It has been interesting to wander off for a bit into the field of early Welsh studies. But I very much want to return to more familiar territory now.
Sitting on my desktop are a number of Word documents, containing partially complete translations of documents from the Council of Hippo (393) and the 3rd Council of Carthage (397). I see these were last touched in June this year. In fact I was relieved that it is not even longer!
This afternoon I picked up one of these, and started to look at it. It contained a canon of the council of Hippo. Back in the 1960s Charles Munier discovered five lost canons in a manuscript somewhere – not sure where – and published them in an article to which I have no access, Charles Munier, “Cinq canons inédits du concile d’Hippone du 8 octobre 393”, in: Revue de droit canonique 18 (1968) p. 16-29. Presumably this says more about his discovery.
The text is pretty rough! I had a go at the first canon back in the summer, but the sentences rather defeated me.
I had another go this afternoon, and this time the sentences made more sense. I expect those fluent in reading Latin would have no difficulty. But those of us who are dabblers must look at each sentence as if it was a crossword puzzle, to be decyphered word by word and clause by clause. When you do that, you can get lead by one set of words in into a state of mind in which even obvious Latin is opaque. You have to go away, and come back. So it was this afternoon. I was quite glad to find that it was working.
I shall do more of this. I’d like to finish up all the material from these two councils and create a document with text and translation, containing the whole thing. That would be one project done.
“You have to go away, and come back.”
Compare:
Kekulé discovery of benzene’s structure: the (fabricated) story of two daydreams he had about whirling carbon atoms forming chains, “twisting and turning like snakes.”
Einstein’s remark: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”