Grammatical Training

Ohne sichere grammatische Schulung und weitausgreifende Lektüre ist nichts zu erreichen . Germanistik , Romanistik , Anglistik entbehren alter Tradition . Sie fallen darum den Moden und Irrungen des « Zeitgeistes » leicht zum Opfer.

Without solid grammatical training and extensive reading, nothing can be achieved. German studies, Romance studies, English studies lack ancient tradition. They therefore easily fall victim to the fashions and aberrations of the ’spirit of the times'.

E.R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur Und Lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: A. Francke AG, 1948), p. 386. My translation.

Ablative Absolute

Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1995), pp. 74-75:

   Then one day in my last year—although this is a figurative use of time—I began to understand something. It was something about the economy of it all: the way the ablative absolute gathered and compressed time. One day, again figuratively, it was a burdensome piece of grammar. The next, with hardly any warning, it was a messenger with quick heels and a bright face. I hardly knew what had happened. I began to respect, however grudgingly the systems of a language which could make such constructs that, although I had no such words for it, they stood against the disorders of love or history. They had described bridges and defined governments. They had left the mouth of the centurion and entered the minds of a Sicilian farm worker. They had forged alliances and named stars. And at that point of my adolescence, where the words I wrote on a page were nothing but inexact, the precision and force of these constructs began to seem both moving and healing.