"I shall have this memorized before I go to bed, even if it takes all night."

Ten years from now he'll be trying to gin up any sort of enthusiasm from 18 bored students...

Stylistically a '70s advertisement -- for what I can't imagine.

Fond memory from a Latin seminar: the supervisor asked for somebody to start with their translation of the first part of this text we were working on, and when met with an absolute wall of silence, he said in his *incredibly* old fashioned RP accent: "It's like squeezing blood from a stone!"

Sounds like John Houseman's character Professor Charles Kingsfield in the movie The Paper Chase.

For two years in middle school and three more years in high school, I studied Spanish. The instructor I had in high school was actually a native francophone from Saint Martin, but a U.S. veteran (he moved here in the 1930s). During WWII, he worked as a translator for the U.S. Army, although he had studied electronics.

In my final year of Spanish, he gave a final exam: five pages of a novel by Jorge Luis Borges, in the original Spanish. We were to translate as much as possible into English during the 50-minute period. The rest of the class were still struggling when he called time; I handed him 12 pages of manuscript when he got to my desk. He stood and paged through it with a smile on his face. I'm the only student who ever finished. 12 errors but I was still the only A. I have his 1939 U.S. Signal Corps electronics manual here somewhere...

Damn, getting Borges in an exam sounds like a blast! Although probably not so fun for the unprepared... maybe a glimpse or two into the Aleph would've helped them... 👻👻

It was good enough that I went to the library and found the book he'd copied it from. I wish I could say I can still read Spanish (I had a girlfriend who was born in Guadalajara, Mexico; she and her family kept me on my toes), but I've grown rusty over the years from disuse.