Was it something to do with blow jobs? Incredulous, I looked again at page 82 of my Latin textbook, then over to the entry in the dictionary; then once more at 82. From the bottom of the page, the word I’d been puzzling over all day seemed to be leering back at me. Until that moment, “Two Centuries of Roman Poetry” had struck me as harmless enough: a collection of excerpts from the major Latin poets, pitched to the reading level of an intermediate college Latin student—which is what I happened to be that evening in the early autumn of 1979, when I learned what the word really meant and it dawned on me that there might be more to Roman verse than philosophical musing, pastoral idylls, and heroic derring-do.
In class that morning, I’d been called on to sight-translate a handful of lines by Gaius Valerius Catullus, the first-century-B.C.E. poet who, the professor had warned us, was among the most erudite and sophisticated, the most doctus, of all Roman writers. In the poem at hand, Catullus ruefully recalls having served on the staff of a provincial governor, bitterly referring to him—because he didn’t let his subordinates enrich themselves at the expense of the locals—as an irrumator. When I stumbled across the unfamiliar noun, I hazarded a guess: “Cheapskate?” Professor Stocker, who’d got his Ph.D. before the Second World War and liked to wear bow ties, pursed his lips, made a face, and declared, a little too loudly, “You may render that word as ‘bastard.’ ”
So I did. But something about his discomfiture had made me curious. That evening, in the library, I took down a Latin dictionary from the shelf and flipped to the “I”s. Within moments, I saw why he’d hurried me past the word. According to “An Elementary Latin Dictionary,” the verb inrumō—the root of irrumator—means “to give suck, abuse obscenely.” I grinned, thinking I had a pretty good idea of what Catullus was calling the governor. What doubts remained were swept away a couple of years later, when, now in my senior year, I happened upon an entire article devoted to irrumator, whose root verb the author crisply defined as “to force to fellate.”
Just how you can call your boss a skullfucker and still maintain a reputation for refined erudition and literary sophistication was a question that stumped me. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one. “In Catullus we have, in a sense, not one poet but two,” the editors of “Two Centuries” acknowledged. Most scholars would agree. On the one hand, there is the impetuous, often swaggering young writer whose sometimes brash, sometimes tender personality vividly emerges from the hundred-odd poems that have come down to us. This Catullus will dash off a dinner invitation in verse to his more financially responsible friends (“You’ll dine well . . . as long as you bring a nice big meal”), or obscenely lampoon the high-and-mighty figures of the day, such as Julius Caesar—a family friend—or lay bare his bleeding heart for all to see. That organ is certainly on abundant display in the poems on which Catullus’ reputation rests today, a cycle that traces the course of a tormented affair with a woman he refers to only by a pseudonym, Lesbia. By turns giddy, anxious, and despairing, these poems have endeared him to generations of ordinary readers who find in the tempestuous and ultimately brokenhearted poet a strikingly modern and profoundly accessible figure.
On the other hand, there is the doctus poeta, the refined littérateur celebrated for his delicacy and wit, who peppered even his occasional verse with elaborate word games and abstruse allusions. (Just what was in the “asafoetida-bearing sands of Cyrene”?) This Catullus produced a handful of longer works that include a baroquely structured mini-epic about the marriage of Achilles’ parents and a gender-bending showstopper that the University of Virginia classicist Jenny Strauss Clay has called “the strangest poem in Latin”: a breathless narrative, cast in an extremely rare and agonizingly complex meter, about an Athenian youth named Attis, who, in a frenzy of devotion to the cult of the Eastern goddess Cybele, castrates himself. Much of the poem takes the form of an anguished monologue the young man delivers after he wakes up the next day, short on body parts and long on regrets.
Catullus himself seemed to be aware of his split nature. One of the most famous of the Lesbia poems is a terse couplet that not only sums up an emotional conundrum that is familiar to anyone who’s been in the throes of obsessive love but also encapsulates an essential quality in the poet himself: “I hate and I love. Just why is something you might well ask. / I don’t know. But I feel it happening, and I’m in torment.”
Because of his extraordinary range, the naked intensity of his emotions, and his dazzling variety of tones—all of which constituted what a prominent mid-century classicist referred to as a “Catullan revolution” in Roman literature—Catullus has always been a poet admired and imitated by other poets. Virgil, half a generation younger, quoted him in the Aeneid; the love elegist Propertius remarked, a little wide-eyed, that Catullus had made Lesbia more famous than Helen of Troy. Renaissance Italians mimicked his Lesbia verses, and Byron adapted one of his odes to a beautiful youth named Juventius. (Like many Romans, Catullus was blithely indifferent to the gender of his inamorati.) Swinburne folded elements of the crazed castrato poem into his sadomasochism-themed “Dolores,” from 1866. Tennyson, that great mourner, self-consciously echoed the Roman’s celebrated elegy on the death of his beloved brother—the poem that gave us the phrase ave atque vale, “hail and farewell,” and furnished the inspiration for Anne Carson’s “Nox,” from 2010, a meditation on her own brother’s death. Robert Frost kept an edition of Catullus by his bedside.
