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            One of the better-known figures in Classics today is Father Reginald Foster.  His story is interesting enough to have appeared in the media several times, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, the BBC, and most thoroughly in The American Scholar.[1] He has his own weekly spot on Vatican Radio, called “the Latin Lover,” and most recently made a brief appearance in Bill Maher’s movie Religulous.  I have no doubt his name and a brief synopsis of his work are to be found in print from many other sources.  His curious job (he is a Latin translator at the Vatican), idiosyncratic and enthusiastic personality, American background (from middle-class Milwaukee), and absolute dedication to Latin have made him about as famous a Latin teacher as there is in the world today.  He is also a very revolutionary one: he uses methods which do not resemble any of the current textbooks or common teaching styles in America (or anywhere else, for that matter).  Many of the people who have studied Latin both in American schools and with Fr. Foster (of whom I am one) swear by his methods.  These people are becoming a larger and larger portion of the next generation of classicists: Fr. Foster teaches several hundred students every year, and has been at it for decades now.  Many of these students have become teachers, and are interested in implementing his methods in their own classroom.  Now is a very good time to begin a discussion of Latin pedagogy in the light of his experiments with a completely different system of Latin teaching.

 

            I will explain my own position with regard to this briefly.  I received seven years of Latin education in good American schools, and achieved the normal level of Latin fluency which good students achieve: I could read about a page of Latin in an hour by laboriously consulting my dictionary and putting together sentences piece by piece and case by case.  I did well on tests because they tested me on only a few pages of Latin, and I could thoroughly learn my English translations of those passages.  I went to Rome to study at Fr. Foster’s summer school after my freshman year of college.  It completely transformed my experience of Latin.  Besides inspiring me to become a Latin teacher, I found that afterwards, for the first time, I could really read Latin, that is to say, read entire books instead of pages.  I could do things like read through St. Augustine’s Confessions (without a Loeb!), which would have seemed impossible before.  Not only that, I could speak and write the language – I now engage in Latin conversation with friends and acquaintances at some of the Latin-speaking groups around the country (and with my fiancée), and I wrote my college senior thesis in Latin and an (unpublished) book about my bike trip down the Via Appia in Latin.  In short, Latin is really a possession of mine (in a way that Greek still is not) entirely because of my experiences in Rome with Fr. Foster.  I consider it a goal to help students get beyond the “page an hour” level and closer to true fluency.  I don’t believe this goal is attainable without adopting some of Fr. Foster’s methods.

 

            Before I proceed, let me add a disclaimer: I do not speak for Fr. Foster, who has in fact already long ago enunciated his teaching principles in a document entitled “Via Docendi Fosteriana.”[2]  What I offer are some thoughts based on classroom experience, in which I have started with basic American techniques and textbooks and have continually moved away from them towards Fr. Foster’s methods.  The conclusions I reach are entirely my own.  What is more, Fr. Foster teaches university-level students and adults, and his own technique is specifically adapted to his own students.  I have been teaching mostly twelve to sixteen year olds.  In general, purists will find that I do not represent either Fr. Foster or standard American practice; nor am I trying to; I offer my own perspective on trying to bring Fr. Foster’s inspiration into the normal American high school classroom.  It is still an inchoate process.

            There are four basic principles that I identify as distinctly “Reginaldian” (Fr. Foster is often known by his first name).  Many of them are not unique to him, but represent movements that can be found across many fields and disciplines in the scholarly world today, though he is probably the most energetic backer of these principles within the realm of Latin teaching today.  The four principles are:

 

            1)  the use of Latin as a language, i.e. something heard, spoken,

and written as well as read

            2)  a much broader exposure to original sources from the first day

of Latin class, and continuing at the upper levels to embrace

dozens (even hundreds) of authors

            3)  the use of grammatical terminology that is revealingly and

accurately descriptive

            4)  attempting to understand Latin as the authors themselves understood it,

by remaining close in translation to the structure of the original  phrasing

 

            As any teacher who attempts to implement any of these principles within a department will see, many people within the Classics community disagree with some or all of these principles.  Similarly, different students of Foster value the different principles in different ways.  The use of spoken Latin is probably the thing which has captured the imagination of most people.  I, on the other hand, value the insistence on original sources the most.  Other people are interested in his reform of terminology.  His preference for literal translation is probably the least talked about.

