The Septimus Notes

Thursday, September 22, 2005

|I'm just talkin' 'bout gerund.|

Today my first assignment was due for Translation. I, personally, thought it was very good. Good enough, in fact, that when Prof. C asked who wanted to read their translation of the first sentence of the passage by Baudelaire that was our assignment, my hand shot up. He, however, called on Victoria.

"Without a doubt, studying the ancient masters in order to learn how to paint is excellent, but..." She reached the end of her sentence and Prof. C said, in his quiet, slow, elongated almost monotone books-on-tape Sideshow Bob drawl,

"That is very good, Victoria. You chose all the words one would expect. But, hmm... 'studying.' That's interesting, isn't it, Victoria? It's a very modern word, which I suppose would make sense since Baudelaire is very concerned with modernity. That is, in fact, the purpose of this piece. But, 'studying' marks it as a very modern translation, doesn't it? Often one translates things with an intended colloquiality, but 'studying' drops us out of the colloquial into an entirely new lexical category, doesn't it? This ing, this gerund, or the present participle as it is sometimes called, is a fairly modern choice. One would have rarely seen it in the 19th century, and certainly not at the beginning of a sentence. You hand me a gerund and suddenly I have no idea where I am or what I am doing. No, I don't care for 'studying.' It's... it's really a desecration of grammar, isn't it, Victoria? But, no, your translation was spot on and precisely what I would expect. No, you get an A+."

Prof. C didn't dig it.

And the very first word of my translation? "Studying."

promulgated by SWS2.1 at 17:53.
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