Even more, the many registers of Catullus’ verse, from recherché artiness to gutterspeak, have proved an irresistible challenge for translators ever since the first fairly complete English version was produced, in the late eighteenth century, by a physician and scholar named John Nott (who warned “the chaste reader” that he was giving “the whole of Catullus without reserve”). To judge from a spate of recent Catullus-inspired work, including an English rendering of selected poems, by Stephen Mitchell, and “Switch: The Complete Catullus,” a dizzyingly idiosyncratic translation-cum-adaptation by the British poet and illustrator Isobel Williams, the fascination hasn’t waned, nor has the challenge grown less daunting.
Catullus would be little more than a name and a reputation today had a single manuscript containing his poems not survived the Middle Ages. Such a narrow escape from oblivion would have shocked his fellow-Romans. Born most probably in 84 B.C.E., into a wealthy and influential family based in Verona—the historian Suetonius reports that Caesar was a frequent guest when he went north to fight his Gallic campaigns—Catullus was, according to ancient sources, dead by the age of thirty. The late Peter Green, who published a Catullus translation in 2005, tried to argue, from a handful of references in the poems to a lingering cough and chronic malaise, that the poet died of tuberculosis—then, as later, a killer of bright young things.
Despite the brevity of Catullus’ life, he had evidently made his mark. His death, according to one early biography, was greeted by “public mourning,” and in the decades afterward he was never far from the minds of Roman writers, starting with the Golden Age poets who immediately followed him: Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid. A century later, the satirist Martial, renowned for his tart epigrams, declared that his greatest ambition was simply to be counted second to Catullus in that genre. Around 150 C.E., the author Apuleius, who had access to sources long since lost to us, was convinced that he knew the identity of Lesbia. Learned Latin writers were still talking about Catullus as late as the early seventh century.
Then the trail goes cold. Unlike his admirer Virgil, Catullus seems to have been almost entirely unknown throughout the Middle Ages. One poem appears in a ninth-century anthology, and a tenth-century Bishop of Verona mentioned him in a sermon; otherwise, nothing. Then, around 1305, that single manuscript turned up in Verona—a discovery that occasioned a celebratory poem, in Latin couplets, by a local man of letters who noted rather mysteriously that the text had come “from a far frontier.” The poems soon found their way into the hands of the poet and humanist Petrarch. Thus began a process that eventually earned the long-forgotten poet an electrifying new renown. For the collection—the Catulli Veronensis Liber, the Book of Catullus of Verona, as it came to be called—was unlike anything else in the Latin canon known at that point.
The poems fall into three successive groups, possibly representing three papyrus scrolls that may have originally constituted the Liber. The first group alone, known as the “polymetrics”—sixty shortish poems cast in a variety of meters borrowed from the Greeks—ranges over an astonishingly broad array of emotions and subjects, the poems often occasioned by the most casual events. There’s that invitation to the B.Y.O. dinner; a thank-you note to Cicero so obsequious that you have to think it’s tongue in cheek; an ode on the retirement of a favorite yacht. One charming piece celebrates the return of a cherished friend from a journey abroad—“Can’t wait to lay eyes on you and hear you / tell of Spain and its people, places, products”—and, meanwhile, in the poem I had to sight-read that day forty-five years ago, the poet is seething because he’s been caught in a pretentious lie about his year in Asia Minor serving on the staff of the irrumator governor. (The governor, Gaius Memmius, can’t have been all bad: it was to him that Lucretius dedicated his magnum opus, the philosophical epic “On the Nature of Things.”) Sometimes Catullus will be singing delicate praises of the virgin goddess Diana; sometimes he’s off and running about a disgusting acquaintance who uses urine as a tooth whitener. He’s like the love child of T. S. Eliot and Frank O’Hara.
