How To Lace Up Converse Doubles

To keep your brain trained, and above all not to lose familiarity with the words and the music that comes out, often compose in a language that is not mine. The choice is not so difficult: English, Latin, greek because I rarely vocabulary, and German at the elementary level. The effort to put together words that not know by heart all the meanings and context, compels me to be brief, precise, to re-check many times to do it all over again if it does not satisfy me, and trying a myriad of meanings in the dictionary to be truly sure I'm saying what I mean (and do not reduce me to use a word correctly, but inappropriate for the context). Contact with the words - not phrases or periods, but with the minimum words, there, present in their physicality - reminds me of what I deal with every time I take the pen in hand.

Those of you who read Journey to the Center of the Earth perhaps not remember the lines Latin Verne to write his Icelandic Renaissance, Arne Saknussem:

In Sneffels Yokulis craterem kem delibat Umbrian Scartaris Iulii intra calendas descends, audas viator, et centrum attinges land. Kod feces. Arne Saknussem.

A point in Verne simulated well for the Latin 'service' and dall'ortografia phonetic probably had to have a Nordic scholar of that time. I said to myself, rereading: how it would be in Latin hexameters, maybe inscribed on a stone, right on the path that leads to the Sneffels?

And after three hours, two dictionaries consulted, and a dozen consumed by the ink sheet, here's a first version of the message Saknussem:

In Sneffels Yokulis craterem, non tibi notum

Ni tetigisset eum Scartaris uerticis umbra,

Planitierum cum tepefecit Iulius aequor,

Inque suis descende, audax peregrine, calendis:

Attingesque, diu tenebra uolitatus in atra,

Centrum terrarum: ted adloquitur qui fecit,

Arne Saknussem, glacie spatians Islandae.

Mi si perdonerà la costruzione non correttissima di spatior with the simple ablative, the genitive plural not attested to Planities, the striking archaism ted the the of tepefecit short, and the casual use of the prosody of non-Latin words, but I could while taking some license. Moreover, this is only a first version.