The True-Life Confessions of the Poet in Love
Like many literary works from antiquity, the poems of Catullus survived by the slenderest of threads. After his death at a young age in the late 50s BCE, his poems certainly had an afterlife. They were read by Ovid, Horace, Virgil, and Propertius and were a strong influence on Martial, who died at the beginning of the second century CE. Two Latin writers in the later second century knew Catullus’ work—Aulus Gellius and Apuleius—but thereafter the poems, all 116 or so of them, seem gradually to disappear and might easily have been effaced from literary history, as so much of ancient literature was. That this did not in fact happen is suggested by the sudden appearance of a single poem, an epithalamium, in an anthology constructed in the ninth century, a manuscript which miraculously still survives in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Hundreds of years later, a single complete codex surfaced in the early fourteenth century in Verona—Catullus’ hometown—but like many manuscripts it subsequently disappeared too. Fortunately it had been copied, by whom and how often is unclear, but the three earliest surviving codices all bear some relationship to it, directly or through an intermediary, now also lost. We have to imagine also that at one time in the early transmission of the Catullan corpus, some scribe, in an increasingly Christian culture, thought well enough of the poems to copy them from scrolls into a codex, dirty words, out-of-date political invective, antiquarian vocabulary, homosexual verse and all. That broad-minded scribe and undoubtedly many others after him allowed Catullus to “last . . . beyond one lifetime,” as he expressed it in the dedicatory poem to his book,[1] a destiny not shared by any of the other poets in his circle, whose works are entirely lost. In 1472 the poems were printed for the first time, by a Venetian printer, assuring them permanence in the literary record. They have been edited, printed, and translated into many languages—a few even into Esperanto—hundreds of times since then and are now on every educated person’s canonical list of the poetry that will never be out of favor.
For a century and a half following the first full translation of the poems into English—John Nott’s edition of 1795—Catullus made life difficult for the translator by his sexual frankness and his obscene vocabulary. Nott thought that he himself faced this challenge squarely. In the preface to his version, he writes that a translator must never “suppress, or even too much gloss . . . over [troublesome language] through a fastidious regard to delicacy.”[2] He went on to say that his English was faithful to the text, “without overstepping the modesty of language,” but needless to say the place where the line between modesty and accuracy is drawn was significantly different for Nott than it would be later. Poem No. 16, which Stephen Mitchell does not include in his selection, begins and ends with an obscene line that Peter Whigham, in his version for Penguin, simply leaves in the Latin, and that Horace Gregory, in a version that was widely read in its time, disguises euphemistically so as to be rather formal and polite.[3] The line uses the Latin verbs for sodomize and fellate, both forced rather than consensual; not until the poet C. H. Sisson’s translation of 1966 did the verbs get an honest English equivalent. Nott, for his part, is even more indirect than Gregory: “I’ll treat you as ’tis meet, I swear / Lascivious monsters as ye are!” With Poem No. 97, which is even more obscene, Gregory appears to have thought it necessary simply to mistranslate in order to avoid having to find an equivalent for Catullus’ “a gaping jaw like the open slit of a pissing mule in summer,” where the Latin is even cruder.[4] Nott, for his part, simply omits the poem, unsurprisingly perhaps. It is not easy to imagine how a translator in 1795 could have found an acceptable way to euphemize such a scatological and grossly insulting poem.
Given that the lyric poetry of archaic Greece has come down to us largely in fragmentary form, Catullus’ poems represent something new in Western literature. A. W. Pollard, who became Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum and is a character in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, puts it wittily in Act 1 of the play:
Like everything else, like clocks and trousers and algebra, the love poem had to be invented. After millenniums of sex and centuries of poetry, the love poem as understood by Shakespeare and Donne, and by Oxford undergraduates—the true-life confessions of the poet in love, immortalizing the mistress, who is actually the cause of the poem—that was invented in Rome in the first century before Christ.[5]
Another way of putting this is to say that when we read Catullus’ poems, or the lyric poems in any case, we do not have to make allowances for a vastly different sensibility, or different mores, or primitive attitudes. If one were to express the poet’s life as a movie pitch, it would go something like this: Affluent boy from the provinces moves to the big city, falls desperately in love with a married woman, experiences the highs and lows of romance, comes to despise politics, dies young. More importantly, Catullus’ emotional life feels completely familiar. He experiences boundless, delightful love (in Poem No. 5 he begs for thousands and thousands of kisses from his lover), as well as despair (in Poem No. 76, his lover is thankless, ungrateful, or disregarding, depending on the translator). He laughs out loud and, as any young person might, insults and makes fun of his enemies. He feels profound grief at a death in his family (his brother). He rails at being broke (whether true or not); he invites a friend to dinner in an elegant poem; he depends on friends to reassure him that his poetry has value. He becomes cynical when his lover proves less than faithful and execrates her in a poem (No. 58) in which he accuses her of having fallen so low that she is reduced to giving “handjobs in crossroads and back alleys / to the decadent progeny of Remus.”[6] That’s mean in the way that any twenty-something lover might be mean to a deceitful mate.