            The purpose of this paper is to defend these basic principles, with which I agree, and to discuss some of the problems which one encounters in implementing them.  They may not be the preferred methods of all teachers, but I think it is important that they receive recognition and support as part of the broader future of the Classics.

           

Principle One: The Use of Latin as a Language.

 

            Teachers have been trying to move away from the old model of Latin pedagogy which looked like this:

 

                        When I began the study of Latin, in September 1942 at Nazareth Hall,

                                we devoted a full year to the abstract study of grammar and syntax.

                                By the time we turned, as sophomores, to the text of Caesar, our first

                                zeal had been sorely tried.    (Ralph McInerny, preface to Let’s Read Latin).

 

Since Latin is in most places an elective, it must compete with other classroom options – it must somehow be appealing.  The students need to experience, at least at some moments, the joy of learning Latin.  Most teachers opt for non-Latin enjoyment: mythology (in English), Roman culture (in English), etc.  The result, I believe (and I have tried it) is enjoyment, but nothing really related to Latin.  The enjoyment takes place in Latin class, of course, but does not derive from the Latin itself.  In my experience this can lead to the problem of students believing that Latin class can be very fun – after all, you build chariots and models of the Pantheon, wear togas, learn about Greek gods – except for the Latin.  Communicating in Latin, however – laughing, joking, being witty – offers enjoyment in a way that derives from the Latin and directly leads to an improvement in Latin.  This, I have found, is the most noticeable fruit of extended use of oral Latin.  We need to bring it to our classrooms.

Spoken language is inherently a faster, more flexible instrument than writing and reading.  It allows a person to adapt his words to the immediate situation, creating opportunities for humor and spontaneity.  Much of the humor in my Latin classes with my students comes from short Latin quips I (or they!) make.  The spoken element allows the joy and creativity which are a normal component of the human experience of language to come to the surface.  It also allows for a kind of play-acting, which students also enjoy: it is much easier to play the part of Cato if you are using a real passive periphrastic.  The use of the spoken language makes learning more fun and more effective.  I have found it a crucial element for making Latin enjoyable. 

            Integrating this practice in the classroom is more difficult than one might think.  First of all, it is very difficult to speak Latin which is easy enough for our students.  You can’t say “I can speak Latin” in Latin without using the irregular verb possum, the infinitive of a deponent verb, and an adverb which the students will translate “Latinly.”  You have to practice speaking easy, short sentences.  Second, if you inherit second- or third-year students from other teachers, you will find that there are always a few students who insist that they cannot understand Latin if it is spoken.  You have to write it for them.  These students slow down the classroom considerably.

            The solution I have found is this: if you want to increase the amount of spoken Latin used, start with short phrases, or even single verbs.  Stop saying “I don’t know” in class: say nescio.  Don’t say “What are you doing?” – quid facis is better.  This is fantastic practice, which we all agree the students need more of.  My students (like all students) confuse manere and monere when they see it written on a page.  But they understand exactly what I am saying when they try to get up but I come to them, waving them into their seats saying, “Mane, mane.”  Or after a test they did poorly on, they understand when I say, “Vos monui!”  This kind of frequent practice in a full context is ultimately successful for teaching vocabulary.  And so it is crucial for a Latin teacher to start replacing oft-repeated phrases with their Latin equivalents.  Common ones are scio, video, ubi fuisti, ubi eramus, quid facis, quid habes, quid putas, quid dixisti, non intellego, and others.  It amazes me how quickly students respond to these short phrases.  While I have found that long sentences daunt them, these short expressions almost always make my students comfortable with the language and get them trying to think in the language.  Younger students almost always attempt to respond in Latin.  

