kiya

Started the day by biking down to Walnut Creek for some routine lab work. Dropped by Brioche de Paris for breakfast afterward combined with LHMP reading/note-taking. (My plan to reduce my "eating out expenditures" is being stymied by my current routine of doing LHMP reading in coffee shops. I'm not beating myself up about it, since I also combine it with my bike ride.) Texted the former co-workers to see if anyone wanted to meet up for lunch when I pop over to Berkeley Bowl tomorrow (since Wednesday is their on-site day).

When I brainstormed about how to structure my days in retirement, I came up with the idea of having a list of "activity categories" where I would try to regularly check off a certain number of different categories each day. (The point is the doing, not the checking off.) Most of them are things I'd been doing previously, though not on a close-to-every-day basis, like exercise, yard work, housework, LHMP reading, LHMP blogging, etc. But I added three categories for activities that had largely fallen off my routine: writing fiction (duh!), playing music, and--after some thought--working in non-English languages.

I'm still working on getting the first two into my routines, but yesterday I pulled out a Medieval Welsh text that I haven't previously translated (Owein) and started working through it. It helps that editions of Medieval Welsh texts generally have a glossary at the end, so in the event I don't know a word, I don't have to be going back and forth with a dictionary. But I was a bit surprised at how few items I had to check.

My current process is to copy out the original on every third line of a ruled notebook, take notes for vocab I had to look up, or verb forms I needed to work out on the second line, and write my translation on the third line. Out of two notebook pages, there were four words I didn't know, three I checked but had remembered correctly, and one verb form I needed to look up. There's also a passage where I know all the words, but I'm still working on the overall sense.

It helps that I'm intimately familiar with several of the branches of the Mabinogi, and the overall grammar and vocabulary of the medieval tales tend to be highly similar. (Also: I know the general shape of the literature.) But it was still gratifying to find that I could pretty much sight-translate 90% of the material. After I finish Owein, I want to try some poetry because I want to work up to translating a poem that doesn't appear to have an English translation published yet.

Given all the language study I've done across the decades, it's felt sad that I don't use most of it except as general background radiation. I'd like to brush up on my Latin, and I'd like to get a more formal grounding in reading French (at least academic French), which I can get the overall gist of, but don't have the grammar for.