[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week’s nearly finished, at least technically; barely a few hours left. Truth is, it was over the moment you went to lunch. What are you accomplishing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Make it a POETS Day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

There are conflicting assessments of this week’s poet’s work. Catullus was verbose, say a small few and one really big and hard to ignore name. Catullus was succinct, say considerably more regular and big names. He was formal. He was iconoclastic. I can say that he is enjoyable. I side with the succinct sect, though I’m at the mercy of translators. The more I read about him the more convinced I am that I need to stop and get back to what he wrote rather than what was written about him, but then the more and varied translations I read, the more I look to what was written about him in order to figure out the author’s intent unfiltered by translators’ decisions. It’s a mess.

A 2007 translation by Peter Green comes up as the one to read. Per the book blurb, he’s “fresh, bawdy, and utterly engaging.” That sounds about up my alley, especially as the promoters took care to assure me that Green preserves Catullus’s obscenity. Instead, for today I’ve chosen to choose from The Poems of Catullus translated by Guy Lee through Oxford World’s Classics, published in 1990. Lee seems the penultimate mix of flair and true reckoning, second in reviewers’ mind only because he leans towards accuracy in meaning when accuracy and craft need arbitration but accuracy is what currently interests me. Lee’s remarkably entertaining, or he is so in combination with Catullus; so much so that I’ve ordered the Green book in hedonistic curiosity.

I was introduced to Catullus by Ezra Pound’s translation of “XXVI.”

This villa is raked of winds from fore and aft,
All Boreas’ sons in bluster and yet more
Against it is this TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND sesterces,
All out against it, oh my God:
some draft.

Here is the same as translated by Guy Lee:

Furius, your little countryhouse faces
not droughts of Auster or Favonius
Or savage Boreas or Apheliotes
But fifteen thousand sesterces,
An overdraft that’s not good for your health.

For reference, here is the original Latin for those who read it, sure, but mainly to show structure.

Furi, uilula uestra non ad Austri
flatus opposita est neque ad Fauoni
nec saeui Boreae aut Apheliotae,
uerum ad milia quindecim et ducentos.
O uentum horriblem atque pestilentem.

Pound, as declared in Cathay, tried for the sense of a poem rather than a direct translation. I don’t know when he translated “XXVI” so neither do I know how far along he was in developing his thoughts on proper treatment. Catullus often wrote in hendecasyllabics, eleven syllables per line, as he did here, and Pound keeps true to that in three of his four—the broken treated as one—lines and hits with five stresses per, as did Catullus.

Pound and Lee play to the draft pun, a joke I’m not sure translates directly. It’s clear that Catullus is saying the house isn’t battered about by wind and that instead, it’s battered about by debt. I was a terrible student of French rather than a terrible student of Latin, so I’m further at the mercy of translators in checking the works of other translators, but I’ve read that in the original the pun is on the word “opposita.” In Catullus, “opposita” means both exposed to and mortgaged or pledged. If that’s the case the pun is to the state of the house.

In Pound’s and Lee’s, “draft” refers to the wind and a financial instrument. In this case, the pun is on what assails or threatens the house rather than its predicament. It’s a small difference, and one not original to either translator as I’ve found the same “draft” pun in an 1871 edition of translations by Robert Ellis. The latter lads were keeping up tradition, properly inserting a pun in a poem with a pun at its center; in the source language thus in the target or receptor language, if ever so imperfectly.

This speaks to the heart of my problem in appreciating translations of poetry, the enjoyment of which rests on exquisite turns of phrase and shades of meaning, both precise and ambiguous. Those are to be found in translations as they are in any worthy work of poetry, but who deserves the credit? Because I can read a brilliant and an awful translation of the same poem (anyone trying to infer should know I’m a fan of Lee, an evangelist for Pound, and admire both of the translation above, if for different reasons) I can’t say without a heap of hearsay that the original is any good beyond sentiment, and even sentiment can be mangled.