            This is a method every Latin teacher can use.  It is not like having full-blown Latin conversations in class.  This is improbable anyway, unless the teacher gets a substantial amount of practice speaking Latin.  For those interested in doing this it is important to participate in the new movement to be found in various places around the country, called cenae Latinae or convivia Latina or circuli Latini.  These are small groups of Latin speakers who get together and speak Latin.  I myself attend one in Princeton (New Jersey) and I know of one in Cambridge, Massachusetts as well.  There is a less regular one in New York City.  Others exist around the country.  I have found these indispensable for keeping my Latin sharp.

            Experience has taught me one other major lesson when it comes to teaching with spoken Latin.  When you learn spoken Italian, for instance, often you learn block phrases whose grammar you do not understand, but are needed for the most basic conversations you might have with strangers (you might learn “he calls himself…” without really knowing reflexives or passives, for instance).  This is also the general technique for conversational Latin in almost all existing teaching materials.  Many teachers adopt this strategy for such things as “I want to go to the bathroom” and so forth.  After some experience, I think this is unwise with Latin.  First of all, there is no need for it: there are no conversations with strangers that will happen if we give our students a bunch of useful block phrases immediately.  More importantly, I have found that it can be harmful and (for me at least) rarely added much to my students’ actual knowledge of the language.  I had to suffer through a whole year of painfully correcting students who refused to be purified of the notion that mihi meant “my” because they had learned the idiomatic nomen mihi est the year before.  I understand that nomen meum est is less common, but it is used, and that construction makes sense to students long before they know the dative of the personal pronouns.  I refrain from nomen mihi est until they know the relevant grammar.  I also generally use quomodo dicis for quomodo dicitur with my students (until they know the passive).  I think that our goal in the early years is really to have them practice the Latin structures they know, as well as generate new sentences of their own with correct structures they understand, rather than parrot flawlessly ones they do not know.  I also found with the “parrot” method that while the students learned the phrases they were never integrated with the rest of their learning: the information simply sat in their brains without really helping them understand the language better.  Since, however, this is not the prevailing philosophy, I recommend treading cautiously with spoken Latin as it is offered in existing books.  Too often it seems to me the authors of those books are aiming for elegance before they have secured even comprehension.

            Writing in Latin also needs to assume a greater role.  I’m not sure students ever really understand the case system in particular without 1) first using them in sentences, and then (and this is important) 2) dispensing with English word order because they understand that the case system displaces the word order system.  In my experience, my students never seem to understand even the concept of inflection as opposed to word order until they write a lot in Latin.  For several years I tried to offer English to Latin exercises as a supplement, but I told them that they would be tested going from Latin to English.  My conclusion now is that the knowledge they acquire that way is superficial when compared with the fluency levels achieved when they compose sentences in Latin.

 

 

Principle Two: Using More Original Sources.

 

            When I arrived in Rome to study with Fr. Foster, I had studied Latin for seven years at high-caliber schools.  I had read four ancient authors: Caesar, Cicero, Vergil, and Ovid.  On my first day with Fr. Foster, I received a packet containing more than forty authors I had never read, in addition to three of the four I had already seen.  I can hardly express how inspiring I found this.  Latin did not seem like an arcane specialty – it was a universe of thought and inquiry, and, what is more, a universe which simultaneously had the odor of tradition and the thrill of a new and untapped resource to explore.

            I am convinced that we have deplorably made Latin into the gateway to two things only: life as a classicist or the SAT.  We do not advertise well the central importance of Latin to medievalists, Renaissance historians, Enlightenment historians, scientists and those interested in the history of science, art historians, students of religion, and lovers of almost all Western literature.  This is a much broader platform than the Romans – in comparison with this outlook, the Romans are merely a possible interest out of many our students may have.  How do we make this clear to our students?  There is a simple answer.  Read Martin Luther, or Galileo, or St. Francis in Latin.  Analyze a work of art by Piero della Francesca or Durer with a lengthy Latin inscription.  Do a unit on Latin names in chemistry or botany (did you know that publishing a description in Latin is still necessary for all discoveries of new plants in the field of botany?).

