Students of the Open University course A397 are expected to translate most of book two of the Aeneid. My version, complete, but still a work in progress, is here. And, in its original form as a Microsoft Word document, here.
I approached this task by doing it as rows in a three-column table, dividing it into short sections, each section being a row of the table, and containing one or more complete sense-units.
The first column is the original Latin, typed in by me from Jordan's text, so may still contain transcription errors. The other columns are my student efforts, and certainly contain errors of every sort. The second column is my translation, the third is my notes, including vocab and grammatical points. I have marked, with a double question mark, points where I am puzzled and should welcome help.
The translation looks now like a mixture of flowery, dogged literality, translatorese, and near-parody. It is my intention, though, that each Latin word can be traced to the English, and vice-versa. And, I have tried to parse each Latin word, identifying its accidence & syntax. This effort is not recorded, but the notes in the last column are to aid in repeating the feat, during revision. Today, October 10th 2007, I completed the task, one week before the examination.
It hardly needs saying that I make no claim for any deep understanding. I have used the translations by Day-Lewis, Dryden, Jackson Knight, and West, also the notes by Jordan in the OU set book, and those of T E Page, whose editions for MacMillan some of us will remember. Certainly I could not have done much without these aids. The day is still far off (though it had better hurry) when it will be possible for me to read a work unseen. Pingers crossed, as the Filipinos say, for the exam unseen.
To save time for m'tutor, a copy of the rows containing my queries is here.