the usual miscellaney

[bedlamsbard]

I am translating real Latin, y'all! In the wild! Well, okay, corralled on a page with extensive glosses, but still! REAL LATIN NOT THE DUMBED DOWN VERSION.

Naturally it is potty humor. Because, hey, with the Romans it's either potty humor, sex humor, or Cicero expounding at some length upon honor and the Republic. Or, okay, we get Hannibal invading Italy and Quintus Fabius Maximus being awesome a lot, too. (I love Hannibal and Fabius Maximus, and Cicero is very moving, although we usually get dumbed down Cicero; the one time we did Real Cicero everyone in the class nearly cried. Ooh, we get a lot of Martial, I really like Martial. The other two translations for today are both Martial.)

Does this seriously translate as "Alas, I think I shit myself!" Okay, Seneca. If you say so. (Or, well, if you say Claudius said so, I guess.)

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I have been meeting with professors ALL WEEK. (Mostly about my honors thesis. Theses. I don't know, at this point. I'm writing the Spenser prospectus, one because I don't know if I'll have enough time to write the Borgia one next week and two because it will be good practice; I have one reader for the Borgia thesis and I was going to meet with the second one tomorrow, but it looks like it's going to be Monday instead; I never actually got to talk with my second reader about the Spenser thesis so I guess I should e-mail him and say I'm probably not going to do it. People keep asking me what my new topic is and I go, "The grand strategy of Pope Alexander VI!" "Which one?" "The Borgia pope? The notorious one? The notorious Borgia one?" And then they ask what my old topic was, and after being told "Classical references in The Faerie Queene," say, "Oh, so your majors are English and history?" "No, MEMS and Classics." Then I get funny looks. Despite the fact that these are all MEMS professors.)

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A thing that is kind of awesome: The French Revolution, set to Lady Gaga's Bad Romance (via Fuck Yeah History Major Heraldic Beast, which kind of freakishly describes half my life). highlyeccentric, they have a King Arthur one! Which may be relevant to your interests. (It's Henry, Henry, Henry which really gets stuck in your head, though. ABBA.)

Comments

[bedlamsbard]

Trufax, I only got through half of it. Which possibly I should have mentioned. (The French Revolution one is better and catchier, I think. So is the Viva Roma No. V, but I'm not 100% convinced of the history there being right.)

That tumblr is, on many an occasion, a shocking example of my existence. So are the two classics ones. (I have actually been asked, "Oh, you're a classics major? So you study Dickens and Shakespeare?")

[highlyeccentric]

That tumblr says a lot about my existence, too.

Although possibly it says MORE about my existence that, when faced with the "read beowulf in the original anglo-saxon" one I shouted at it that it's ENGLISH majors who read Old English.

[bedlamsbard]

I'm pretty sure historians who concentrate on that period also read Old English, though. (There are a couple of English major ones, too -- well, they've been spreading over Tumblr the past week, or so, for many disciplines. I think the English ones tend to be a bit eh.)