            But even if you believe that in all instances Latin should be only about the Classics, it is clear that we have much to do in terms of bringing original sources to our students.  Fifty years ago a typical high school Latin student might read all of Caesar and a dozen speeches of Cicero before doing four books of Vergil – hundreds upon hundreds of pages of excellent Latin.  Today a typical student may read some poems of Catullus and excerpts from seven or eight books of Vergil – less than half of a paperback’s worth of material – as the entirety of their exposure to original sources.  Our students today read mostly Latin specifically written for textbooks.  While the rest of the world is using more original sources in the classroom, we have slowly moved away from original sources because, given our teaching methods, classical Latin is too hard for our students.

            My experience indicates that this is in part because textbook Latin is a specific, doggerel version of Latin which differs from the real language.  When I have inherited students from other teachers, I have been shocked to hear them espouse the belief that in a Latin sentence, the subject comes first, followed by other cases, and then the verb at the end (“prose word order”)!  Nouns are adjacent to their adjectives, and adverbs to the words they modify!  Is it any wonder, given these presuppositions, that our students cannot handle a short poem of Horace or a sentence of Cicero?  I challenge my students with tough, real Latin word order from the beginning – with short sentences like Spem successus alit.  I have inherited Latin III students who could not translate such a sentence properly.  Either textbook Latin has to be made to conform with the expectations of real Latin, or (a better idea) we should give them original sources constantly.  This is the skill we want them to develop – reading the classics for themselves.  Therefore they need to practice it.

            In order to implement this, I started copying out sentences from my Latin readings, sorting them by grammatical topic – here is a sentence with pluperfects, here is one with an –ius genitive, and so forth.  Then when teaching a lesson on that grammatical topic, I used the sentences either as examples or as exercises.  Instantly this approach ran into opposition – the senior Latin teacher at my school proclaimed in a department meeting that Latin I and Latin II should be only for “nuts and bolts,” and that it was useless to have the kids try to read original Latin which would be much too hard for them.  In my defense I said that there was if we had to choose between a sentence like “Flavia est laeta” or Cicero’s “Fortuna est caeca,” I thought the latter superior, for obvious reasons.  The head of the department sided with me.

            Because of this obvious superiority, I have no doubt that the original-sources system will in the end prevail in Classics teaching.  But it will take several years, even decades, given the current pace.  The biggest problem is that it is not easy to implement such a system with the basic methods of almost any of our textbooks.  In both grammar and vocabulary, the textbooks follow a highly idiosyncratic method that may as well be known as textbook Latin.

We all know what textbook Latin looks like.  For the books that follow the “grammatical method,” you start out with first declension nouns and first conjugation verbs in the present tense, to create sentences like “Agricola puellas spectat.”  I am confident that such sentences cannot be found in virtually the entire corpus of Latin literature (I’ve looked), so if you use a book of this sort, you can’t use original sources from the beginning.  Indeed, it takes quite a while: for example, most textbooks place the (uncommon) imperfect tense before the perfect tense, because it is very regular.  But the imperfect almost never occurs in real Latin without the perfect tense, so you can’t practice the one tense from original sources until you get to the other.

For books that follow the “reading method,” textbook Latin is different, but there are still serious problems.  As a matter of pedagogical principle, these books believe that language learning occurs within a fluid context of guesswork and induction, and so they provide limited vocabulary and a running story in order to encourage students to guess.  I have found that this method ill-prepares students for original sources, which frequently violate all their cultural presuppositions. The sentence I gave above, Spem successus alit is a useful example.  They are very willing to accept that the sentence means “hope nourishes success” because that makes sense to them, given a certain modern American optimism.  I am amazed every year at the number of reading-method students (mostly disciples of Ecce Romani) who translate the Christian dictum “diligite inimicos vestros” as “love your friends” (none of them, of course, having heard the phrase before).  Some of them even say that they thought that “inimicos” meant “enemies,” but “that didn’t make sense.”

