"If fear was plucky, and globes were square"
- e e cummings, "If"

Last week I cruised along smoothly, but this one was a little rougher. I don't want to pin all the blame on a busy weekend and a rough week, but it has been that. I'm determined that nothing will slow me down next week, though.

What I did accomplish this week was a more thorough exploration of Catullus. I love his poetry dearly, all of it, but it's so hard to find something that's suitable to share with an audience. He can be very colorful in his language and never really holds back what he feels. Entertaining to read, but hardly appropriate to translate. I had to back off of three poems of his after catching what he was really saying. 

That being said, I've decided that my first goal for translation will be to tackle his poems addressing his lover Iuventius. The first of these was in fact what spurred me to choose this for part of my project (it is a lovely poem with terrible, awkward translations). Funnily enough, only two of them were apparently written while he was in his favor. The other four are indignant tirades against (alternatively) Catullus's ex and the other men he dared to date. Catullus is the man. I mean, really. This will involve a lot of squinting and trying to find new syllables for "sweet." Honeyed vocabulary is somewhere Latin has us English-speakers beat, I'm afraid.

Speaking of the sorrows and struggles of speaking English, my other goal for the past week hasn't quite set. Writing sonnets is slow-going, and I've never been the most graceful at following rhyme schemes. As such, I haven't actually finished my Shakespearean sonnet on my frustrations with English as a language I am obliged to use. I really do plan to have it finished by tomorrow, though.

This project really is wonderfully enabling. I managed to scribble out another one of those just-feel-it-out poems, and while it doesn't slot in with my goals, I think it merits a mention.

I've been obsessing over Neruda enough that my goal for next week will have to be related to him somehow. I have a friend about whom I have been intending to pen a poem for months now and I think a serenade in his style would be suitable. Even if this friend never, ever, ever sees this. Whoops. 

So to recap: my Catullus translations will continue with me wrangling Catullus 48, 81, and 99, with possible polishing-up of 24 just for some harmony. It would be nice to get two of the three going by next Friday, but I'll also have my Neruda sonnet to piece together. We'll see how that goes. I also need to reorganize my Google Drive folder for this project, as it's getting annoyingly crowded, and ensure I have typed up every scrap I've written lest I lose it or (as I nearly did last week) write some other random stuff on the back of the paper.