Penguin Classics Poems Of Catullus [Mass Market Paperback]

51

Godlike the man who
sits at her side, who
watches and catches
that laughter
which (softly) tears me
to tatters: nothing is
left of me, each time
I see her,
...tongue numbed; arms, legs
melting, on fire; drum
drumming in ears; head-
lights gone black.

Coda

Her ease is your sloth, Catullus
you itch & roll in her ease:

former kings and cities
lost in the valley of her arm.

As is evidenced in the above selection, Catullus was one of the great love poets of his or any age. These often beautiful and forlorned sentiments were mostly written for "Lesbia", a woman believed to have been married to a diplomat or some man of high rank whom Catullus never fully ensnarled with his wit and passion but seemingly had a long-tryst and/or tumultuous affair with.

But just as soon as you think that Catullus is E. E. Cummings you are shocked into the realization that this man was as multi-faceted and prone to "juvenilia" and sensationalistic raunchiness as say a Bukowski or Ginsberg.

88

What, Gellius, of the man
who itches with sister & mother
naked in night-vigils,
who 'lies-in' for his uncle,
what stain does he lay on himself?
Such, that not Tethys to far limits
no Ocean, father of Nereids, can cleanse:
no fouler brand (Gellius)
even supposing
one were to lower his head to his own loins
and swallow himself.

Just as well he could be straight-laced and political and silently thoughtful in the same way as he was exuberant and confessional.

93

Utter indifference to your welfare, Caesar,
is matched only by ignornace of who you are.

102

If, Cornelius, we entrust our secrets
only to those whom we know we can trust,
here is Catullus,
devoted to secrets & secrecy
a finger ever to his lips,
as mute as Harpocrates!

Another aspect of these translations by Peter Whigham, as witnessed above in "51", is the tendency to modernize the poems and language. "head-lights gone black." is one such example. Some scholars(http://www.classics.und.ac.za/reviews/94-2whig.html) say this is to their detriment as are Whigham's liberties with words being fitted to his artistic credo moreso than the original Latin texts. I'm no scholar, but have read several different translations thought to be more true to the original Latin and I must say that they are tedious and rubbery bores. They hold none of the lively magic or smart humor of the Whigham translations. To read the others is like reading Nietzsche by any translator other than Walter Kaufmann, you lose a bit of the modern scholarship and interpretation and lively poetry for stale accuracy's sake.

This is one of the few books I have used to excess, marking, creasing and breaking the spine open searching and re-learning these invaluable and poignant texts. Behind Jeffers, no poet other than Catullus is revered more by me.

Whigham seems to have no qualms at all about changing entire lines of the poems to soften the dirty bits, even in the works lasting no more than twenty lines. Even worse, if there's no way to clean up a line in translation, he simply leaves it untranslated. Take this example from poem 16:

You read of those thousand kisses.
You deduced an effeminacy there.
You were wrong. Sodomites. Furius & Aurelius.
Pedicabo et irrumabo vos.

While I'll admit, that last line's difficult to translate into English without using slang usually confined only to gay porn, the translator doesn't even have the stomach to attempt it. In my humble opinion, anyone willing to translate everything EXCEPT for the dirty bits has no business translating at all.