Pound’s appeals as music. To my ears, he’s always a pleasure to hear. Lee is clever and set about conveying sense of form. As I mentioned, Catullus often wrote in hendecasyllables. He wrote simply as well. There are not as many inflections in English as in Latin and our Latin-derived words tend to be longer than our German-derived ones. What seems terse in eleven syllables of Latin may seem verbose in the same number of syllables in English. That’s not in the spirit at all.

In the introduction to his Catullus: The Complete Poems, Lee writes “Catullus uses a variety of metres… and it is possible to reproduce them in English—possible but inadvisable, because only too often one has to resort to padding to fill up the requisite number of syllables.” He mentions that Tennyson “tried his hand at hendecasyllables” and got made fun of. Lee’s solution is to render Catullus’s poetry, at least the hendecasyllables, in nine syllable, mostly iambic lines. Call the result nine syllable blank verse? Iambic tetrameter with a female ending? What have you?

X
Catullus (c. 84 BC – c. 54 BC)
Translation by Guy Lee (1918-2005)

Free in the forum I was taken
By my Varus to meet his love,
A tartlet, as I thought at first,
By no means unwitty or unattractive.
Once arrived there we got talking
On various topics, including
Bithynia—how were things there now
And had it made me any brass?
I answered straight—there was nothing now
For praetors themselves or their staff,
Why anyone should come back flusher,
Who doesn’t give a toss for staff.
‘But surely’ they said ‘you collected
What’s said to be the local product—
Bearers?’ Whereat, to make the girl
Think me one of the luckier ones,
I said ‘Things weren’t so bad for me
Despite my drawing a bad province
That I could miss eight straight-backed men.’
In fact I’d no one, here or there,
To heave up on his head the broken
Leg of a second-hand camp-bed.
At this she said, like the bitch she was,
‘Lend them to me, please, dear Catullus,
Just for a little. I need taking
To Sérapis.’ ‘Wait,’ I replied
‘What I said just now I had, I
Wasn’t thinking. It’s my messmate
Cinna—Gaius, you know—they’re his.
But what’s it matter whose they are?
I use them as if they were mine.
But you’re a damned tactless—a living nuisance
Who won’t allow one to speak loosely.’

The Cinna mentioned was Catullus’s friend and fellow poet Gaius Helvius Cinna who was specifically not Lucius Cornelius Cinna. I feel like the universe owes Helvius identification given with manly and robust certainty. Lucius, not Helvius, had been friendly with Caesar once but held republican leanings became his outright enemy after the Rubicon. He wasn’t among the stabbing conspirators, but after the deed was done and Caesar was dispatched he was the first magistrate to speak out against the dead tyrant and apparently lively, pointed, and vicious in doing so. According to Suetonius, some at Caesar’s funeral heard that someone named Cinna was in attendance, assumed the poet was the politician, and, crowds being as crowds are, lynched the poet on the spot, thinking he was the other man.

Only a few lines, and no complete poems, written by Cinna survive. He’s known through Catullus by mention and was made immortal in dying by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 3. “What’s in a name?” indeed.

CINNA. Truly, my name is Cinna.
FIRST PLEBEIAN. Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.
CINNA. I am Cinna the poet; I am Cinna the poet!
FOURTH PLEBEIAN. Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses!
CINNA. I am not Cinna the conspirator!
FOURTH PLEBEIAN. It is no matter, his name’s Cinna! Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going!

Catullus, with his friend poor Cinna and other friends Marcus Furius Bibaculus and Quitus Cornificius, were among a group of brash poets led by Publius Valerius Cato known as the Neoterics. They wrote about everyday subjects. There are puns and witticisms. It’s lighthearted verse in contrast to the grand epics popular at the time (Virgil was, if not one of the group, Neoteric adjacent before his epic turn to The Aeneid.) They were very conscious of meter and elegant but precise speech. Cicero didn’t like it. He thought the Neoterics, a name he coined, were too precious and refined. That confuses me a little. They were fond of iambic feet, traditionally reserved for comedy. I see the overarching wittiness of their work in juxtaposition of precision in form and subject matter not considered worthy of such treatment. They’d adhere to formal structure, hint at unseriousness with iambs, and then write about matters held unworthy of poetry. I would think Cicero more on point if he’d said they were too precious while unrefined.* If Cicero is speaking of language in addition to form, I want to know why so many of the translations considered among the best render too precious and refined Latin as everyday unfussy English. I think of the Neoterics as writing in the vernacular but, again, I’m at the mercy of translators.

