Baby Talk
By
Rupert Hughes
Part III
Vocabulary
1) uproars , , ; 2) condition . ; 3) chasm (kæzm) ;4) Assurbani-pal ́ ( ); 5) recension - ; 6) ponderous - , , ; 7) Nonnus - ́ ( ); 8) prolegomena - , , -.; 9) Bassarid ; 10) gally ; 11) imprimatur - ; 12) proof ; 13) Quintus Smyrnaeus ( ).
Teed had a splendid mind for everything material and modern, but he could not and would not master the languages he called dead. His mistranslations of the classics were themselves classics. They sent the other students into uproars; but Litton saw nothing funny in them. When he received Teed's examination papers he marked them with a pitiless exactitude.
Teed reached the end of his junior year with a heap of conditions in the classics. Litton insisted that he should not be allowed to graduate until he cleaned them up. This meant that Teed must tutor all through his last vacation or carry double work throughout his senior year--when he expected to play some patriotic or Alma-Matriotic football.
Teed had no intention of enduring either of these inconveniences; he trusted to fate to inspire him somehow with some scheme for attaining his diploma without delay. His future job depended on his diploma--and his girl depended on his job.
He did not intend to be kept from either by any ancient authors. He had not the faintest idea how he was going to bridge that chasm--but, as he wrote his Fansy-pansy, "Love will find the way."
While Teed was taking thought for the beginning of his life-work Litton was completing his--or at least he thought he was. With the splendid devotion of the scholar he had selected for his contribution to human welfare the best possible edition of the work least likely to be read by anybody. A firm of publishers had kindly consented to print it--at Litton's expense.
Litton would donate a copy to his own university; two or three college libraries would purchase copies out of respect to the learned professor; and Litton would give away a few more. The rest would stand in an undisturbed stack of increasing dust, there to remain unread as long perhaps as the myriads of Babylonian classics that Assurbani-pal had copied in brick volumes for his great library at Nineveh.
Professor Litton had chosen for his life-work a recension of the ponderous epic in forty-eight books that old Nonnus wrote in Egypt, the labyrinthine Dionysiaka describing the voyage of Bacchus to India and back.
A pretty theme for an old water-drinker who had never tasted wine! But Litton toiled over the Greek text, added copious notes as to minute variants, appallingly learned prolegomena, an index, and finally an English version in prose. He had begun to translate it into hexameters, but he feared that he would never live to finish it. It was hard enough for a man like Litton to express at all the florid spirit of an author whose theme was "the voluptuous phalanxes" of Bacchus' army--"the heroic race of such unusual warriors; the shaggy satyrs; the breed of centaurs; the tribes of Sileni, whose legs bristle with hair; and the battalions of Bassarids."
|
|
|
He had kept at it all these years, however, and it was ready now for the eyes of a world that would never see it. He had watched it through the compositors' hands, keeping a tireless eye on the infinite nuisance of Greek accents. He had read the galley proofs, the page proofs, and now at last the black-bordered foundry proofs. He scorned to write the bastard "O. K." of approval and wrote, instead, a stately "Imprimatur." He placed the proofs in their envelope and sealed it with lips that trembled like a priest's when giving an illuminated Gospel a ritual kiss.
The hour was late when Professor Litton finished. He stamped the brown-paper envelope and went down the steps of the boarding-house that had been for years his nearest approach to a home. He left the precious envelope on the hall-tree, whence it would be taken to the post-office for the first mail.
Feeling the need of a breath of air, he stepped out on the porch. It was a spring midnight and the college roofs were wonderful under the quivering moon--or tremulo sub lumine, as he remembered it. And he remembered how Quintus Smyrnaeus had said that the Amazon queen walked among her outshone handmaidens, "as when, on the wide heavens, among the stars, the divine Selene moves pre-eminent among them all."
He thought of everything in terms of the past; yet, when he heard, mingled with the vague murmur of the night, a distant song of befuddled collegians, among whose voices Teed's soared pre-eminent above the key, he was not pleasantly reminded of the tipsy army of Dionysus. He was revolted and, returning to his solitude, closed an indignant door on the disgrace.
[Poor old Litton! His learning had so frail a connection with the life about him! Steeped in the classics and acquainted with the minutest details of their texts, he never caught their spirit; never seemed to realize that they are classics because their authors were so close to life and imbued them with such vitality that time has not yet rendered them obsolete.
He had hardly suspected the mischief that is in them. A more innocent man could hardly be imagined or one more versed in the lore of evil. Persons who believe that what is called immoral literature has a debasing effect must overlook such men as Litton. He dwelt among those Greek and Roman authors who excelled in exploiting the basest emotions and made poems out of putridity.
He read in the original those terrifying pages that nobody has ever dared to put into English without paraphrase--the polished infamies of Martial; the exquisite atrocities of Theocritus and Catullus. Yet these books left him as unsullied as water leaves a duck's back. They infected him no more than a medical work gives the doctor that studies it the diseases it describes. The appallingly learned Professor Litton was a babe in arms compared with many of his pupils, who read little--or with the janitor, who read nothing at all.
|
|
|
And now, arrived at a scant forty and looking a neglected fifty, short-sighted, stoop-shouldered and absent-minded to a proverb, he cast a last fond look at the parcel containing his translation of the Bacchic epic and climbed the stairs to his bachelor bedroom, took off his shabby garments, and stretched himself out in the illiterate sleep of a tired farm-hand.
Just one dream he had--a nightmare in which he read a printed copy of his work, and a wrongly accented enclitic stuck out from one of the pages like a sore thumb. He woke in a cold sweat, ran to his duplicate proofs, found that his text was correct--and went back to bed contented.
Of such things his terrors and his joys had consisted all his years.]
Learn the vocabulary by heart.
2. Give the Russian for:
clean smth up; have no intention of doing smth; at smbs expense; appallingly; tireless; nuisance; outshine smth. or smb.; tipsy; to be revolted; steep in smth; putridity.
3. Give the English for:
; -.; , ; ; ; ; , , ; ; .
