The Poems of Catullus

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Translation © Daisy Dunn 2016

Daisy Dunn asserts the moral right to be identified as the translator of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007582969

Ebook Edition © January 2016 ISBN: 9780007582976

Version: 2016-01-07

If any of you chance to become readers

Of my untimely ramblings and your hands

Do not tremble to thumb my scroll …

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

The Poems

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XIVb

XV

XVI

XVII

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

LI

LII

LIII

LIV

LV

(LVIIIb)

LVI

LVII

LVIII

LIX

LX

LXI

LXII

LXIII

LXIV

LXV

LXVI

LXVII

LXVIII

LXIX

LXX

LXXI

LXXII

LXXIII

LXXIV

LXXV

LXXVI

LXXVII

LXXVIII

LXXVIIIb

LXXIX

LXXX

LXXXI

LXXXII

LXXXIII

LXXXIV

LXXXV

LXXXVI

LXXXVII

LXXXVIII

LXXXIX

XC

XCI

XCII

XCIII

XCIV

XCV

XCVb

XCVI

XCVII

XCVIII

XCIX

C

CI

CII

CIII

CIV

CV

CVI

CVII

CVIII

CIX

CX

CXI

CXII

CXIII

CXIV

CXV

CXVI

Notes

About The Publisher

Introduction

On an autumn night in 1962 the poet Robert Lowell ambled through Cambridge, Massachusetts, as far as 35 Brewster Street. He had walked this broad, tree-lined road before as a young student, grasping a bundle of pages, pale grey with pencilled words. His manuscript had weighed heavily upon him as he approached a large gabled house on the road’s midpoint. He was now forty-five and no longer in need of affirmation of his talent; his verse translation of Racine’s Phaedra had recently been feted. But he longed to recall the bewildering array of what lay beyond the walls of this dwelling.

In January 1963 his sometime mentor Robert Frost, the great poetic master of pastoral and everyday experience, passed away. ‘The lights were out that night; they were out for good now,’ wrote Lowell, reflecting on the moment, just months earlier, that he revisited the cold threshold of Frost’s former home: ‘Its narrow gray wood was a town cousin of the farmhouses he wrote about, and stood on some middle ground between luxury and poverty. It was a traveler from the last century that had inconspicuously drifted over the customs border of time … I can easily imagine the barish rooms, the miscellaneous gold-lettered old classics, the Georgian poets, the Catullus by his bedside, the iron stove where he sometimes did his cooking, and the stool drawn up to his visitor’s chair so that he could ramble and listen.’1

Robert Frost read the poetry of Catullus often, mesmerised by his words and the weight and complexity of his sentiments. New England shared little ground with ancient Verona, the nascent town south of the Alps where Catullus was born c.82 BC, or Rome, where he lived in the fraught times before Julius Caesar waged his civil war and the Republic fell to pieces. But Catullus’ passions were timeless, and free, far outliving his brief thirty years on this earth. His ‘little book’ (libellus), a series of over a hundred poems referred to merely by number, and arranged by a mysterious hand in an order that lacks chronology – though not thought – appealed to Frost’s appetite for subtle expression. There could be no better place for Catullus’ poetry book than the bedside, where Frost kept the slim volume Lowell spied in his clapboard house.

Gaius Valerius Catullus, whom scholars often see as the inventor of Latin love elegy, once wrote of how, ‘Undone by passion I tossed and turned all over the bed …’2 He had spent a long ‘lazy day’ drinking wine, carousing and composing verse with his dear poet friend, Gaius Licinius Calvus Macer, whom he referred to merely as Calvus (‘Suave, suave Calvus’, ‘my dear Calvus’) in further poems. Catullus also wove the finest poem he ever wrote around a bedspread, which he embroidered with the myths of Theseus and Ariadne, sister of the Phaedra who inspired Robert Lowell’s play of 1961.