Whatever their subject or inspiration, many of these poems display the wit, pith, and cleverness that were hallmarks of the avant-garde school to which Catullus belonged, the so-called New Poets—or neoteroi, as Cicero, who preferred the old ones, sniffily referred to them. The orator’s use of the Greek word for “new” was pointed: Catullus and his friends were in thrall to the theories of the Hellenistic Greek scholar and poet Callimachus, who flourished in the first half of the third century B.C.E. and worked at the Library of Alexandria, the great literary and cultural center of the Mediterranean world. It was Callimachus who famously proclaimed mega biblion, mega kakon, “a long book is a great evil”; for his Roman acolytes, concision, originality, and vividness, rather than what they saw as the bombast and portentousness of an earlier generation, were the qualities to embrace. Catullus makes no bones about his literary allegiances. One poem, addressed to the grandiloquent work of a dreary historian, begins, “Hey, Volusius’ Annals (yes, I’m talking / to your hundreds of pages smeared with bullshit.)”
A startling freshness and informality are certainly the rule in these shorter poems, most of which are cast in a jauntily syncopated meter known as the “hendecasyllable”: BUM-BUM-BUM-buh-buh-BUM-buh-BUM-buh-BUM-BUM. And yet even the breeziest of Catullus’ occasional poems can suddenly betray flashes of ferocious emotion. Poem 50 begins as a giddy recollection of an afternoon spent dashing off verses to his friend Calvus, another of the neoteroi. The opening lines paint an endearing picture of the two writers “playing now with this meter, now with that one, / improvising on themes set by the other, / laughing hard.” But—typically, as it turns out—the experience becomes overwhelmingly intense for Catullus, who goes on to record how, on returning home,
The nakedness of the feelings exposed—to say nothing of the willingness to expose them—was wholly new in Latin poetry.
The way in which a poem by Catullus can veer from the innocuous to the intense is often mirrored by dramatic swerves in the tone and the register of his language. In certain poems, you can practically hear the gears shift. The first half of Poem 11, for instance, makes you think you’re reading an ode to the constancy of the poet’s friends Furius and Aurelius, who he says he knows will follow him to the ends of the earth, from Persia to the Nile to the Alps and as far as the “horrible Britons.” But the real point becomes clear only at the beginning of the second half, when Catullus, having listed the proofs of his friends’ loyalty, feels emboldened to ask them to do him a favor relating to Lesbia:
Then he puts in the clutch yet again, ending with lines of astonishing delicacy, which compare his rejected love to “a flower / fallen at the edge of a field, the plowshare’s / blade slicing through it.”
The volatile emotions to which Catullus gives vent are not always so touching. Poem 16 begins with a jokey threat that he’s going to assault two male friends because they’ve teased him: “I’ll fuck you up the ass and”—inrumō again!—“fuck your face.” The offense for which they’re being menaced is that, having read some of the tender poems addressed to Lesbia, they’ve accused him of being male marem—“insufficiently manly.” Although the tone is playful, it’s hard not to feel that the friends had hit a nerve. Not for the first time, the violence of a bullying threat is directly proportional to the vulnerability that’s been exposed in the bully. Sometimes it’s as if this poet can’t hold the warring parts of his own personality together.
In jarring contrast to the polymetrics, with their accessible freshness and ingratiating openness, stand the four long poems that constitute the second section of the Liber: two wedding hymns, the mini-epic about the nuptials of Achilles’ parents, and the castrato tour de force. Contemporary readers tend to have a harder time with these; Stephen Mitchell, whom I’ve been quoting thus far, shares the general prejudice and omits them from his translation, explaining that, “despite their sporadic beauties, [they] leave me cold.” At first glance, it’s easy to see why: their tone and manner, compared with those of the other poems, are so much more self-consciously “literary” that you sometimes wonder how the same poet could have written them all. The two wedding hymns, Poems 61 and 62, bristle with learned mythological allusions (“For Junia, as beautiful / As Idalium’s mistress / Venus coming to the Phrygian / Judge, is wedding Manlius . . .”), and the hyperventilating poem about the self-mutilating Attis is steeped in the arcana of Eastern cultic practice.
As for Poem 64, the mini-epic about Achilles’ parents, for all its size—at more than four hundred lines, it’s Catullus’ longest work and accounts for almost half of the second section—it is a Fabergé egg of a poem, structured with great ingenuity and aglitter with favorite devices of the high Greek style. One of these is known as ekphrasis: an extended depiction, within a literary work, of a work of art. In Catullus’ poem, the account of the meeting and subsequent wedding of the couple, Peleus and Thetis, soon segues to a detailed description of a coverlet spread over their marriage bed, woven with images depicting the myth of the Cretan princess Ariadne, who was abandoned by her faithless lover, Theseus. (With this allusion, the poet artfully foreshadows the fact that the union being celebrated will eventually sour—after producing a child who brings grief and destruction to many.) Catullus pushes ekphrasis to unprecedented limits, allowing the description of the coverlet to metastasize to the point where the Theseus-Ariadne story grows larger than the story of Peleus and Thetis, the ostensible subject of the poem—a bravado move on the poet’s part in a work that he clearly intended to be a masterpiece.
