After a summer spent leisurely working my way through Wheelock's Latin in order to give myself a first official introduction to Latin grammar, I still felt lacking. I didn't feel like my Latin was any better or worse, and of course it didn't help that my previous education with the language was so fragmentary. When school started again, I half thought of auditing elementary Latin while taking advanced Latin to get a real refresher, but ended up just enrolling in advanced.
When I had previously dealt with Ovid in AP Latin, I much preferred the shorter, more humorous poems of Catullus, but when I started reading Ovid's Metamorphoses I fell in love. I began to get a deeper appreciation for the language Ovid employed and the techniques he used to create the best poetry I have ever read. I quickly branched out and started reading his other works (mostly in English translation) and have now decided that I want to focus on him for my thesis. I breezed through Ovid and then focused on Horace for my ISP by translating book one of his Odes and compiling an annotated bibliography of some scholarly work pertaining to them. I was surprised to see the end product weighing in at over 50 pages!
After ISP came my first introduction to Latin prose by the duet of Suetonius and Seneca the Younger with their works about the emperor Claudius. Prose marked a fairly easy transition and the Apocolocyntosis of Seneca was so easy that I sight-read most of it. Concurrent with this endeavor was my self-started IRP (individual research project) on Latin composition. Writing a little bit in Latin everyday really helped give me a strong hold on grammar and aided in some vocabulary. My only qualm with the textbooks made for Latin composition are the strong focus on military vocabulary and the lack of modern vocabulary used to allow for practical application of the composition skills. It was only recently that I have found books for such things, which I plan to use this year in conjunction with that Latin club at school I run.
My Latin learning will be a continuous adventure that I don't see ending soon, though that may change when I go overseas to teach English. It remains to be seen what will happen, but I will enjoy whatever time I continue to pursue the language.
No comments:
Post a Comment