Frost was probably unaware of how far his bedside copy of Catullus coloured Lowell’s experience of his smart Brewster Street home. Catullus’ book shone more brightly than any of the others in his library, which Lowell’s eyes darted off too eagerly to render more than ‘miscellaneous’. The younger poet’s description of the house itself as ‘a town cousin of the farmhouses he wrote about’ even evokes one of Catullus’ poems, in which he described his retreat on the outskirts of Rome: ‘Dear country pile of mine, whether Sabine or Tiburtine … your suburban dwelling …’3

The grandeur of Frost’s former residence and its smart surroundings might have felt at variance with what Lowell described as ‘some middle ground between luxury and poverty’, but Catullus courted the same indeterminate line. Across his 117 surviving poems, which are translated in full in this volume,4 arise several references to men who are cash poor but asset rich.5 A certain Furius, very probably a contemporary rival poet called Furius Bibaculus, ‘has neither slave nor savings’, but possesses a little villa with ‘a bill fifteen-thousand-two-hundred steep’ (Poem 26). Poverty, moreover, was a rich man’s fashion. While Catullus came from a wealthy family, with houses in Verona and on the most beautiful peninsula of Lake Garda (Sirmione, see Poem 31), and who counted among their friends and dining guests Julius Caesar himself, Catullus could still complain that his wallet was empty, ‘full of cobwebs’, and request that a friend provide him with the food and accoutrements required for a lively dinner party (Poem 13).

If Frost’s house recalled a ‘traveler from the last century’, then Catullus’ poetry was the place where travellers converged and traded in new tongues. Familiar as he was with the poetry of his Greek and Roman forebears, he ingeniously combined ideas from a variety of genres, including epigram, epic, and comedy, and imposed upon them a new vocabulary, forging many neologisms – new words – and affectations; he was particularly partial to the diminutive, which he employed for pathos and affection as often as he did for size. In Poems 2 and 3, for example, he describes the sparrow that belongs to his favourite lover, whom he refers to in his poetry as ‘Lesbia’. She was, in all likelihood, Clodia Metelli, from one of the oldest and most prominent families in Rome. She was married to the Roman senator Metellus Celer until 59 BC, when she was widowed. Catullus describes what was nominally her pet bird and the ‘small release’, solaciolum (a diminutive) it gave her from her frustration. In death, the sparrow is miselle passer (‘poor little sparrow’); in life, deliciae … puellae, his ‘girl’s darling’.

Deliciae, like iucundus (‘pleasant’), was part of the vocabulary Catullus used to communicate his poetic taste. These words prove difficult to translate in English, but for me deliciae in Poem 2 has become ‘apple of my girl’s eye’, since I venture also to suggest that the last three lines of Poem 2, which many commentators view as a distinct fragment, belong with his sparrow lines. Just as the little bird provides relief, Catullus imagines that Atalanta, the indomitable huntress of Greek myth, finds relief when a suitor beats her in a foot race – after she slows to pick up some golden apples – and wins her hand.

The nature of Poem 68 in the collection is problematic. Catullus addresses the first part of it to a certain Manlius, probably the young nobleman Manlius Torquatus, for whom he also wrote the wedding hymn at Poem 61 (other hymns may be found at Poem 34 and Poem 62: they have a marked formality). The second part is addressed to an Allius. The poem probably started life as separate poems. In this edition, I have demarcated the two main parts with a line break.

Like Lowell seeking the approval of Frost, Catullus spent time offering his work to fellow poets to edit, and digesting theirs in turn. He belonged not so much to a fixed coterie as to a loose set of like-minded individuals who enjoyed a shared language and poetic heritage. They knew that when Catullus asked for ‘salt’, he was seeking more than a condiment: he wanted wit and urbanity. It would be a pity to lose the word in a translation of his work.

In Poem 95, Catullus celebrates the publication of his friend and fellow poet Gaius Helvius Cinna’s work Zmyrna, which described an act of incest between a princess and her father. Catullus compares it favourably with some Annals by a certain Volusius, which in Poem 36 he describes with more colour as cacata carta (‘shit-smeared sheets’). There is a corruption in the text, but it seems likely that Volusius is described as coming from Hatria, near Padua, and producing ‘five hundred thousand’ verses in one year. Such productivity was reason enough for Catullus to despise him. Catullus, Cinna, Calvus, whom together Cicero would describe as poetae novi, ‘new poets’, were united in their preference for brevity and concision over verbosity.

This was a stylistic feature that Lowell, too, was taught to savour. The manuscript he carried to Robert Frost as a young man, he once recalled, was heavy with words.6 He had written, in barely legible pencil, an epic on the First Crusade in blank verse. Taking hold of it, Frost began to read as far as his eyes and patience allowed. ‘It goes on rather a bit, doesn’t it?’ Frost said, and retrieved from elsewhere in the room a copy of Keats’ Hyperion, which he read aloud, as Catullus did his own poetry, and circulated also in written form.7 Lowell would learn to refine his art, and to great effect.

