"You Really Expect me to read all that Latin!" - Strategies for Reading Latin Texts
by Caroline Kelly, Covenant Day School, NC
II. "You really expect me to read that!" (con't)
This is such a delightful poem that a rough translation is in order at this point:
By now Latin was out of style:
I’ll be frank with you,
He know enough Latin
To work out epigraphs,
To chat about Juvenal,
To end his letters with vale,
And he even remembered, though not without error,
Two verses of the Aeneid.
He had no desire to dig
Through the chronological dust
Of the ancient texts of the earth:
But anecdotes of days past
From Romulus to our day
He preserved in his memory.
Pushkin, A. S. “Evgenii Onegin.” Sochineniia. Vol. I. Ed. M. D. Filina, Mosckva: Vechc, 1999. 295 (Russian text)
Two final items could be deduced about the vocabulary of the poem. Based on the subject matter, one could anticipate that Greek derivatives such as epigraph and chronological might be employed by the poet, if they exist in Russian—and a quick glance at lines four and ten confirm our guess. One could even go further, and deduce many letters of the alphabet based on the words which can be recognized.
In contrast, if a teacher were to place the following three sentences on the overhead, his or her students would breathe a sigh of relief: no long passage, just an exercise, and probably a simple, transitive sentence—subject, verb and direct object.
If we know that Russian, like Latin, is an inflected language, we can recognize the morphology by the patterns of the final syllables. Each of these sentences employs a nominative feminine plural noun as subject (the second word in each sentence), modified by an adjective of the same case, a third person plural present tense verb and a feminine accusative singular noun as a direct object. We can note the endings of these different forms, and also observe that the adjectival endings, unlike the case with some in Latin, do not match the noun endings. However, unlike the passage, we have no clues at all as to content. If, on the other hand, we are told that the subject is the Russian word for ‘women’, and that in each sentence that noun is modified by a different adjective giving nationality, we might be able to see that the last sentence is speaking about…American women. When we get to the translation, we find out that there was in fact a little more that we could have predicted.
1. Norwegian women drink beer.
2. Russian women discuss politics.
3. American women buy Coca-Cola.
It is not improbable that Russians would discuss ‘politics’—and now that we know what it means, we realize that the word, both in Russian and in English, is clearly a Greek derivative. We can also see that ‘Coca-Cola’, is a logical topic in the same sentence as the adjective ‘American’.
We may conclude that while sentences are less daunting, we would probably rather know what Pushkin said than read these simple sentences Ecce Romani which hopes to engage the students
The one point that this paper attempts to emphasize is this: pre-reading is valuable in reassuring students that they are much farther along than they realize. They already possess prior knowledge which can enable them to begin the process of constructing meaning from a whole passage.
I use pre-reading also to enable them to identify and practice the various skills that are needed to understand the story as whole—examples of possible exercises for select chapters of Ecce Romani are available on this Website.
