Learning Latin with Pope Francis - May 24, 2014

I'm launching today a series of posts in which I will offer grammatical explanations of the tweets from the Latin feed of Pope Francis, Bishop of Rome.

I'll study all the new posts and catch up over time on older posts. A full list of these will be housed at my main page. I'll be posting the Latin and corresponding English post together and then offering grammatical thoughts.

Literal translation of the Latin: Dear friends, I ask you to accompany me, with prayers, (as I am) making a holy pilgrimage into the Holy Land.

First off, the Latin is a much dearer thought than the English. You pray for the Pope and thereby accompany him on the Pilgrimage! Rest assured, Your Holiness, you are in my prayers.

Here's how the Latin works.

Latin	English	Parsing	Grammar Points
Dilecti	Dear	nom. pl. adj.	dilectus, dilecta, dilectum; modifies amici
amici	friends	nom. pl.	amicus, amici
rogo	I ask/pray	1st pers. sing. pres. ind. act. verb	rogo, rogare, rogavi, rogatum
vos	you	acc. pl.	vos, vestri
ut	that, so that, in order that		governs comitemini in purpose clause
precibus	(with) prayers	abl. pl.	prex, precis
me	me	acc. sing	ego, mei
comitemini	may you accompany	2nd pers. pl. pres. subj.	comitor, comitari, comitatus
sacram	holy	acc. sing.	sacer, sacra, sacrum; modifies peregrinationem
peregrinationem	pilgrimage	acc. sing	peregrinatio, peregrinationis; direct object of facientem
in	into	Prep. + acc
Terram	Land	acc. sing.	terra, terrae; follows in
Sanctam	Holy	acc. sing.	sanctus, sancta, sanctum; modifies terram
facientem	making	acc. sing. pres. act. part.	facio, facere, feci, factum; modifies me

Women Reading ... in Art

In honor of my late mother, my commemoration of Mother's Day will be a reflection on a curious artistic motif: Women Reading.
I stumbled on this recently, while surveying art (a thing which I enjoy). And I realized, the motif is quite old.

The Virgin Mary is frequently depicted in iconography as reading a book. She is traditionally reading when the Angel Gabriel comes to her at the Annunciation.

Now, to be sure, there certainly are examples in art of males reading. But if you survey this genre it becomes very clear that the vast majority of people depicted as reading in art are women. And I began to wonder why this motif is so ubiquitous.

You know a motif is significant when there are sizable Pinterest Boards dedicated solely to it. Survey, for instance the following:

Art - Women Reading
Women Readers
Biblio Beauties
Las Mujeres que leen

One may here counter that women reading in art is so common simply because
A) reading is a common activity and B) women are overall depicted in art significantly more than men. (For the simple fact that they're gorgeous!) Put those things together and maybe there's nothing terribly special or unexpected about a lot of artists producing paintings of women while they read.

But that explanation doesn't satisfy me. 
There are plenty of common activities which don't constitute significant artistic motifs. Women traditionally prepared food in a household (I actually do most of the cooking in mine). But there aren't nearly as many "women making dinner" paintings as there are of women reading. Something else is going on. 

As I studied the matter by looking at multiple examples of the genre, I noticed that the impetus of using "a woman reading" as an artistic subject seems to be the very fact that a woman reading is focused on something. In the vast majority of these art works, the woman is, of course, focused on the book. But I found it utterly fascinating that sometimes, while she has a book, she is focused on something else in the painting. 

Women reading, by Mary Cassat

Even if female artists have painted in this genre, it remains true that most of the artists who established this motif were men. And I will here propose that the choice of the "women reading" as a subject of art by men is ultimately about boys always and forever craving their mother's attention and approval. 

If you survey these paintings, you see women--strong, confident, frequently beautiful, and rarely focused on me, the viewer, at all. The artists who popularized this motif were subconsciously expressing the angst that the very young person has that the most central person in their world, their mother, is sometimes turned away from them.

The show Family Guy depicts this brilliantly and hilariously in a scene where the baby Stewie is trying to get his mother's attention.


 
And the many artists in the "woman reading" genre are subconsciously expressing the same angst.

Which brings me back to my mother. She also was a reader. My mother raised five children

within some limited means. But she made a significant purchase when we were all young. She bought a set of the World Book Encyclopedia. And she encouraged us all to read them and learn everything we could. And it opened up the world to us! I didn't even really want to go to college. But she insisted, even forged my signature on the application and sent it in when I had procrastinated the process. I would eventually get a PhD.

My mother, far right, with her siblings.

And never did I doubt her love and attention for a moment.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. Pray for me, as I pray for you. I love you always.

Thalatta! The Sea!

Xenophon, a mercenary who made the march of the ten thousand, called out with the rest, thalatta, thalatta! The Sea the Sea!

Joseph Brownlee Brown's poem captures the action nicely:

Thalatta!

I stand upon the summit of my years.
Behind the toil, the camp, the march, the strife,
The wandering and the desert; vast, afar,
Beyond this weary way, behold!
The Sea!

The sea o'erswept by clouds and winds and wings,
By thoughts and wishes manifold, whose breath
Is freshness and whose mighty pulse is peace.
Palter no question of the dim Beyond;

Cut lose the bark; such voyage itself is rest.

Majestic motion, unimpeded scope,
A widening heaven, a current without care.
Eternity! Deliverance, promise, course!
Time-tired souls salute thee from the shore.

In my novel, In Saecula Saeculorum, a young man has fixated on the quote, Thalatta, Thalatta, because it reminds him of lost parents and it seems to offer the hope of a future he feels in his heart. Read the novel to ride the seas with him and see if he finds the peace he seeks...

