Carmina E-Book

Gaius Valerius Catullus

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Catullus is a companion of lovers and of those whom love has disappointed. He is also a satirical and epigrammatic writer who savagely consoles with laughter. Carmina captures in English both the mordant, scathing wit and also the concise tenderness, the famous love for reluctant Lesbia who is made present in these new versions. A range of English metres and rhymes evokes the many modes and moods of this most engaging, erotic and influential of Latin poets. Of Len Krisak's translations of Horace, Frederic Raphael writes, '[He] enables us both to enjoy a fresh voice and to hear (and see), very distinctly, what lies behind and within his unintimidated rescripts'. Again in Carmina Krisak works his precise magic.

Leseprobe

FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

from ‘Thyrsis’

Gaius Valerius Catullus

CARMINA

Translated with an introduction by Len Krisak

for Ruth

Contents

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgementsIntroductionCarminaAbout the AuthorCopyright

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the editors of the following periodicals in which these translations first appeared, sometimes in slightly different form:

Able Muse Review (XXII)

Arion (I, II, IIb, III, LVIIIb)

Artful Dodge (XIII)

Barely South Review (LXIX)

Blackbird (XXXIX, XL)

Classical Outlook (XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI)

Crosstimbers (CII, CIII, CIV, CV, CVI)

Fiddlehead (XXIX)

Hamilton Stone Review (LIII)

Modern Poetry in Translation (V, XLVIII, L, LXX, CVIII, CXI)

Plume (XIII)

PN Review (IV)

Riprap (XXI, LXXI, LXXII)

Rosebud (XIV, XIVb, LXXXVII)

SpoKe Magazine (XV, XXXIV, LI, LXV, LXXIII, LXXXV)

Stand (X, XI, XII)

Turk’s Head Review (C, CI)

Verse Wisconsin (XLVI)

Warwick Review (XLIV)

In translating the Carmina of Catullus, I have consulted the following:

Balmer, Josephine, Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate. London, 2004.

Copley, Frank O., Catullus: The Complete Poetry Translated. Ann Arbor, 1964.

Green, Peter, The Poems of Catullus. Berkeley, 2005.

Gregory, Horace, The Poems of Catullus. New York, 1956.

Lee, Guy, The Poems of Catullus. Oxford, 1990.

Martin, Charles, The Poems of Catullus. Baltimore, 1990.

Meyers, Reney, and Ormsby, Robert J., Catullus: The Complete Poems for American Readers. New York, 1970.

Michie, James, The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition. New York, 1969.

Sesar, Carl, Selected Poems of Catullus. New York, 1974.

Sisson, C.H., The Poetry of Catullus. New York, 1966.

Whigham, Peter, The Poems of Catullus. Harmondsworth, 1966.

Zukofsky, Celia, and Zukofsky, Louis, Catullus. London, 1969.

My special thanks to the members of the Powow River Poets.

Introduction

1. Life

Gaius Valerius Catullus (84–54 BC) was born in Sirmio, on Lake Garda, to a wealthy landed family. In Rome in his youth, he became familiar with, or befriended, a number of contemporary poets (the Carmina, for example, are dedicated to the poet Cornelius Nepos). He clearly studied the works of Sappho and other Greek and Hellenistic models, eventually becoming a member of the group of versifiers called neoteric, for their new style, which encompassed elegance, difficulty, sophistication, and learned allusion. Poem LI, for example, is a reworking of a famous poem by Sappho. It is written in her eponymous stanza form, and follows the original fairly closely, then seems to indulge in a kind of Horatian clinamen, or ‘swerve’, at the end.

We know Catullus had a brother, whose death he honoured in one of the more famous of his Carmina, CI, a moving elegy. Time spent in Bithynia (in northwestern modern-day Turkey) on the staff of the propraetor C. Memmius in 57–56 BC led to some of Catullus’s more mordant poems, which appear to attack his superior more on the grounds of that figure’s failing to share the looting of the province than on the basis of any ethical objections. And although a host of contemporary figures, from Caesar and Pompey to Cicero and other lesser-knowns, populates his work, Catullus almost never writes on what we today would think of as political subjects.

2. The Poems

Instead, he lets his imagination loose on love affairs, mythology, and the everyday annoyances of Rome and its more-than-interesting cast of questionable characters. Most prominently – and Catullus is probably more famous for these poems than even his well-known obscene squibs and epigrams – he chronxiicles the tempestuous highs and lows of an intense love affair with a certain Lesbia (probably Clodia, the sister of Publius Clodius Pulcher and wife of Q. Caecilius Metellus). The poems that deal with his relationship to this married woman are alternately tender and scathing, elated and excruciating, as the affair progresses… and implodes. Although we cannot be sure whether LXXXV – an anguished elegiac couplet that actually employs the word excrucior – refers to this affair, it certainly captures the suffering of a passionately conflicted love:

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?

Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

[I hate and love her. Why, you ask? I do not know,

But tortured, only feel that it is so.]

Whether the graph of thrilling desire and disillusioned bitterness that these poems plot is an accurate (but of course artfully reimagined) picture of Catullus’s actual relationship with Clodia, or instead a highly sophisticated but wholly imaginary construction of poetic possibilities involving a purely notional Lesbia, à la Ovid’s Heroides, may have to remain an open question. Not unlike Shakespeare’s sonnets, these poems totally convince us, on the one hand, that such a stormy affair is real, in all its wild zig-zags through Catullus’s heart, and on the other hand offer nothing implausible in seeing the Carmina as a skilled, distancing, poetic construction. In other words, Catullus may be so skilled a poet that much, if not most, of this passion and angst is a complete fabrication, put in the mouth of that famous all-purpose literary-critical construct we know as the persona, or mask. Perhaps admitting this ambiguity is one of the highest tributes we can pay the poet. It was, after all, Yeats – that modern figure who perhaps best exemplifies the twentieth century’s morphing of high romanticism into austere sexual realism – who wrote to mock a certain set of classical scholars, ‘Lord, what would they say /Did their Catullus walk their way?’

