Month: May 2012

Honored Justices, We Respectfully Disagree

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

My spiders bring back some strange things from time to time … a case in point is an item from the Courthouse News Service regarding a suit brought by a Japanese baseball player … inter alia they suggest:

A divided Supreme Court vacated that decision Monday, finding that the statute that compensates prevailing litigants for “interpreters” is limited to the cost of oral translation, and does not include the cost of document translation.
“Based on our survey of the relevant dictionaries, we conclude that the ordinary or common meaning of ‘inter­preter’ does not include those who translate writings,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. “Instead, we find that an interpreter is normally under­stood as one who translates orally from one language to another. This sense of the word is far more natural. As the Seventh Circuit put it: ‘Robert Fagles made famous translations into English of the ‘Iliad,’ the ‘Odyssey,’ and the ‘Aeneid,’ but no one would refer to him as an English ­language ‘interpreter’ of these works.”

No one? I think every Classics person on the planet would automatically reply that all translations are interpretations. It’s one of the primary reasons we desire to read primary sources in their original language! But then they seem to be using ‘translation’ and ‘interpretation’ somewhat differently than we do; I guess we’re neither “ordinary” nor “common”.

Something That’s Been Bugging Me: Outreach II ~ The Conference

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 1 Comment

When my Explorator newsletter — and the internets — was still in its infancy, it was a common annual thing to read in most of the major newspapers some coverage of the annual Modern Languages Association shindig, most often with an aim of poking fun at folks. Over the years I have oft-opined at how little news coverage the major conferences in North America seem to garner, specifically the AIA/APA thing, and, to a lesser extent, the CAC thing. To be fair, there always seems to be one or two papers on the AIA side of things which gets attention, and in the past couple of years a pattern has emerged: first,  the papers at the AIA/APA which get coverage in the popular press are those which have already had some press attention in the form of a University press release and has some ‘sexiness’ as a topic (e.g. Simon James’ study of chemical warfare at Dura Europos started out as a University of Leicestershire press release: Ancient Chemical Warfare (the press release doesn’t seem to be online anymore , alas), although even something potentially obscure (to the public), such as a paper on Menander, might get some press attention if it has garnered some press release attention (e.g. UCincinnati’s treatment of Kathryn Gutzwiller’s work a year or so ago: Mulling Menander and Mosaics).

But it must be admitted that merely putting out the press release doesn’t guarantee press coverage. The Canadian Archaeological Association just had its annual meeting and put out a press release (400 Canadian and American archaeologists in Montreal), but near as I can tell, no significant news coverage resulted from it. This suggests that for a major conference to get some popular press coverage, the association(s) involved have to go a bit further.

So here’s a potential strategy: once a paper has been accepted for presentation at one of the big conferences,the association has to encourage the author to go to his/her university’s PR department and say so or, given the reluctance of Classics types to be self promoting, perhaps the association should have some sort of ‘form email’ that they can send to a university’s PR department themselves (I’m sure PR departments would love to have something from the Humanities to cover). Hopefully that will result in a few press releases for the mainstream press to take notice of.

That’s the first step. The second step is a bit more labour-intensive: once the program for the conference has been put together (or better yet, while it is being put together … this will become clearly shortly), the powers that be should be putting together an itinerary of select papers which would have some popular appeal. It could be just for a morning session, a day, or the whole conference (or combinations thereof). These itineraries would be sent to the editors of the local major newspaper and to some of the ‘big ones’ which have (inter)national readership. Essentially what I’m suggesting is to give a prospective reporter a reason to go/something already in mind to report on. If abstracts are available online (as they are for the APA … but strangely not for the CAC), links to those could also be provided to make the journalists’ job even easier.

Livetweeting and liveblogging such things should also be encouraged, but it must be admitted that all such treatments essentially are ‘preaching to the converted’. To reach the broader audience, we need to hit the ‘bigger papers’ … perhaps the next time one of the biggies is coming around someone might want to implement some/all of these suggestions just to see if they have any potential …

Hobbitus Ille

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 4 Comments

Another one that required a bit of poking around … last week Ginny Lindzey earned a tip o’ the pileus for alerting us (and the world) of an item at the Bookseller:

An edition of J R R Tolkien’s The Hobbit translated into Latin and titled Hobbitus Ille, will be published in September by HarperCollins to mark its 75th birthday.

The publisher said the Latin version of the tale‚ which opens “In foramine terrae habitabat hobbitus” (In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit)‚ would be “great for students learning Latin, but also for fans who want to dip in and find favourite passages”.