Familiar as the emotions in many of Catullus’ poems may feel to us as readers, the poems nonetheless present many challenges to the translator in addition to the scatological one.[7] The book falls into three sections, plausibly representing three rolls or scrolls in the poet’s day: lyric poems, longer poems (including an epyllion or miniature epic), and epigrams. Catullus used many different meters but not end rhyme, pace John Nott. Not surprisingly, the text in Latin, given its transmission history, is frequently corrupt. There is a gap in the numbering of the poems (18–20) because a sixteenth-century editor inserted three poems that a nineteenth-century editor deemed spurious and removed. The poems do not record Catullus’ life in any straightforward way and were probably not ordered by him but by a later scribe when Catullus had been long dead. For a modern readership, the longer poems (Nos. 61–68) are especially demanding. They include two epithalamia and a mini-epic on the subject of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis (Poem No. 64). Daisy Dunn, whose version of Catullus was published in 2016, calls the latter “the finest poem [Catullus] ever wrote.” Basil Bunting, by contrast, who knew his Latin lyric poetry well, began a translation of Poem No. 64 and, breaking off at line 28 of the Latin, wrote “—and why Catullus bothered to write pages and pages of this drivel mystifies me.”[8] Stephen Mitchell, perhaps wisely, includes only Poem No. 65 and part of No. 68 in his translation, with the result that his version focuses on the so-called polymetra (the lyric poems) and the epigrammatic poems that conclude Catullus’ book. Not many readers will rue his omissions.
Stephen Mitchell is a well-known translator whose work ranges across several languages, ancient and modern. He has published versions of Homer’s two epic poems, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Biblical texts, Rilke, Yehuda Amichai, and many others. His version of Catullus, which includes almost exactly half of the extant poems, is his first translation from Latin as far as I know. (Coincidentally, both Mitchell and Daisy Dunn acknowledge Robert Frost’s influence on their Catullan projects.) As already mentioned, he omits most of the long poems and many, though not all, of the obscener poems. The most famous of Catullus’ poems are here, however: the two poems about Lesbia’s pet sparrow; Poem No. 5 (“Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love”), which Ben Jonson translated and Thomas Campion set to memorable music; Poem No. 51, which is a translation by Catullus of a poem by Sappho; Poem No. 101, the elegy for Catullus’ brother; and others. In making his choices, he tells us in his Introduction, he followed “no principle at all; I simply chose the poems that gave me the most pleasure—the ones I thought were the best.”[9] This seems fair enough. With over a dozen translations of Catullus’ complete poems in print, a selection made on the basis of personal taste does not feel out of line or eccentric.
Where meter is concerned, Mitchell tries to follow the Latin quite closely. Other translators, including C. H. Sisson, Peter Whigham, and Daisy Dunn, translate the Sappho imitation (Poem No. 51), for example, into free verse, while Mitchell expertly retains the Sapphic stanzas: three hendecasyllabic (eleven-syllable) lines followed by an adonic (“watches and hears you”). Yet the long lines are not necessarily stressed like the Latin hendecasyllabics, with the result that the poem feels like free verse while adhering to some of Catullus’ underlying formal procedures:
That man truly seems to me like a god—or
even more (if such things can be imagined)—
who is sitting close to you, spellbound, as he
watches and hears you
sweetly laughing. I am bereft of mind, of
all sense, lovesick me: for the very instant
that I see you, Lesbia, there’s no voice left
inside my mouth, my
tongue feels frozen stiff, and a subtle fire
flows down through my body, my ears start ringing,
night descends upon me and leaves my eyes en-
veloped in darkness.