Catullus, at least, was frequently vulgar and teased or attacked by name those who displeased him. Wikipedia dedicates a page to his surviving poems where in one chart column they’re tagged them “Friends,” “Lesbia,” “Juventius,” “Miscellaneous,” or “Invective.” There are a hell of a lot labeled “Invective.” The result as I see it could be described as High Church Follies or drunken country club gossip—clips from an erudite but bitchy speaker who’s had a few.

(The below and all of the following are Lee translations.)

XVI

I’ll bugger you and stuff your gobs,
Aurelius Kink and Poofter Furius,
For thinking me, because my verses
Are rather sissy, not quite decent.
For the true poet should be chaste
Himself, his verses need not be.
Indeed they’ve salt and charm then only
When rather sissy and not quite decent
And when They can excite an itch
I don’t say in boys but in those hairy
Victims of lumbar sclerosis.
Because you’ve read of my x thousand
Kisses you doubt my virility?
I’ll bugger you and stuff your gobs.

“XVI” spins me around. If by “sissy” he means “precious,” Cicero had him, but I haven’t found a single rendering that shows as such. I’m open to the idea that he’s being ironic, as he was on occasion, including in “XLIX” when addressing Cicero directly. My final thought on precious language: the Imagistes, no fans of flowery or pointless language, claimed Catullus as an influence. If I’m wrong in thinking him conversational and succinct, I’m wrong in company with a great many I admire.

One the pleasures of reading Catullus is indulging yourself as time traveler. He gives a peek at daily life in the ancient Roman world, at least the slice of one whose family had an estate on Lake Garda. Nobody daydreams about being an ancient Roman peasant, so all the better for imagination fuel. Like Trekkies poring over already memorized Enterprise blueprints, Civil War buffs holding a belt buckle found at Gettysburg, or model train enthusiants admiring a miniature coal loader, readers of Catullus hold an immersion catalyst. There are togas in those tea leaves.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the famous Lesbia, though that may not have been her real name. In the earlier poems, our Catullus is head over heels in love with her, going on about sparrows and bright eyed desire. That changes. Lesbia leaves our poor poet for a series of richer and more powerful men. Wikipedia tags the poems following the split as “Lesbia,” but they would better serve their readers by inventing a new category: “Lesbia/Invective.” It doesn’t feel right taking pleasure in someone’s outrage, but that’s Catullus’s fault for being so funny about it.

Below is my favorite of his work. He writes in Sapphics stanzas here, recalling the love poems of Sappho, to set the tone. It begins as a heartfelt farewell to two friends about to embark on a tour of the known world and ends with a request by Catullus that they take the opportunity to spread the word, tell the world and all its people far and wide, that his ex girlfriend is a whore.

XI

Furius and Aurelius, Catullus’ comrades,
Whether he’ll push on to furthest India
Where the shore is pounded by far-resounding
Eoan rollers,

To Hyrcania or effeminate Arabia,
The Sacians or the arrow-bearing Parthians
Or those levels to which the seven-double
Nilus gives colour,

Or make his way across the towering Alps
To visit the memorials of great Caesar,
The Gallic Rhine, those horrible woad-painted
And world’s-end Britons—

All this, whatever the will of Heaven above
May bring, ready as you are to brave together,
Simply deliver to my girl a brief dis-
courteous message:

Farewell and long life with her adulterers,
Three hundred together, whom hugging she holds,
Loving none truly but again and again
Rupturing all’s groins;

And let her not as before expect my love,
Which by her fault has fallen like a flower
On the meadow’s margin after a passing
Ploughshare has touched it.

* I’ve got all sorts of rhetorical advice for Cicero, chess tips for Fischer, and match coverage fixes for Saban.