In other words, trying to integrate original sources into reading-method books is difficult because it wars with the entire pedagogical rationale of the books: that contextual guesswork is the proper method of language acquisition.  An original-sources approach almost necessarily lacks context: if you translate the inscription on the Arch of Septimius Severus, it is unlikely that the students will know Septimius Severus particularly intimately.  Isolated sentences or paragraphs, likely to represent a large portion of an original sources approach, will necessarily lack context, which the students have been trained to rely on.  

            As I tried to implement my growing collection of sentences in my classes, I found that the vocabulary of our textbooks is also inappropriate for reading purposes.  Every Latin I student learns porto, portare, a somewhat uncommon Latin verb meaning to transport.  The verb occurs sporadically throughout the ancient sources.  But it is nowhere near as important as the ubiquitous fero, ferre, which is, however, irregular, and so banned from most Latin I classes.  But you need fero to translate any real Latin!  This is part of a general movement in textbook Latin to prefer first conjugation verbs.  In fact, real Latin focuses more on third conjugation verbs – they are far and away the most common.  If they are common, this means that they are indispensable tools the students need to practice very frequently.  But many textbooks (and textbook-Latin standards like the National Latin Exam) avoid them scrupulously.  And when it comes to nouns, what need have we to mention agricola, nauta, and all the other commonly accepted first-year vocabulary words which are relatively unimportant in Latin?  How did these words become part of the basic vocabulary while dozens of workhorse words in the language like res or domus or manus are put off sometimes until the second year?

            Some teachers, inspired by Reginaldus, have essayed the difficult task of teaching Latin without any textbook at all.  This exposes teachers to problems in organizing a coherent curriculum; a disorganized curriculum is probably the easiest way to fail as a teacher.  It is clear that an original-sources textbook will have to be produced.  I have been working on such a textbook, which started as a collection of several thousand sentences and paragraphs; I have let the sentences determine the relative importance of the grammatical topics and order of introduced vocabulary.  I imagine that other people are working on similar projects throughout the country.  Until books designed on original-sources principles are published, we will probably see only slight progress in this regard.

            I have proceeded for the most part on the assumption that such a project is desirable per se.  Let me also mention some of the benefits that I have seen in my classroom.  My students read interesting sentences, and are close to interesting ideas, all the time.  Scio me nihil scire is their introduction to indirect statements; avaritia et luxuria omnia magna imperia everterunt comes up when we do accusatives.  These are fascinating statements in themselves and good ways to start talking about Socrates and Cato, respectively.  At the end of the year my Latin I students write essays about one of the authors they have read, describing their character based on their own words.  Seneca and Cicero are consistently the most popular authors.  This is not only good preparation for upper-level Latin, it is interesting: these are real people, with real characters and real ideas.  The students can sense that it is real, too: I consistently find they are more engaged with this material than the normal textbook fare.  I will add that I am more engaged as well.

            A few weeks ago, I got an email from an acquaintance my age who had found out that I was a Latin teacher.  He began his message with an effusion of Latin, which was the following: “E pluribus unum, sextus est puer molestest, flavia furtive approprinquate, quid latae sunt.”  He said that was all he remembered from high school Latin.  This to me is something of a terrifying future outcome for a Latin student.  He is not a stupid man: he is a lawyer, clerking for a fine judge, he reads Hermann Hesse, and all that.  When he thinks Latin, it is “sextus est puer molestest.”  This to me is a sign that we need to reclaim the content of a classical education.  Fifty years ago there is no doubt that he would have said, “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,” “Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra,” and “Arma virumque cano.”  Latin is much much more than those three authors, of course, but at least they are three real authors.  As for the future, I believe that we owe it to our students that they see Latin in all its richness, that they think of Galileo and Erasmus and the Carmina Burana and Augustine and Appius Claudius and Plautus and Mozart’s choral music and Linnaeus and Hieronymus Bosch and many, many others.  I continually have ringing in my ears Fr. Foster’s dictum, “If we brought these things into our classrooms, friends, Latin would live.”   

 

 

Principle Three: the use of descriptive and revealing grammatical terminology.