Catullus received a similar education at the hands of the god Apollo – through the Greek poetry of Callimachus, one of the finest writers from the great Library of Alexandria. In the third century BC, Callimachus wrote of how the god instructed him to fatten animals for sacrifice, but keep his poetry slender, inventive, recherché, ‘even if you drive a narrower path’.8 In ‘The Road Not Taken’, Robert Frost proudly took the road ‘less traveled by’. Catullus worked in accordance with these precepts, and translated several of Callimachus’ poems from Greek into Latin. Catullus’ Poem 66, written from the viewpoint of a lock of hair that belonged to Queen Berenice II, wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes of third-century BC Alexandria, was a close translation of a Greek poem by Callimachus.

Poem 64, though Catullus’ longest surviving poem at over four hundred lines, adheres to Callimachus’ advice for reducing an otherwise long tale to a tight and erudite poem. It overflows with subtle allusions to the work of earlier poets, including Apollonius of Rhodes, author of the Argonautica, and Ennius, author of a Latin Medea. At the beginning of Poem 64 Catullus describes the flight of the Argo, which he viewed as the first ship ever to have sailed. It is so novel that he can refer to it only as a ‘flying chariot’. As often, the oars on which it sails are ‘palms of the hand’; these are delights which must be preserved in English.

I came to translate Catullus’ poems in the process of writing Catullus’ Bedspread, a book about the poet’s life and work in which I explore the ‘flying chariot’ and characters of Poem 64. I challenged myself to keep as true to the Latin as I could – a difficult task since Latin is a far more economical language than English – while retaining the life and tone of the original verse. At times this called for interpolation: Catullus addressed several poems to ‘Mentula’ (‘Cock’), a none-too-flattering nom de plume for Caesar’s subordinate in the Gallic War, Mamurra. In Poem 7, where he speaks to Lesbia of the number of kisses he desires of her, Catullus uses the word basiationes. The standard Latin for kisses was oscula, but Catullus appears to have favoured basia because the word’s origins were probably Celtic. His native Verona was part of Gaul for as long as he lived. I have tried to convey the equivalent by using French, gros bisous, for basiationes, which gives the size of these great kisses, almost diminutives in reverse.9

I felt that the bones of some of Catullus’ more striking constructions deserved airing in order that the spirit of the Latin can live on in the English. His poems occasionally read strangely in Latin. In Poem 22, for example, Catullus repeatedly refers to ‘the same man’, ‘that same man’, ‘the same fellow’, which some scholars have sought to explain as a hint that the poem’s subject, Suffenus, was in fact synonymous with Varus, the poem’s addressee.10

Catullus used a variety of poetic metres. Poem 64 was written in hexameters, the metre of epic, which gave it more weight than many of his other poems, such as the elegiacs, which make up the last fifty poems in the book as it is arranged. Poem 63, in which Catullus describes a man named Attis castrating himself in honour of an ancient Eastern goddess (he refers to him from that point on as a ‘she’), was the first Latin poem to be written in galliambics, a feisty metre chosen to reflect the strangeness of the foreign rites: the goddess’ eunuch priests were known as galli.

I have not sought to recreate the Latin metres Catullus used. I wanted the freedom to render his words as I saw fit, and reflect on the difficulties of seeking an English equivalent for the sound of Latin verse. An elegiac couplet in English will not sound like a Latin elegiac couplet when read aloud. Robert Frost discovered the difficulty of replicating Latin metres when he decided to write his poem ‘For Once, Then, Something’, in hendecasyllables – one of Catullus’ favourite Latin metres – formed of eleven-syllable lines. ‘Everybody just thinks it’s my kind of blank verse,’ Frost said, at once delighted and vexed that his poem, ‘calculated to tease the metrists’, had succeeded in blinding his critics.11

Gestures may still be made to reflect the sound of Catullus’ Latin, whilst making it appeal to the modern eye and ear. In the love poems, the languor of the Gallic tongue may still be heard. Catullus’ early Latin readers, though far more familiar with mythology and Greek literature than we are today, might still have had use of a commentary to read Poem 64. Attempts to reflect the sound of Catullus’ Latin have led me to shape stanzas out of the continuous text and shorten the line length in the earlier part of this poem, where the rhythm and sound of the ship, the Argo, moving through the water resounds clearly. It is hoped that this will aid with the reading of this richly complex poem.12

It is the poise of Catullus’ poems that has gripped me amid the passion of his words, and this that I have tried to capture in translating them. I hope they will speak to today’s reader, and confirm that while Catullus is ripe for the bedside, he is not yet ready to be put to bed.

