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A good
classical education promotes patience and persistence:
Professor Sheerin demonstrates the payoff. |
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Fall 2008 Humanities and Latin students
had the privilege of studying with an internationally recognized
Classics scholar from the University of Notre Dame. Professor Daniel J. Sheerin, who has translated or written about works in Latin and
Greek ranging from ancient times to the Renaissance, taught last
summer in the graduate theology program at Saint Michael’s and
returned in the fall to teach undergraduate courses in Latin elegaic
poetry and Ancient and Medieval Civilization. His visit was arranged
by Classics chair Ron Begley, who is working with Sheerin on a
translation and commentary of work by Erasmus, the Dutch Renaissance
humanist and friend of Thomas More.
“He knows so much it is just amazing,” says Joe Kwiatkowski '09, who
took the course on Latin elegaic poetry with Sheerin, “I mean,
he could be completely making things up and nobody would be able to
tell.” The Latin students read the love poetry of Catullus,
Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid with Sheerin. “You can imagine
sometimes the material became sort of risqué,” remembers Angela
Carello. “Professor Sheerin was always very helpful by providing plenty
of help with the poetry through notes and often we spoke about what
Roman life would have been like.” As a final exam for the course,
each student was given a different passage of poetry to translate,
and then each had to produce his or her own set of notes on the
passage.
According to Sheerin himself, he hated Latin when he first
began. Forced to study Latin at a seminary high school in St. Louis,
he resisted it at every step. New Testament Greek with a priest who
was a “wonderful old man, but a terrible teacher,” was no better
than the Latin. By the time he was a sophomore at St. Louis
University, however, Sheerin had discovered that he could
actually read Latin with a little effort, and from then on he was
hooked. Even so, Greek with Fr. Haworth, S.J., was rough. Class was
held in an old building heated by steam, “so it was very warm. Fr.
Haworth would demand that you recite the principal parts of Greek
verbs, and he would look out the window and wait, and he wouldn’t
say a thing, while the sweat was running down your back…it was very
scary.”
But Fr. Haworth proved to be a wonderful mentor who eventually
advised the young Sheerin to accept a fellowship for graduate study
at the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina because in
then-small, sleepy Chapel Hill, Sheerin would “experience a
different culture.” After earning his degree, Prof. Sheerin taught
at the University of Delaware, Catholic University, and UNC-Chapel
Hill before settling in at Notre Dame, where he chaired the
department of Classical and Oriental Languages for a number of years
and taught many, many young people, both undergraduates and graduate
students. So, the teenager who hated Latin has become himself a
mentor: “Every class,” says Angela Carello '11, “I sort of felt like a
child sitting cross-legged at the foot of a grandfather type figure,
carefully listening to everything he said with admiration!” |
