"Am I supposed to prove that drinking makes you happy?"

My son is 10, and a good reader — but if he'd just stuck to the kids' section at the library and what he gets at school it would only have been Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Detektivbyrå nr 2 etc. Great stuff! But when I've introduced things like the Odyssey (children's version), we just finished reading the King Arthur myth by Rosemary Sutcliff, I've read some of the dialogues in Peer Gynt to him and told him about the plot, he's completely in love with Erasmus Montanus and likes to try out rhetoric on his schoolmates "am I supposed to prove that drinking makes you happy"? ;) — he thinks it's super exciting and rewarding.

While we were hiking in the mountains he wanted me to tell him stories, so I retold plays, among others by Holberg — Erasmus Montanus, and Den vægelsindede. He got very fascinated by Erasmus Montanus — later we watched the whole play on Fjernsynsteateret on NRK, and I even heard him trying out some logical argumentation with some friends ;)

And now we're reading Aladdin by Oehlenschläger — in a verse translation... He said at first that he wasn't interested because he's seen the movie, but he was hooked pretty fast ;)

So much Danish culture in the house ;)

The Trojan horse

Found a children's version of the Odyssey for him, and he loved it. And he's already come across references to Trojan horses twice, and known what they referred to!

Opera with a simultaneous translator

We chose to start with comedies: three Holberg plays on Fjernsynsteateret, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. I translated as we went while we watched the operas, and that made them much easier to follow. He also likes it when I retell plays and stories — while we were hiking in the mountains in Switzerland I told him Antigone, the Knights Tale from Chaucer, and the myth of Theseus and the minotaur.

I've also watched three operas on recordings with my son — which led to us going to Copenhagen for fall break and seeing The Barber of Seville in a fantastic production there (something I never would have done if I didn't know that he liked it)...

Lots of practice, and a bit more

My son reads tons of Donald Duck and Detektivbyrå nr 2 and everything else that's out at the front of the shelf — totally excellent, lots of practice is what matters. But it's also fine to add a little something to the diet.

From letters to a professor of classics and a professor emeritus at NTNU, January and April 2025

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