Fond Latin memories

I'm translating the Aeneid again, so I can get better at Latin once more. I need to find my old translation that I used to have - it wasn't a very good translation, and I spent a lot of time griping to myself about how much cooler a translation I could do if I felt like it, but it was handy to have around when I got stuck.

Latin is fun. It is lame that I have just spent three, almost four, years without translating any Latin whatsoever, considering how fun and relaxing it is to do Latin translations. When all along I could have been doing Latin translations to wind down after a stressful day, of which there have been many in the past three (almost four) years. When I have had my very nice purple Aeneid just waiting to be picked up and dusted off and re-translated.

My high school Latin teacher was one of the best teachers I ever had, ever. She knew everything about Latin and also about Greek and Greece and Rome. She had so much knowledge. She should get a shiny prize for being the best Latin teacher of all time. I would have stuck with Latin anyway because I really like it, but my Latin teacher made it way much more fun. Plus in junior year, there were only five of us in the AP Latin IV class, and James would sometimes make these amazing white chocolate macadamia nut cookies, and we would talk about strategies for escaping from marauding alligators, and we played Strike-a-Match like fiends. So that was fun.

That said, it is kind of liberating to be translating the Aeneid without my teacher. Because I can just depart from the literal translation if I like my way better. When I was doing the Aeneid on Sunday while driving with my family, I got to the bit where it talks about the saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram, the unforgetting wrath of savage Juno, and I remember doing this bit in Latin class, and I wanted to translate it as the savage unrelenting wrath of Juno, because that sounded cool to me, and my teacher said no. And even when I explained that it would be transferred epithet, a perfectly legitimate literary device used by Virgil on a number of occasions, she continued to not accept this as a translation. But you know what, you know what? I can translate it that way now! That's right! Nobody can stop me! I WILL TRANSFER WHATEVER EPITHETS THE HELL I WANT.