The papers finally arrived today. Hippokrene is now an officially registered company, of which I am the proprietor. Of course, it will be awhile before I have time to get the website up, not to mention before I have time to actually start taking on any projects. Well, I am thinking I might do something small during the spring, but that depends on which extra classes I’ll try to finish up outside of the Literature.
So, what is it that I plan to do? Translation, mostly, but also some webdesign. That’s it to start with, I think, though I do have some more plans outside of that as well. I am already thinking that maybe the description I gave when I registered the company isn’t broad enough, but hopefully I’ll manage to squeeze my future plans in as well. Its too bad they don’t allow you to describe your planned activities a little more loosely, like ... “a bit of this and that”. Would suit indecisive me much better than having to specify everything.
Oh, and the name? That’s the name of the spring of the muses on Mount Helicon, created by Pegasus with a strike of his hoof. I figured it fit well enough since “equine inspiration” is what I thrive on. Riding is what energizes me, and horses are what motivates me to make money. ;)
In other news, my paper was ventilated at the university the week before last! Since I ended up finishing it mid-semester, and since it fit well in with what they were working on anyway, my supervisor assigned a group of PhD students to review it. Talk about extra pressure. However, apart from some minor quibbles, they were very impressed with my work (which also received the highest grade of VG, which I guess would be called a high pass in English) and we ended up going so far over the allotted time that she’s thinking of scheduling another seminar focusing on the paper.
Had it not been for the Bologna Process, which will lead to some significant changes to higher education in Sweden, this would have been the last step before the PhD program, and it would have been considered a Masters thesis. However, they’re now adding further requirements to the Masters, to make it more compatible with what is offered in the rest of Europe, so I’ll probably be writing another paper in 2007 (the new system won’t be in place until then), and then I’ll have a ‘proper’ Masters. Given that its virtually impossible to get into the PhD program at the moment, and given that doing the extra work will cut a year off the PhD, its probably all for the best, even if it does mean I’ll have to come up with another subject to write about.
My supervisor thinks I should continue along the same lines as this time around, perhaps focusing on horses in tomb paintings instead of on terracottas. Then I could use both of these papers as the base for a dissertation that focuses on Etruscans and horses in general. That seems like the reasonable thing to do, though my real love is Bronze Age Greece, and I would love to focus on that instead. However, since prof. Robin Hgg retired, they don’t have anyone able to supervise such an advanced paper focusing on that. The Etruscan stuff also suffers from the problem that many of the sources I will need are written in Italian or French, and that slowed my work down a lot when I wrote this paper.
Still, its probably most likely that I’ll end up with Etruscans again. Its certainly interesting enough. I hope, btw, to have a copy of my paper up on the website fairly soon. Minus the images, though.