OU students are working with their professor to translate a historical text into English for the first time.

Samuel Huskey, chairman of the department of classics and letters, is in charge of the project to translate a Latin work by Robert Fludd, a 17th-century philosopher.

“It’s always interesting and valuable to see where we’ve been as a group of people and what people used to think,” Huskey said. “That helps us understand where we are going and how to get there. It helps us understand the paths people did go down before.”

The text, a massive book filled with engravings, deals with ideas of how the natural world was formed, he said.

The text is part of the History of Science Collection, located on the fifth floor of Bizzell Memorial Library. The collection contains thousands of historical books in a temperature-controlled vault, and Huskey has identified this as one that may have not been translated before.

Translating the text into English from Latin can be tricky because of the language used, he said. The language is not the classical Latin, and students have to consider how to translate the style and idioms as well.

“That’s part of the art of translating and the teaching element of this research project,” Huskey said. “We talk about the difficulties of translating one idiom into another, and that’s really the educational value of this project. Often in classes, there are translations of those works, and a student can look at a translation, which is a very big temptation.”

The project began a year ago with three undergraduate students working on translating it, Huskey said. However, the translation is currently on a break as he looks for more interested students.

Students wanting to participate on the project need to have three to four years of Latin experience, he said, with plans to digitize the work when it is completely translated.

Because the department does not have a graduate program, Huskey said he wants to provide these opportunities for undergraduate research.

“Research in the humanities is a fascinating thing,” he said. “It’s probably not going to change the world as if you were to cure cancer of something, but it can definitely add to our knowledge of who we are as a people. Undergraduates can benefit from working with professors individually.”

The History of Science Collections at OU was created in 1949 when Everett DeGolyer donated 129 ancient works in exchange for a program to teach about the history of science, according to the collection’s website.

The collection now has nearly 100,000 texts, some of which are on display in the library, according to the website.

GO AND DO
History of Science Collections
What: Collection of rare texts donated to OU
Where: Fifth floor of Bizzell Memorial Library
When: 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays