the only ones there. Hermes, the psychopomp, is telling the story; Zeus has spent the early-morning hours having sex with Helen, Adam Jr.'s wife; and Pan visits in the guise of an old friend, Benny Grace.

This quirky novel is set in an alternative world, which at first seems a bit amazing. Godley's mathematical theories destroyed the Relativity Theory and other staunchly-taken-for-granted scientific formulae long ago. The world is powered by alternative energy: cars run on a sea compound of some kind. What? What? I kept thinking at first. I can deal with the gods, but the "rattly old Salsol" threw me for a minute. Banville reveals these things slowly, as though we are in the know.

Hermes shows us the day's events from the point of view of all the members of the family, including Adam himself, who thinks about the past. Especially interesting is Petra, the rather crazy 19-year-old with the shaved head and obsession with compiling an encyclopedia of diseases in a leather notebook with a steel pen. Hermes loves her, and says she'll be coming to the gods early, but not yet.

To give you an idea of Banville's style, here is Adam considering his inability to connect with people:

"I have never been any good in dealing with people. I dare say I am not alone in this sad predicament, but I feel acutely my incompetence in the matter of other folk. You know how it is. Say you are walking down a not particularly crowded street. You spy, at quite a long way off still, out of the corner of your eye, out of the corner of your watchfulness, as it were, a stranger who, you can see, has in his turn become aware of you as you approach him. Even at that distance you both begin to make little adjustments, covert little feints and swerves, so as to avoid eventual collision, all the while pretending to be perfectly oblivous of each other."

Goodness, isn't that exactly the way it is?

He also tips his hat to the Amphytrion myth, especially to a German 19th-century version by Heinrich von Klast which Banville translated and produced an adaptation of 10 years ago.

I enjoyed this novel very much.

One of the best books I've read this year!

Ransom

I've been reading novelistic retellings of myths lately, David Malouf's Ransom among them, and enjoying his reinterpretation of the story of Priam.

I was inspired to read Ransom because of the problems of teaching adult ed Latin and reading an English translation of The Aeneid. It's very different from teaching Latin IV, where students read brief chunks of the Latin text at a time and concentrate on translation. Reading in English, I'm confronted with the fatum-furor-pietas symbolic triad (fate--furor-- & recognition of duty to gods, country, and family) at an incredible speed. It's all there, all at once, a jumble, a grief, a tragedy, a weariness, terror, love, battles, and the epic agony of having to go on, whether one wants to or not. Aeneas, an unusual hero, ravaged and numbed by the destruction of his civilization, comes to terms with the difficulty and horror of his mission, to lead the Trojan people to Italy. (He is seven years on the road when the poem starts.) This ibeautifully sophisticated epic poem, deemed by T.S. Eliot the best poem in any language because it was written in Latin at the height of the maturity of the language when Roman civilization was at its peak, has countless allusions to the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the days when everyone took Latin, of course everyone knew this poem.

David Malouf's novel Ransom is an inspired reimagining of the Iliad, not the Aeneid, but it does, of course, at the end contain allusions to the account of Priam's murder by Achilles' son in Book II of the Aeneid. As Malouf says about his new novel, he "re-enters the world of the Iliad to recount the story of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, and, in a very different version from the original, Priam's journey to the Greek camp."

At the heart of Ransom is Priam's questioning of fate. In a dream/vision Iris, a messenger of the gods, visits him, and tells him that perhaps it is chance, not fate, that has killed his sons and wrecked Troy. This goes against all the teachings: the gods condone or chastise, favor or destroy empires, seemingly on a whim, sometimes to punish one man's hubris, even when a country like Troy has honored the gods. Priam hatches a plan that will challenge and rethink the acceptance of fatum: he will go, a suppliant, in a humble cart, filled with gold and Trojan wealth, driven by a working-class driver, to Achilles' camp to ransom his son Hector's body. He will approach Achilles on a personal level, not as a king of Troy. He will change the assumptions of civilization.

He approaches his wife, Hecuba, and in an epic speech, tries to persuade her that his plan is sanctioned by his vision.

"But to Hecuba the image is a shocking one--she is more tied to convention than she believes--and as Priam warms to his subject she grows more and more disturbed."

This short, exquisite literary novel may not be for everybody, but I recommend it. Malouf writes beautifully, and one of my favorite books of all time is An Imaginary Life, the novel he wrote about Ovid in exile.

Sentence Attack

Whether you're a beginner or an advanced student, "sentence attack" is the key to translation.  Apply the following rules to sentences and you can't go wrong.  Remember that the Latin word order must be translated into the English word order, subject-verb-direct object, etc. 

SENTENCE ATTACK RULES: 

I.  Verbs, nouns (nom. & acc.), adjectives & prepositional phrases.

EXAMPLE SENTENCE 1: Amici bonos viros in agro vident.

1.  Find the verb(s) in each sentence and analyze the person (1st, 2nd, or 3rd), number (sing. or pl.), tense (present, future, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, or future perfect), and mood (indicative, the mood we use  most often, states a fact, as in "I see," "you see," "he sees"); the infinitive (the second principal part, meaning "to see"), and imperative (command, meaning "See!").

In Ex. Sentence 1 above, the verb is vident.  It is 3rd person pl. present indicative and means "they see."

2.  If the verb has a 1st or 2nd person ending, the subject does not need to be stated.  The ending will tell you the subject is "I," "You," "We," or "You-all.) If the verb has a 3rd person ending, it is translated "he, she, it" or "they" unless a nominative subject is specified. If there is a nominative noun, it is always the subject and replaces the "he, she, it, they."