 

            Has anyone ever noticed that many of the things which students find most difficult in Latin have names which seem to mean absolutely nothing?  Passive periphrastics, gerundives, ablative absolutes, perfect participles – all of these, whose names are entirely mysterious, our students consider difficult.  I am convinced there is a link here.  Perfect participles are used all the time, in English as in Latin – there’s even one in this sentence – so the students shouldn’t have any conceptual problem with them.  The problem begins, I think, with a term like “participle.”  I like to ask my Latin III classes, or AP classes, what a “participle” is and wait for the answer.  They may give me an example – but they can almost never come up with the basic “verbal adjective” or “adjective formed from a verb” response.[3]

            Fr. Foster has been a pioneer in this field, trying to deliver grammar, and the understanding of the organization of language, from its own terminology.  His first target was the “passive periphrastic.”  It is easy to see why.  The term is not only opaque, but actually gives no information about what it purportedly describes.  It means literally “roundabout passive.”  Periphrastic verb forms are generally defined as those which are formed by combining two or more words (as most English tenses); the passive of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect, in Latin, are also periphrastics.  The future passive infinitive is another such.  But of course it has been specifically reserved for the use of the future passive participle plus sum to express necessity.  Fr. Foster has come up with an easy way to express how this works and what it does: he calls it the necessity participle.  Once you teach this to the students, you will never, I think, go back to the older term: the term necessity participle is more precise, more descriptive, and clearer in students’ minds.

            The need for this term is even greater today, as I now hear frequently (and see in books) the necessity participle called a gerundive, which seems to me to be complete confusion; it is true that the two look the same (as, for instance, dative and ablative plurals), but I see no reason to call something the same if it must be translated two different ways and must be used in different contexts,[4] i.e. it represents two different linguistic phenomena. 

            Fr. Foster has also attempted to change the grammatical terminology for the tenses of the infinitives and participles, which, as he points out, have only relative tense, and so a “present” participle may describe a past action and so forth.  He calls the infinitives and participles antecedent, contemporaneous, and futurity.  These are fairly formidable terms as well for our students, but at least they are accurate.

            Fr. Foster has also taken aim at the terms declension and conjugation.  It seems obvious to me that they offer very little.  He calls declensions “blocks” and conjugations “groups.”  I tried the term “block” for awhile but have now switched to “type” (different nouns of different types).  Most intriguingly, Foster also insists that the first and second declensions should be treated as a single block, which seems obvious when you think about adjectives: bonus and bona are masculine and feminine forms of the same word, not two different words from two different declensions.  They were originally categorized by their “stem vowel,” which for the first declension would be ‘a’ and for the second declension ‘o’; but that does not accurately describe the way we use the words or teach them now.  ‘O’ stem words (second declension) have an ‘o’ only in a possible four of their ten forms[5] – and consequently they are rarely called ‘o’ stems, though the classification remains.  Nor do I know of  anyone who says that the genitive singular of the first declension is –e, added to the stem which includes an a; they say the genitive singular is –ae.  In other words, for us first and second declension words have no vowel in their stems at all; the vowel is part of the ending.  Consequently a word like bonus has stem bon-, to which masculine, feminine, and neuter “block one” endings are added. 

            Foster then makes the third declension the second block, while words like manus and res he considers a kind of specialty item beyond the basic two-block system.  Not content with this, I began experimenting with classification systems, and came up with one that conceives of all the nouns and adjectives as a kind of pie chart, with type one (=first and second declension) blending into type two (=fourth declension) blending into type three (=third declension) blending into type four (=fifth declension) blending back into type one.  Such a system is far more scientific, i.e. it has far greater predictive power than any current system: type two nouns resemble a cross between type one and type three, type four a cross between type three and type one, etc.  The real advantage is that it helps explain the odd words like domus (on the border between type one and two), plebs (on the border between three and four), materies (on the border between four and one), etc.  The goal of any system of classification is to elucidate the structure of the phenomena classified.  I am not certain that classifying nouns by “stem” vowels that are not part of the stem as we define it today (and stem vowels such as the ‘o’ that have mostly been replaced by ‘u’ in our spelling) helps elucidate the system for our students.

