Greek!

M & C are a couple in our community group at church. C needs to translate a certain amount of Plato (yes, in Greek) to fulfill degree requirements, and both of them have done some NT Greek in college. And I am very rusty in classical Greek and looking for a way to brush up on it a bit. So I joined them today for our first meeting to translate a section of the Republic. Now, we were supposed to do as much of the translation as we could ahead of time, but it seemed that our initial assignment was too much - in fact it was a bit overwhelming for me and I just didn't do as much as I probably really had time for. But that's just to say that we went rather slowly today. And it was great fun! It's been almost 8 years since I last translated classical Greek with any degree of seriousness. Let's just say that there was a lot of rust. Fortunately for all three of us, I think we are all at about the same level - I was afraid I would end up being a drag on the conversation/translation. And our strengths are all a bit different, so it's a nice complementarity. One of the fun things about translating Plato with M & C is that they both have some real background in philosophy (whereas I only pretend now and then to know something about philosophy). So the discussions about how best to translate a certain clause, what's the main verb, is that a participle?, and so on - these discussions were punctuated with revelations about the philosophical implications and how great it is to read Plato in Greek. So I learned some things about Plato's system, shook off a little bit of rust, and over all had a great time. I think it was decided after today's session that we really want to start at the beginning and translate all of the Republic. At the rate we're going that's probably a multi-year project, but even if we never finish it will be great fun and very educational. :-)

In other news, I got to teach a Speech Acoustics course this semester via webcast between here (St Louis) and a group of grad students in Budapest. That was also a lot of fun, and a lot of work. I'm afraid I started stronger than I finished, but my teaching has definitely improved since the first time I taught a version of this course (a year ago at MIT), and I have plans for improving the course for its third iteration, whenever and wherever that may be.

And finally, at long last, I have been reading Tolkien. All through college and grad school my friends would tell me I needed to read Tolkien, but I never was interested enough to put it very high on my To Do list. But after moving to St Louis I read the Silmarillion, and then M and I read The Hobbitt together, followed by The Fellowship of the Ring, and we are currently reading The Two Towers. Once we finish that, we will of course read The Return of the King. Then... We might return to the Silmarillion, since M has never read it. Anyway, I am now a Tolkien fan.

The weather in St Louis has been awesome this week. I find that each time I go outside in this weather, I feel like reading Milton or Pope, or something similar. It stems from my time living in Cambridge, when I was reading Paradise Lost (spread out over a couple of years) and found that it was very pleasurable to read it outside in a little park on a sunny day. A few weeks ago when I was reading a few pieces by Pope, I did go out to Forest Park and found a nice bench to sit on and read - on sunny days. But that only happened two or three times (Pope's stuff is much shorter and easier than Paradise Lost). Anyway, apparently sunny days (without humidity!) are Milton/Pope reading days for me...and Milton/Pope are best read outside. :-)