In Sentence 1, amici is the subject.  It is nominative plural and matches the 3rd person plural ending of the verb vident.  So far the translation is 

"The friends see..."

3.  Every noun in the sentence has a relationship either to the verb or another noun.  After you've found the subject and verb, look for the direct object (accusative) and identify the gender, no., & case.  In Ex. Sentence 1,  viros is m. pl. accusative.  It means "men" and will be the DIRECT OBJECT of the verb, not the SUBJECT.  So far the translation is:

"The friends see the men."   

4.  An adjective may be used to describe a noun.  It will agree with the noun it modifies in gender, no., and case.  In the sentence above, bonos is an adjective and means "good."  Identify the gender, no., & case to see what noun it describes.  Bonos is masc. sing. acc. and modifies the noun viros.  So far the translation is 

"The friends see the good men."

5.  Some nouns are objects not of verbs but of prepositions.  Prepositions (in, with, without, into, towards, etc.) can take either the acc. or the abl.  You have to memorize the the preposition with the case it governs.  In the sentence above, in agro is a prepositional phrase.  The translation of Sentence 1 is:

"The friends see the good men in the field."

II.  Nouns (gen., dat., & abl.)

EX. Sentence 2:  Philosophiam magni magistri mihi libris tuis docuisti.

1.  Identify the verb form and subject as in the first sentence.  Docuisti is the 2nd. person sing. perfect indicative of doceo and means "You taught" or "You have taught."  "You" is the subject so we don't have to look for a nom. noun (though in somce cases you might see Tu).

2.  Identify the direct object.  Philosophiam is f. acc. sing.  So far the sentence says:

"You taught philosophy..."

3.  Identify the other forms of nouns and adjectives one by one.  

a.  Magni magistri is an adjective-noun phrase.  In this sentence, the phrase is gen. sing. and shows possession.  A genitive is always used to describe another noun.  In this case, magni magistri shows possession of philosophiam and means "of the great teacher" or "the great teacher's.)  So far the sentence says,

"You taught the philosophy of the great teacher..."

b.  Mihi is the dative singular form of the pronoun ego.  It is the indirect object of the verb means "to me." The sentence now says

"You taught the philosophy of the great teacher to me..."

c.  libris tuis is abl. pl.  It is an ablative without a preposition, hence the abl. of means, and means "with or by your books."

"You taught the philosophy of the great teacher to me."

Presto!  It's not so hard, is it?  I will put up a "Sentence Attack" exercise post over the weekend.

Homework Due April 6

Wheelock, Chapter 15, pp. 100-101:

Learn vocabulary; P&R, 1-10; Sententiae, all; "Dying Words on Immortality"

Read half of Book 8 Aeneid

And an Optional Latin Challenge TBA!

Optional Latin Challenge: Aeneid, Book VII, vv. 475-482

In addition to the assigned lines of the Aeneid, I encourage you to read more on your own. Haec gloriae gratia lege (gratia is an ablative here: the ablative of gratia preceded by a genitive means "for the sake of"). The optional lines are Book VII, vv. 475-482. We will review these in class. I'm using a different text but assume ours both show the alternate 3rd-declension accusative endings which I explain in the notes below.

Bonam fortunam! (Accusative of exclamation.)

NOTES VV. 475-482:

476 Allecto: one of the Furies. This is the nominative form. (nom. f. sing.)

477 speculata: "having spied or gazed at." This is the nominative feminine singular form of a perfect deponent participle. Perfect participles are usually passive: deponent verbs have passive forms, active meanings. For information on traditional perfect passive participles (though you don't need to know this for deponents!) look here.

477 quo litore: "on which shore"

480 naris = nares This is a common alternate 3rd-declension acc. plural ending

481 ut...ardentes agerent: "so that the eager (dogs) might drive..." This is an example of ut + the subjunctive, here a purpose clause. For now you only need know how to translate it.

481 quae: "which," nom. fem. sing. of the relative pronoun, but here is better translated as "and this."

482 agrestis=agrestes: see note 480

The Sibylline Prophecy: How Long Does It Take to Learn Latin?

The pile of books in the photo above depicts a "Latin factory." The red book is my Virgil. The open book behind it is a dictionary. The shiny taped-up blue book in the back is a well-used grammar. And then of course there is the beat-up relic of my original Virgil word-list notebook, which I photographed to show solidarity with your reference-book dependence.

After my Sibylline prophecy that it will take seven years (magic number) to learn Latin, I decided I should clarify. There are stages of learning Latin. You are in one of them. You may have to look up everything in a dictionary or Wheelock at this point, but that is the respected method of classicists everywhere. Eventually, when you finish Wheelock, you may become a whiz at Caesar, Seneca, Virgil, or Catullus, but it takes practice, practice, practice, and experience. Will you reach a magic moment when all conjugations, declensions, grammar, and syntax converge? Yes, many times. But then a few sentences later you may find yourself doing hard work again. It can be humbling. It is, however, always challenging and fun. You will eventually find yourself reading paragraphs or stanzas without consciously translating.


See this faded, stained notebook? This is the ancient receptacle of my original Aeneid Book 2 word lists. When you translate a Latin author, it is necessary to keep a running word list. You look up words you don't know, and often words you do know when they express a unique meaning in a specific passage. You work from your word lists to translate. These two pages covered Book II lines 39-104. I looked up almost 60 words.

When you translate even a few lines of the Aeneid, make a word list. Once you have the vocabulary, you can use Wheelock to identify grammatical forms, which are the backbone of your translation. The word lists can also help you prove your translation, or show where you went astray.