With this comes a general principle, which is that the most important thing about language is that it means something.  As a result, the emphasis is on understanding what something means, and the grammatical terms are there to aid that process.  I once heard a Latin teacher going through some verbs with an eighth grader:

            “Parse that verb for me.”

            “Third person… singular… present… indicative… active.”

            “So what does it mean?”

            Silence.  The boy could parse, but did not understand.  The grammatical terms did not, in fact, help his understanding.  Goodness gracious, I thought, the grammar is nice, but he has to know the word means “he loves.”  As a result, I am constantly in my classes trying to get at the root of grammatical terms, and I substitute others when I think they will be useful.  Sometimes this does not work.  I used “subject-form” and “object-form” for nominative and accusative one year, and was stumped when trying to explain to students that not all nominatives are subjects, or accusatives are objects.  But the principle is clear enough: the modern languages are constantly in flux, and the words which were appropriately descriptive in the field of grammar two hundred years ago are outdated today.  There will be problems: our language is still not terribly precise in such matters, and precision is precisely what we need.  Fr. Foster himself only rarely uses the case names with his Latin I students, emphasizing their meanings first: genitive is “of”, dative “to/for”, ablative “by/with.”  This gets cumbersome at advanced levels.  But my general conclusion has been that in the field of grammar we need a general reevaluation of our terminology, making the improvements that seem possible.

 

Principle Four: Using more literal translation

 

            Translation is a curious business.  As you advance in knowledge of a language, you get better and better at translating it, and then something happens – you begin to get worse at translating it.  You understand what is communicated so subtly you instantly recognize all the things that cannot be expressed in another language.

            To say it in few words, translating and understanding a language are different skills.  Fr. Foster’s Latin classes emphasize understanding; and so, all translation work is done merely as a prop for understanding.  Some of the best moments in his classes are when we read a sentence and it goes untranslated – because everyone understands it without translating it.  I have attempted to imitate this in my classes, and again, when I speak something that neither I nor they translate, but they understand, I feel that the real goal has been achieved, more than when we laboriously translate something.

            For him, prop-translation is literal translation – in order to make the students think Latinly.  Therefore you see sentences like “the things needing to be seen having been seen, we were about to depart.”  Of course to a non-Latin student this is strange and awkward.  But to a Latin student – to someone who is really trying to understand the Latin – such sentences should make sense.  They should make you think of the Latin participles.   

Traditionally, as soon as students learn Greek or Latin participles, they are immediately told not to translate them as participles.  Instead they should use a relative clause, or a temporal clause, or a causal clause, or some such thing.  Sometimes this is inevitable.  But I’m less convinced it makes for good policy.  I am amazed at the translations I find in our textbooks – they are generally very free.  Free translations are useful.  But to me what we should be modeling is close listening to the way another culture, expressed through its language, expresses itself.  Sometimes the Latin will lead us to deeper realizations about the structure of the world, if we open ourselves to repeatedly considering it on its own terms as opposed to substituting our own cultural equivalent.  The future perfect in conditionals is more logical than our system.  The historical present is a very interesting idea, and says much about Roman conceptions of the past and of historical narrative.  But you lose these ideas if you translate them away too quickly.  I had a colleague whose standard for translation was “what you would say in the halls”: if you wouldn’t say it that way as an American adolescent on your way to the cafeteria, then don’t say it in Latin class.  I am not certain I want my students to believe that their speech patterns in the hallways are the absolute standard for all human locutions.  It is true that it is a great pleasure to find Cicero or Erasmus saying the same things we might say ourselves.  But it is also a great pleasure when we find something in them that is elevating – expression that is more precise, more descriptive, more nuanced, and more true than what we are used to.

 

            These four principles represent a portion of Fr. Foster’s legacy to Latin teaching, and no doubt there are other people working to put them into action.  In many instances the work of others will no doubt be more ambitious and more effective than what I have been able to achieve.  I am very interested in hearing the feedback of other Latin teachers who are working along similar lines.