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Oct. 13th, 2005 04:01 pma.d. III Ides Oct.
I skipped French Table today. I'm going to lose it all, and it's going to be horrible, but I really didn't want to go.
The sun hasn't been out in at least a week. It's cold and rainy and depressing. Good weather for sitting in a cozy setting and reading, or for putting Mozart of Haydn quartets on and baking cookies1. Of course --
--So, one of the morons in my dorm made the fire alarm go off. He decided to spray the fire extinguisher "just to see what would happen." IDIOT!!!!!! I didn't turn my music off, and it went from the beginning of "Se a caso madama la notte ti chiama" to the very end of "Se vuol ballare, signor Contino," which, granted, is only six minutes or so.
Anyway, I was browsing in the library after the Latin midterm today (I swear that we had never seen maneo, manere before, and the fourth sentence was just plain icky) and I got a new biography of St. Augustine by James J. O'Donnell. It's quite interesting. I am really getting quite fond of this early-Christian, late-Roman period. Perhaps I should start taking Greek and be a Classics major. But it really is fascinating, how much I don't know about this kind of early Christianity, about the various competing sects, even about how misleading a lot of what one reads is. The term Bishop, for example, actually corresponds more closely to what we would call a parish priest: there were about 700 of them in North Africa alone in Augustine's time.
The one thing that gives me pause, however, is how O'Donnell tends to give examples from modern slang and pop culture to get his points across. In particular, I wonder about his translations. Are they too free? Or is it that scholarly translation tends to be too free to conform to a certain standard of appropriate gravitas?
Take this, for example, from Romans 13.13:
no orgies and drunkenness, nothing about bedrooms and horniness, no wrangling and rivalry -- just put on the master Jesus Christ and don't go on looking after the flesh and its hankerins.
From the official Vatican Website:
let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.
Okay, so it isn't that different.
Here's the Latin, from the same site:
Sicut in die honeste ambulemus: non in comissationibus et ebrietatibus, non in cubilibus et impudicitiis, non in contentione et aemulatione; sed induite Dominum Iesum Christum et carnis curam ne feceritis in concupiscentiis.
My half-literal, half-guessed-at translation of the above, with the help of The Perseus Project dictionaries because, for some strange reason, we haven't learnt all the words for 'immodesty' and 'drunkeness' yet.
Let us walk honorably, as in the day: not in Bacchanales and drunkenness, not in beds and immodesty, not in struggle and competition; but dress yourself in the Lord Jesus Christ and do not concern yourself for the flesh in its desires.
So, okay, he's pretty accurate. Which makes me really want to read Augustine in the original. Hm.
1. When I think about chamber music in its original context of music that would have been played for the private enjoyment of, say, Prince Esterhazy in the comfort of his own estate, I wonder what it would have been like to be a servant in such a household. Because the music would have filtered through the walls, right? So if you were scrubbing the floors in another room, or polishing silver, you still would have heard it. For this reason I like to listen to Mozart and Haydn when I bake.