Still, you could argue that, beneath their arch sophistication, these longer works turn out to be animated by the same hot-blooded themes and obsessions that you find in the other poems. Take the startling tenderness of the marriage hymns, with their intense empathy for the emotions of young brides leaving home for the first time (whose lot is compared, rather shockingly, to the fate of women after “a city’s brutal capture”), or Attis’ surrender to a frenzy he cannot control, followed by the morning-after self-recriminations (“Now, ah now, what I’ve done appalls me”): we recognize these feelings. Also familiar is the note of righteous outrage in the poet’s diatribe, at the end of Poem 64, against the corrupted morals of his day. Even when Catullus is being arty, the passions, the tenderness and the indignation, the wounded sense of wrongs unpunished, come through.
But nowhere in the Catulli Veronensis Liber is emotion at a higher pitch than in the Lesbia poems, which are threaded through both the polymetrics and the third section, which is devoted to poems written in the “elegiac” meter: lines of six beats alternating with lines of five beats. (A lot of the really filthy epigrams, which prompted Byron to declare that “Catullus scarcely has a decent poem,” belong to this group.) Most scholars believe that Lesbia was in fact a certain Clodia, a member of one of Rome’s greatest families. Her father was a consul; her brother, Clodius Pulcher, was a powerful demagogue and the archenemy of Cicero. Unfortunately, nearly everything we know about her, apart from what Catullus says, comes from a savage speech of Cicero’s that was intended to discredit Clodia as a witness in a politically explosive trial, and hence can hardly be taken at face value. (At one point, the great orator hints that brother and sister were lovers.) By contrast, what we glean about her from Catullus’ Liber is oddly generic. The focus, as with so much of his work, is on his feelings, his reactions.
It’s likely that Catullus met Clodia around 62 B.C.E., when he was just past twenty and she was around thirty; it was then that her husband, Metellus Celer, became the governor of the northern-Italian province where the poet’s family lived. Given the family’s prominence, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the new governor and his wife could, like Caesar, have been their guests at one point or another.
Whatever the case may be, the Lesbia poems often betray the giddiness of a callow young lover who’s already hopelessly in over his head with an older and far more sophisticated woman—one who, you sense, may well just be toying with him. It’s worth remembering that, for all his suavity, Catullus was, at heart, a boy from the hinterland: the outrage he often expresses at faithlessness, betrayals, and broken promises, whether by lovers or friends, belongs to the ethos of the straightlaced provinces, not the decadent capital. The pseudonym Lesbia, which alludes to the lyric poet Sappho (and, perhaps, to the alleged erotomania of the women who lived on her island), was presumably intended to protect Clodia’s identity—she was, after all, a married woman—although it’s hard to believe that, in gossipy Rome, the affair could have remained a total secret.
Not counting a verse dedication to the biographer Cornelius Nepos, a fellow northern Italian who “used to think that / these light things that I scribbled had some value,” the first poem of the Liber is about Lesbia, and after that she’s rarely out of sight for long. Strikingly, the glimpses we get of this notorious femme fatale are often oblique. Poem 2, for instance, is addressed to her pet sparrow, with which the poet wishes he could play “and bring ease to my heart’s ongoing torment!” Poem 3 is playful: a mock-heroic eulogy for the sparrow, now dead, whom the poet blames for making his sweetheart’s eyes swollen and red—one of a very few references to Lesbia’s physical appearance. In Poems 5 and 7, he’s counting out, apparently on an abacus, how many kisses will satisfy him: a thousand, then a hundred, then another thousand. Isobel Williams, in the introduction to her renderings of the poems, rightly observes that Catullus, who was likely the scion of successful businesspeople, has a “book-keeper’s eye.”
As giddy as Catullus seems to be in these early poems, he never forgets his clever Alexandrian technique. “Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,” goes the opening of the first kiss-counting poem: a winning enough incipit. But the classicist Michael Fontaine has pointed out that the poet—who, like all educated Romans, knew Greek as well as Latin—is actually indulging in an elaborate and risqué bilingual pun here. If you translate “let us live, Lesbia” into Greek, you get Lesbia, zômen, a phrase that’s virtually identical to the Greek lesbiazômen, which you could translate as “Let’s do fellatio!”