THE POEMS

I

I dedicate the elegant new little book

That I polished off not a moment ago

With dry pumice stone to who,

But you, Cornelius. For you always did think

That my ramblings were something,

Though you were the only man of Italy brave enough

In those days to unravel our whole history in three volumes –

Learned ones, by Jupiter, and exhaustive.

So have this little book, whatever it is

And whatever its worth; only please, virgin muse,

May it survive unceasing for over a hundred years.

II

Sparrow, apple of my girl’s eye,

Often she plays with you, holds you in her lap,

Gives you a fingertip when you want it

And urges you to take passionate bites

Whenever she wishes, gleaming in desire for me,

To play with something for pleasure.

And I believe it provides a small release from her

Frustration, as then the intolerable burning fades.

I wish that I could play with you as she does

And lighten the ponderous cares of my mind …

I would be as grateful as they say the quick-stepped

Atalanta was for the little golden apple

That loosed the chastity belt that bound her long.

III

Mourn, Venuses and Cupids

And all who have tasted love.

My girl’s sparrow is dead.

Sparrow, apple of my girl’s eye

Whom she loved more than her own eyes

For he was honey-sweet and knew his owner

As well as a girl knows her own mother.

He never shifted himself from her lap

But hopping around

Cheep here

Cheep there

Would chirp continuously to his mistress only.

But now he travels that shadowy path

From which they allow no return.

Shame on you, cruel darkness of the

Underworld who devours all beautiful things

As you have stolen pretty Sparrow from me.

Criminal deed. Poor little sparrow.

It is your fault the darling eyes of my girl

Are now swollen and red from weeping.

IV

That little kidney bean you see before you, friends,

Says she was once the very fastest of ships

And that no floating plank in onward surge

Could outstrip her whether she made her flight

On hand-like oars or canvas,

And she says neither the shore of the dangerous Adriatic

Denies this nor the Cycladic islands

Nor upstanding Rhodes nor the savage Thracian

Propontis nor the harsh gulf of the Black Sea

Where that yacht to be was formerly

Long-haired forest – for on the ridge of Mount Cytoris

Her whispery hair would whistle.

Pontic Amastris and boxwood-bearing Cytoris,

Yacht says this was – still is – all very familiar to you.

At the very beginning, she says,

She was rooted on your heights

And soaked her hand-like oars in your waters,

And from there she carried her master

Over many unstoppable waves, regardless of whether

The breeze summoned her from port or starboard

Or Jupiter fell favourably upon both her sheets alike.

No vows were made on her behalf to the gods

On the shore when she set out on her last voyage

From the sea all the way to this limpid lake.

But this belongs to the past. Now she has been put away

To grow old peacefully and dedicates herself to you,

Twin Castor and twin of Castor, Pollux.

V

We should live, my Lesbia, we should love,

We should value at a penny all

The rumours of our elders – they are dourer than most.

The sun can set and rise again

But once our short light has passed beneath its yardarm

We must sleep a night that never ends.

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred

Then another thousand, then a second hundred.

Then – don’t stop – another thousand, then a hundred

Then when we have shared many thousands

We shall confound them so no one can know

Or cast an evil eye upon us

When he knows that our kisses are so many.

VI

Flavius, if your lover were not

Inelegant and unrefined you would want to speak –

Would not be able not to speak – about her to Catullus.

No doubt you’re in love with some feverish

Little slut and it shames you to confess it.

See, for all its silence your bed betrays

The nights you sleep are not sexless:

Steeped in flowers and the oil of Syrian olive,

Knackered and tattered, pillows everywhere,

Creaking and shaking,

The trembling bedstead shattered.

If shame did not rule you, you would reveal all.

Why, you would not flash such toned love-handles

If you were not engaged in some dalliance.

So whatever news you have, be it good or bad,