This poem, either from Sappho’s Greek or Catullus’ Latin, has been translated dozens of times, sometimes by very famous poets (Tennyson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, et al.). Mitchell’s version is well done—accurate (obviously), formally adherent to the syllables, and even quite close in the use of enjambement. Perhaps only the breaking of the word “enveloped” over two lines seems like an unfortunate trick, executed for metrical reasons alone. As for the later epigrams, which mainly employ the elegiac meter (one line of hexameter, one line of pentameter), Mitchell again keeps to the right number of stresses, without always avoiding what can sound like free verse. The famous epigram about love and hate, Poem No. 85, is a good example:
I hate and I love. Perhaps you are wondering how this can be.
I don’t know, but I feel it and am in torment.
The hexameter line is well done here—one can feel the beats—but the second line sounds more like prose. This poem, which has also been translated multiple times, always sounds a bit underwhelming in English. Neither the poets (Ezra Pound, Horace Gregory, C. H. Sisson) nor the Latinists (F. W. Cornish, Peter Whigham, Guy Lee, Daisy Dunn) seem able to hit the mark. It is the second line that is the problem. In the Latin original, the line is all verbs except for sed (but) and et (and): nescio (I do not know), fieri sentio (I feel it to be happening), and excrucior (the passive form of the verb to torment). That final verb is powerful in Latin, but—as a passive form—less so in English. Daisy Dunn finds perhaps the best translation by paying attention to etymology. Her version concludes with the words “I am crucified.” Other solutions—“torn in two,” “I am tormented,” “am racked,” “and suffer,” are too weak and end the poem with a whimper, not a bang.[10]
Poems that are more than 2,000 years old and in a language that is as different as Latin is from English—etymological connections aside—are clearly open to wide variations in tone, diction, and technique among translators. Catullus’ poetry has been translated into English using rhyme (he did not), free verse (he did not), and meter (he did, though some of his meters do not do well in English). The racier language has been understated and, occasionally, overstated. Poets have tended to treat the original quite loosely, scholars less so. Lines are occasionally omitted, and modernizations are commonplace.[11] Mitchell is relatively faithful to the text, and a brief close look at a small number of poems will demonstrate his allegiances and occasional errancies. Poem No. 1 is a useful first example. It represents the dedication of Catullus’ book, presumably the first book only, given that Catullus refers to his poems here as nugae—trifles—a word that would be inappropriate for the long poems. Mitchell translates libellum as “slim book of verse,” which is a nice choice, while for some reason leaving out Catullus’ adjective lepidum, witty, and translating the simple adjective novum as “just now polished.” In the following line, Catullus characterizes his book, i.e., scroll, in exactly the way a writer of the first century BCE would: dry and recently polished with pumice. Mitchell uses “polished,” but adds “and inked with my revisions,” which is definitely not in the Latin. Mitchell sticks fairly closely to the Latin in much of the remainder of the ten-line poem, though he adds “thick” to Catullus’ description of the three scrolls which the dedicatee, Cornelius Nepos, filled with his history of the world; leaves out an oath (“By Jupiter!”); makes the poet’s “O Virgin patron,” i.e., Minerva, into “O patron goddess”; and collapses Catullus’ doctis (learned) and laboriosis (industrious shading towards labored) into the phrase “your matchless learning,” which while not perfectly accurate is rather nice. Mitchell follows Catullus’ use of the eleven-syllable line throughout his version.
Poem No. 43, an example of Catullus’ unruly but charming invective, supplies a second example. In it, Catullus registers his disbelief that another woman, who has few physical charms to recommend her and is a bankrupt’s girlfriend, has been compared to his Lesbia, and how this demonstrates the idiocy of the age. (He calls it ignorant and unhappy.) Mitchell gives the other woman a name that is not present in the poem, Ameana; the poet merely says Salve (greetings, hello there, etc.). The woman’s unattractive features are described very concisely by Catullus, but Mitchell is a little more descriptive, rendering his version wordier, less minimal. The poem’s “not beautiful of foot” becomes “your feet undainty,” and “not a dry mouth” becomes “and when you open / your wet lips.” Catullus tells us that the woman is a friend of a bankrupt man from Formiae, between Rome and Naples. Mitchell both gives him a name and calls him a name: “Concubine of that bankrupt prick Mamurra.” And whereas the poet execrates the age with just the two adjectives mentioned above, Mitchell raises the temperature considerably: “Oh this age—this tasteless, / coarse, unmannerly, stupid age we live in!” That’s good invective, if not as tightly put as Catullus’.