A goodly number of the 114 to 118 poems in the Carmina(the number varies depending on whether one splits certain poems in two, and because there is a gap in the manuscripts early on) were for decades kept from the eyes of schoolboys or included in editions only in their original Latin. The occasion for literary blushing is obviously long past in our culture, but even so, the student coming to these sexually explicit (and often cruelly hostile) expressions of Catullus’s spleen may wonder, why so much fury? Or is this all just wildly inflated comic exaggeration? After all, the poems clearly in the scatological category don’t seem to our poet unfit companions for the most soaring (and searing) of love epics and epigrams, so perhaps all we can do is accept them as at least a genuine, if small, part of what Catullus is. In my translations of these pieces, I have tried to strike a compromise between the gross and the euphemistically cute. Only the reader can judge with what success the right tone has been struck.

When Catullus refers in the very first, dedicatory, poem of the Carmina to his novum libellum, his new little book or booklet, he probably means the entire set of poems we now possess, though some scholars have speculated that the phrase refers to a small collection of pieces lost to us. In either case, this opening welcome to the work introduces a set of about 60 individual poems, sometimes called the ‘polymetrics’ (for their use of a number of different metres), almost all of which are fairly short. They constitute a kind of anthology of different prosodic treatments of love and various social-satirical targets.

These are followed by a central section of long poems (and in one case, LXIV, a virtual mini-epic of over 400 lines), mostly acting as celebratory wedding pieces (epithalamia) or choral song contests with marriage celebration as the theme. One particularly notable exception is LXIII, a poem about the cult of Cybele, the ancient earth-mother goddess, that involves a castrated lover – perhaps symbolic of Catullus in his relations with Lesbia? – and is the sole surviving Latin poem written in the unusual galliambic meter (q.v. below).

The remaining poems are all in elegiacs, and return us to the satirical, scatological, and amorous subjects of the first 60, but with the marked difference that Catullus (or his persona?) is now a decidedly wiser and consequently more bitter lover. He has been betrayed, and is not about to let Lesbia off easily.

A good scholarly case can be made for the notion that either Catullus (or some friendly editor) has arranged the Carmina in specific patterns, the structure of which emphasises the centrality of certain themes. For example, does XXVII, a command to an imagined Ganymede (boy wine-server) to begin to pour out stronger, richer vintages, constitute a turning point in the first section of poems, with individual cups representing stronger poems to follow? And does LXIV, an extended poem with ekphrastic elements at its centre, employ a chiastic or ‘hinged’ structure of wedding-within-wedding material to celebrate (and at times, perhaps ironically undercut) human hubris? (It positions a narrative ‘mini-epic’ of Theseus and Ariadne – not a good omen, certainly – within the larger structure of Peleus’s wedding, from which will eventually come the death of Achilles.) These two examples should alert us to Catullus’s extremely sophisticated constructive powers and to his ability to handle learned, even arcane, mythological material, all while subtly alluding to his own romantic and sexual predicament.

3. Translation

This brings us to that bane of all poetic translators, an account of one’s practice in bringing another poet over into English. The subject is huge and endlessly complex, with as many theories, defences, manifestos, and dogmatic jeremiads as there have been translators through the ages, but the translation of poetry continues to constitute an irresolvably difficult case. Mention has been made above at times to Catullus’s metrical practice. I have thought it best to leave to the last both definitions and discussions of some of the metres alluded to, and justification of the ways I have Englished the Carmina’s prosody.

To begin with, any translator who wishes to make English poetry out of Latin poetry must overcome three crucial obstacles. First, Latin is a highly inflected, or ‘synthetic’ language, while English is basically ‘analytic’, or syntactically driven. In less grandiose terms, Latin suffixes tell us what part of speech we are dealing with, whether verb, noun, or adjective, and also direct our understanding of a sentence. This means that Latin verse can be composed of words in almost any particular order, but still be ‘unscrambled’ to make sense. Horace may place his adjective at some distance from his noun, but we almost never have to ask ourselves which adjective goes with which noun. The famous Ciceronian ‘periodic’ sentence often ends with its main verb, thus driving impatiently budding young classics scholars to distraction.

English is slightly inflected, of course (we distinguish between a singular and a plural by the addition of the morpheme ‘s’, for example), but woe unto the reader first taking up English who does not recognise the difference between ‘dog bites man’ and ‘man bites dog’. This inescapable hurdle has to be leapt by poet-translators confronted with Catullus’s word order. It simply cannot be brought over word-for-word into English, which means the translator usually has to break the grammatical structure of the Latin and reconstitute its sentences in something closer to ‘standard’ English order: subject-verb-object.

Next, a poet-translator faces the at times frightening bugbear of Latin metre. Because Latin assigns long or short values to vowels and syllables, whether by their intrinsic nature or by position within the poetic line, it is considered quantitative verse. That is, it is concerned solely with the length of time required to speak a particular syllable. So a line of dactylic hexameter, or six ‘feet’, employs a long syllable followed by two short (this constitutes the foot) six times in a row, but often with a trochee (a long-short foot) substituted in the sixth position (the X represents a long syllable and the u a short):

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