The translation, by classicist Mark Walker, will also see Tolkien’s songs and verses translated into classical Latin metre. Previous Latin editions include Domus Anguli Puensis (The House at Pooh Corner) and Ursus Nomine Paddington (A Bear Called Paddington).

HC will publish in hardback priced £12.99

I’ve been trying to figure out whether this was just a UK thing. I could not find any mention of it at Harper Collins’ US site; I did find it at their UK site last week, but now can’t seem to locate it. That said, it is listed on the Canadian Amazon site, so it should be generally available.

Something That’s Been Bugging Me: Outreach I ~ Scholarships

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

It being Victoria Day and all, I’ve been able to do a bit of catching up blogging (as you can probably tell) and it also gives me the opportunity to gripe about a few things which are outreach-related. The first one has to do with a conversation currently unfolding on the Latinteach list wherein it has been asked what scholarships are available for students who are hoping to enter the Classics field. It boggles my mind at this point in the development of both Classics and the internets, but amazingly, there doesn’t seem to be a one-stop shopping list for this sort of thing. One would think, e.g., that the American Philological Association or the Classical Association of Canada would have a section of their websites devoted to this, but I’ve come up empty. They do, of course, highlight scholarships/prizes which their respective associations offer, but that’s a bit short-sighted for ‘(inter)national’ organizations. As a result, on the American side, Shelly McCormick’s list seems to have the most entries so far (she’s a Latin teacher). On the Canadian side, one can wade through the entries at canadian-universities.net, although it gets tricky where departments have merged with others.

So the obvious gripe is why haven’t the APA and CAC put something together in this regard? It seems to me that one of the most basic aspects of outreach — i.e. attracting high school students to enter the field — would be to show them that there is some financial assistance available to them to help pay for a program they might have difficulties convincing their parents is worth taking, no? I also notice — from the Canadian listings — that there are plenty of prizes and and the like at various universities for those who are already in-course. Knowing that such things are available before you even enter a program would obviously provide at least some incentive to ‘sign up’. Come on associations … let’s get on this thing!

Celebrity Gossip’s Classical Roots

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Of course, rogueclassicism readers are well aware that all the sorts of thing that fills the airwaves with chatter about this or that Kardashian or Lohan or Gaga or whatever would have been perfectly familiar in ancient Rome, but Johan Kugelberg had a nice piece for the Independent blog which is worth excerpting … first, the intro:

Gossip in the time of ancient Rome has trickled down to us. There are passages in Petronius, Procopius, Seneca and Suetonius that would have regular readers of Gawker or D-listed or any other celebrity schadenfreude site spit-spray their latte.

Procopius Anecdota (literal title ‘unpublished notes’) most commonly known under the title The Secret History is the most notorious, so I’ll cut to the chase right here. Written in the 6th century by a Byzantine master historian, this was the text he wrote to contradict all the fluff he’d been forced to write about his boss the emperor Justinian in The Wars of Justinian and The Buildings of Justinian in order to keep the big man happy. It is the defamatory masterpiece handed down to us from way back: Due to its obscene and libelous nature, the text lay dormant for centuries in the Vatican library until published in the early 17th century, and has maintained its notoriety ever since.

Procopius’ hatchet job on Justinian’s wife the empress Theodora is legendary. He tells all, and all is as unbelievable as all get: Trained swans picking grain from off Theodora’s genitalia in order to titillate her jaded sexual palate is not the craziest example I could cull up, in fact, some of the other ones are of the magnitude that if they showed up on a celebrity sex tape there is no doubt that Our Sweet Lord would lose any remaining patience with us and hurl an apocalyptic gotcha our way.

… and then the deliciously-difficult-to-parse-but-wonderful-to-try-to-read-out-loud penultmate paragraph:

People who write and blog and snark on sites such as Egotastic or Celeb Jihad or Media Takeout or The Superficial are dismantling some of our waxy build-ups that the constant Kardashian vuvuzela bring about, they are fueled by schadenfreude, certainly, and its lesser-known shadow-cousin gluckshmerz. Gluckschmerz is important; It is part of the mechanism that drove Procopius to write about Justinian and Theodora, and I would hope that the pain we feel presented with other people’s happiness is the bitter tonic at the centre of the reality-show sugar cookie when we indulge in that particular kind of destructive yet delicious schadenfreude that comes from seeing someone fumble and stumble and fail and fall as they are about to conquer the summit of modern celeb-dom.

… can’t believe I never heard of the word Gluckschmerz before …