Gilbert Keith Chesterton: On Fate

"I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act."

 Illustrated London News (29 April 1922)

Translating Homer: It's Funny Because it's True...

Stephen Butler Leacock, a Canadian economist and humorist, provides a delicious parody of Homer in the following:

"Then he too Ajax on the one hand leaped (or possibly jumped) into the fight wearing on the other hand, yes certainly a steel corselet (or possibly a bronze under tunic) and on his head of course, yes without doubt he had a helmet with a tossing plume taken from the mane (or perhaps extracted from the tail) of some horse which once fed along the banks of the Scamander (and it sees the herd and raises its head and paws the ground) and in his hand a shield worth a hundred oxen and on his knees too especially in particular greaves made by some cunning artificer (or perhaps blacksmith) and he blows the fire and it is hot. Thus Ajax leapt (or, better, was propelled from behind), into the fight."

Homer did indeed produce beautiful poetry. But if you've ever translated him for the original Greek, you got at least a giggle out of Leacock's rendering.

Bellum et Pax--War and Peace...

Intervention of the Sabine Women

I'm a Latin teacher at a public high school today. But ten years ago this very day, I was a government agent actively preparing for a deployment into a war zone... 






 


Bellum/War

My Latin 1 class arrived today at the neuter noun. I used, as my example, a common noun well worth knowing, bellum 'war'.

And I also jotted onto the board what I call "quotes worth knowing,"  which put this important new noun in context:

Dulce bellum inexpertis   War, sweet to those who have not experienced it   Erasmus, quoting Pindar

Bella detesta matribus   Wars, detested by mothers   Horace, Carmina 1.24-25

And as I returned to the lesson, I found myself reflecting upon how I lived these quotes in course of my journey. 


Dulce bellum inexpertis
War, sweet to those who have not experienced it

That was sure me in February, 2004. My boss pulled me aside. "Keith, there's an opportunity I'd like to recommend you for. Would you be willing to serve in Iraq?"

I was, at that time, an Arabic linguist at the National Security Agency. I had gone to work there after 9/11 precisely because I wanted a piece of the action. The answer was, an immediate Yes! I was apprehensive, of course. But eager to go.

What followed was a few months of training, including certification on the Glock 9mm and M4 Assault Rifle I would be required to wear while in country.

Me, in Iraq, Summer, 2004

I would end up serving for three months at a base in Iraq, from mid-June to mid-September. Not as long as a lot of people who served there. But longer than anyone I knew at the time. In that deployment, I experienced mortar attacks and the fear of literally running for my life. I lived with the low-grade tension of knowing that the mortar shell that kills me is probably one I never hear coming.

Again, my experience of that war was not as horrific as many others. I never drew my gun in anger and I was never in active combat. I did, by the nature of my job, process intelligence that was used by the war machine. But I had already done that before I went to Iraq. And I would do a lot more of that when I returned to the States and spend the rest of my tenure at the NSA at the Counter-Terrorism Office. I'm actually not aware of any specific case in which I know with certainty that, as a result of my intelligence efforts, someone died versus was detained. And I have no moral conflicts about the job I did. 

But all that said, war was not so sweet when I stepped out of it. It had been replaced by:

Bella, horrida bella
Wars, horrid wars... (Aeneid 6.86)

I can remember calling my late father when I was settled in my hotel room in Amman, Jordan, freshly flown from Baghdad. I told him, "I'm out of there, tell everyone I'm safe." I hung up the phone and cried my eyes out, so relieved and daring to finally relax. And I drank two bottles of wine. I dreamed that night that I was back in Iraq, a thing I had never done while in Iraq. And, strangely, something I've never done since.

One of the reasons why I felt such strong emotion over being safely out of that country was that I knew this deployment, so important to me, had been quite difficult on my mother.


Bella detesta matribus
Wars, detested by mothers

I told my mother about the deployment just one week before my departure. She was in very poor health and I didn't want to give her any more stress than was necessary. I would see her and our entire family the weekend before I left--at my twin brother's wedding.

Now, I know my mother arranged for me to prayed for, by name, at her Church. Every Sunday during my entire deployment, she heard in the prayers for the people, "And for Keith, in Iraq..."

In mid-July, while in Iraq, I learned that my mother had suffered a minor stroke. The circumstances made it impossible for me to leave to come home, nor would she have wanted me to do that. But I could not escape the thought, was this because of stress over her son being in Iraq? (Probably not. It wasn't her first stroke. But having a son in a war zone didn't help her condition any.)

I would come home. In the presence of my father and my mother I would marry just three months after my return from Iraq.

Two years later, I left government service and became a Latin teacher. Three years after that, both my parents had passed away.


Bellum et Pax--War and Peace

I can go through whole days in which I never reflect on or remember the fact that I was in Iraq ten years ago. I would not have thought that possible. But those quotes took me back, with so many memories flooding back into my consciousness. That was my journey, and it's made me who I am today.


Novels of War... and Peace

In the novels I've written, the characters experience war, but I certainly can't glorify it. They hate it as much as I did. In my novels, the protagonists kill in battle only when they have to and reflect on how much it disturbs them. I depict a band of freedom fighters who pray for their enemies immediately prior to directing fire against them.

The novel A Place of Brightness tells the story of two women. Doina is a freedom fighter struggling to liberate her native Romania from the Communists. A generation later, Aurora is an intelligence officer helping Doina's sons solve a mystery that threatens the modern and free Romania once again.
 

The novel In Saecula Saeculorum is a Time Travel Adventure set in Ancient Rome. But it also does not glorify battle. One of the chief characters, Carmen, turns to the bottle to cope with the pain of taking human life in battle. And the success of the mission will hinge on her internal war...