Beneath the fun and games, however, there’s a shadow over the proceedings almost from the start. Here’s Mitchell’s translation of Poem 5 in its entirety:
Why are the old men gossiping? Who is so jealous that they’d cast a spell? Even in these early, seemingly lighthearted verses, you sense that this unlikely couple won’t be able to keep the real world at bay for long.
And, sure enough, in Poem 8 you get the first crisis:
As the cycle proceeds toward the inevitable breakup—triggered, perhaps, by Lesbia’s dalliances during the year that Catullus was away working for Memmius—the poems of recrimination and spite, often eye-poppingly obscene, predominate. But here, in Poem 8, the poet hasn’t yet hardened himself. That pivot from abjection to the overconfident “Goodbye, dear girl,” and then to the pathetic “you’ll be sorry soon,” suggests why the Lesbia poems have so long appealed to readers. The precision with which Catullus evokes the feverish rhetoric of desire and disappointment, the strident self-admonitions, the denunciations, the pronouncements advocating courses of action that, we know, will never be followed are as familiar today as they were during the waning years of the Roman Republic.
“Even Landor turned back from an attempt to translate Catullus,” Ezra Pound wrote, referring to the distinguished British poet and friend of Dickens. “I have failed forty times, so I do know the matter.” It’s not hard to see why Pound was so pessimistic. Precisely what makes much of Catullus’ work so appealing and “relatable” to modern audiences—the offhand charm, the impish vulgarity, the jazzy colloquialisms—makes him that much more difficult to bring into modern English. Ordinary language, after all, has a far shorter shelf life than does the elevated language of high literature; translations of Catullus that are barely twenty years old already feel dated. Peter Green’s “Wretched Catullus, stop this stupid tomfool stuff” sounds positively Victorian next to Mitchell’s “Wretched Catullus, stop this crazy longing.”
Mitchell often succeeds at conveying Catullus’ diction and tone in a way that feels natural. In the accounting poem, “old farts” is perfect for the Latin senum severiorum, literally “rather stern old men.” Elsewhere, though, he inexplicably fumbles the ball. (Well, maybe explicably: his version aims to reproduce Catullus’ jumpy meters, which force him into some tight corners and limit his choices.) At the beginning of that same poem, Catullus suggests to Lesbia that the gossip of the old farts is worth no more than unius assis, “a penny”—an exhortation wholly in keeping with this bookkeeper poet’s use of pecuniary diction. Mitchell’s “let’s . . . / Not bother our heads about the gossip” abandons the metaphor that crucially structures the entire poem. Such lapses add up. Mitchell is a veteran translator—he’s done everything from Gilgamesh and Homer to Rilke—but you sometimes find yourself wondering whether the scope of his ambition hasn’t come at the price of a certain depth of engagement with the original. The scant notes provided at the back of his volume, a number of which simply paraphrase other scholars’ insights, feel similarly sketchy. You don’t ever feel that he owns this material.
Isobel Williams’s “Switch” puts the fizz back into the proceedings, hewing closely to the thought world of the original, albeit by—to say the least—unexpected means. Among other things, she gets at the Roman poet’s penchant for polarities via a prefatory explanation of the Japanese erotic practice of rope bondage, or shibari. For Williams, Catullus’ divided nature suggests something kinky: “Catullus splits into an anxious bitchy dominant with the boys,” she writes, “a howling submissive with his nemesis, the older woman he calls Lesbia.”
However oddly this may strike you at first, that fresh breeze from the East has the effect of blowing away the cobwebs, giving her renderings the immediacy and wit of the original. “Open out to life and love with me, / Clodia, and we’ll set the regulators’ / Hisses at the lowest rate of interest,” goes the opening of her translation of Poem 5; she proceeds to render all those hundreds and thousands of kisses as Roman numerals interspersed with little “x”s. And here’s how she deals with Poem 8, when the poet thinks it’s all over—the one that, in Mitchell’s version, begins, “Wretched Catullus, stop this crazy longing”:
It’s clear that Williams isn’t interested in giving you everything Catullus actually says; I wouldn’t use “Switch” as a primary text in a survey of Roman literature. But I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to know what reading Catullus must have felt like. Every page of “Switch” is electric with that unmistakable personality: the strutting young genius who knows exactly how talented he is and wants you to know it, too, the brash newcomer from the boondocks determined to conquer the big city, the lover who proudly wears his hemorrhaging heart on his sleeve, the twentysomething with, maybe, a shadow on his lung, writing as fast as he can and bringing everyone he’s ever met, everything he’s studied, and everything he feels to the party, from Callimachus to inrumō. Some old farts may complain about the accuracy of Williams’s new version, but who’d give a penny for their thoughts? As far as I’m concerned, she’s right on the money. ♦
