[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.”