Poem No. 109 provides a final example. Mitchell has chosen to end his selection with this poem, leaving out a brief poem in which Catullus calls someone a catamite, two poems in which the pseudonymous Mentula (prick, tool) is made fun of, a bit of persiflage about a fellow poet, and so on. It is a good choice to close the book, as it expresses the poet’s profound hope that his lover’s promise of eternal love will indeed be kept, that she is making the promise from her soul (ex animo), and that the gods will help in insuring that their “sacred friendship” will be lifelong. Inevitably the English poem is considerably longer than the Latin (sixty-five words as compared to thirty-eight), in part simply because Latin is more concise (no articles, fewer copula verbs, etc.), but also in part because of Mitchell’s word choices: “that it’s going to last forever” for three Latin words, “let her be making it honestly” again for three words in the original, or “and let it be our glad fate to enjoy for the rest of our lives” for fewer than half the number of words in Latin. Mitchell wants to keep each line a hexameter, and this aspiration does mean a bit of wordiness: “going to” could easily be “will,” “let her be making it” could easily be “let her make it,” and so on. But in truth the result is a good poem, and an appropriate ending to Mitchell’s selection. His culling makes of Catullus perhaps a more romantic poet and less a sort of Roman equivalent of an internet troll who in today’s unforgiving culture would doubtless be cancelled. For Catullus, it was all good fun, or even mean fun; his willingness to be charming and unedifying, prayerful and execrating, full of grief and full of bile, obscene and deeply sensitive, leaves readers not with a sense of inconsistency but of psychological richness. In Poem No. 109, Mitchell uses the word “heart” twice: once to translate vita (life) and once to translate animo (soul). In both cases it feels like the right word, since Catullus really was one of the first love poets in Western literature. He spoke from the heart and died young, like many good romantic poets ever since.
You assure me, my dearest heart, that this love existing between us
will be happy and that it’s going to last forever.
Let her, you mighty gods, be able to keep this promise,
let her be making it honestly, from the heart,
and let it be our glad fate to enjoy for the rest of our lives
the unbreakable bond of this our sacred friendship.[12]
[1] CATULLUS: Selected Poems, trans. by Stephen Mitchell. Yale University Press. $26.00. My title is taken from a speech by A. W. Pollard about the invention of the love poem in Tom Stoppard’s play, The Invention of Love (London, 1998), p. 13.
[2] The Poems of Caius Valerius Catullus, in English Verse, trans. by John Nott (London, 1795), I, xi.
[3] The Poems of Catullus, trans. by Horace Gregory (New York, 1956). This version was originally published in 1931.
[4] The English version cited is by W. H. D. Rouse, from the Loeb edition: Catullus, Tibullus, Pervigilium Veneris, 2nd ed., rev. by G. P. Goold (Cambridge, 1988), p. 169. The Catullus poems in this volume are mostly translated by Francis Warre Cornish, but several—most of them the salacious poems—were rendered by Rouse.
[5] Stoppard, op. cit., p. 13.
[6] Mitchell, p. 71. The Latin verb that Mitchell turns into a crudity, glubere, fundamentally means to peel or strip the bark from something. Horace Gregory is as usual euphemistic, but more recent translators have tried out “wank,” “toss off,” and (less defensibly) “fuck.” Guy Lee oddly avoids the overtones of the verb by writing that Lesbia “peels great-hearted Remus’ grandsons,” whatever that means. The Poems of Catullus, trans. by Guy Lee (Oxford, 1998), p. 55.
[7] Contemporary translators can get into trouble too, but for being not scatological enough. Daisy Dunn was taken to task in 2016 in the Times Literary Supplement for being namby-pamby in her translation of the word fututiones in Poem No. 32. It is a rare word that seems to mean bouts of lovemaking, but crudely put. Dunn chose to use “fucks,” which was not strong enough for some readers.
[8] The Poems of Catullus, trans. by Daisy Dunn (London, 2016), p. viii, and Basil Bunting, Collected Poems (Mt. Kisco, 1985), p. 151.
[9] Mitchell, p. xvii.
[10] John Nott’s version is worth quoting for its bathos: “Tho’ I hate, yet I love!—you’ll perhaps ask me, how? / I can’t tell; but I’m vext, and I feel that I do.”
[11] For example, Carl Sesar drops two lines in his translation of Poem No. 56, and Charles Martin, in his book on Catullus, translates the word libellum, the diminutive of liber, or book, as “chapbook.” See Selected Poems of Catullus, trans. by Carl Sesar (New York, 1974), n. pag., and Charles Martin, Catullus (New Haven, 1992), p. 10.
[12] Poem No. 109, in Mitchell, p. 117.