School portraits / Classics and school life
At Collegiate, Some Students Translate Latin Poems Into Russian
Collegiate School's classics journal publishes students' translations of Greek and Roman poetry. Some of them skip English entirely.
Every year, students at Collegiate School in New York edit and publish Forum, a journal of the classical world. The school's description lists translations of passages from Greek and Roman literature, short articles, illustrations and "sundry other items," including, in parentheses, "movie rooms" and "subjective discussions."
Then the school adds, almost in passing, that some students choose to translate Greek or Roman poetry into poetry in another language. Those languages have included French and Russian. Some have translated from Greek into Latin. Others from Latin into Greek.
Greek into Latin. A boy takes one language nobody speaks at dinner and turns it into a second language nobody speaks at dinner, as poetry.
I would have settled for one language I could read.
It is not the only publication. The Collegiate Journal, the student newspaper, has run since 1932, and the school says students crowd around stacks of fresh copies in the lobby and library. Its stated purpose includes helping future generations of Dutchmen, the school's name for its students, appreciate their own history. There are also student magazines in French and Spanish.
Upper School juniors and seniors can take electives in subjects like Ancient Greek, astrophysics, or the construction of masculinity, and if the course they want does not exist, they can propose an independent study or a senior project.
There is something wonderful about a school that lets a teenager look at a difficult task and invent a harder one, for fun.
The middle one is in his first year of Latin and has started translating household objects at dinner. The table is mensa. The dog is canis. The dishwasher, he says, does not exist in Latin, which he presents as a reason not to load it.
Last week he translated his little sister's name into Latin, then into what he called Greek, then back into English, and announced that it now meant "Small Loud Person." She translated his name back. Hers was shorter, and it rhymed. He has asked me not to print it.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Collegiate student publications collegiateschool.org
- Collegiate Upper School collegiateschool.org
- Collegiate public student reviews niche.com