Daisy Dunn - The Poems of Catullus

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Translation © Daisy Dunn 2016

Daisy Dunn asserts the moral right to be identified as the translator of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007582969

Ebook Edition © January 2016 ISBN: 9780007582976

Version: 2016-01-07

If any of you chance to become readers

Of my untimely ramblings and your hands

Do not tremble to thumb my scroll …

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

The Poems

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XIVb

XV

XVI

XVII

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

LI

LII

LIII

LIV

LV

(LVIIIb)

LVI

LVII

LVIII

LIX

LX

LXI

LXII

LXIII

LXIV

LXV

LXVI

LXVII

LXVIII

LXIX

LXX

LXXI

LXXII

LXXIII

LXXIV

LXXV

LXXVI

LXXVII

LXXVIII

LXXVIIIb

LXXIX

LXXX

LXXXI

LXXXII

LXXXIII

LXXXIV

LXXXV

LXXXVI

LXXXVII

LXXXVIII

LXXXIX

XC

XCI

XCII

XCIII

XCIV

XCV

XCVb

XCVI

XCVII

XCVIII

XCIX

C

CI

CII

CIII

CIV

CV

CVI

CVII

CVIII

CIX

CX

CXI

CXII

CXIII

CXIV

CXV

CXVI

Notes

About The Publisher

On an autumn night in 1962 the poet Robert Lowell ambled through Cambridge, Massachusetts, as far as 35 Brewster Street. He had walked this broad, tree-lined road before as a young student, grasping a bundle of pages, pale grey with pencilled words. His manuscript had weighed heavily upon him as he approached a large gabled house on the road’s midpoint. He was now forty-five and no longer in need of affirmation of his talent; his verse translation of Racine’s Phaedra had recently been feted . But he longed to recall the bewildering array of what lay beyond the walls of this dwelling.

In January 1963 his sometime mentor Robert Frost, the great poetic master of pastoral and everyday experience, passed away. ‘The lights were out that night; they were out for good now,’ wrote Lowell, reflecting on the moment, just months earlier, that he revisited the cold threshold of Frost’s former home: ‘Its narrow gray wood was a town cousin of the farmhouses he wrote about, and stood on some middle ground between luxury and poverty. It was a traveler from the last century that had inconspicuously drifted over the customs border of time … I can easily imagine the barish rooms, the miscellaneous gold-lettered old classics, the Georgian poets, the Catullus by his bedside, the iron stove where he sometimes did his cooking, and the stool drawn up to his visitor’s chair so that he could ramble and listen.’ 1

Robert Frost read the poetry of Catullus often, mesmerised by his words and the weight and complexity of his sentiments. New England shared little ground with ancient Verona, the nascent town south of the Alps where Catullus was born c .82 BC, or Rome, where he lived in the fraught times before Julius Caesar waged his civil war and the Republic fell to pieces. But Catullus’ passions were timeless, and free, far outliving his brief thirty years on this earth. His ‘little book’ ( libellus ), a series of over a hundred poems referred to merely by number, and arranged by a mysterious hand in an order that lacks chronology – though not thought – appealed to Frost’s appetite for subtle expression. There could be no better place for Catullus’ poetry book than the bedside, where Frost kept the slim volume Lowell spied in his clapboard house.

Gaius Valerius Catullus, whom scholars often see as the inventor of Latin love elegy, once wrote of how, ‘Undone by passion I tossed and turned all over the bed …’ 2He had spent a long ‘lazy day’ drinking wine, carousing and composing verse with his dear poet friend, Gaius Licinius Calvus Macer, whom he referred to merely as Calvus (‘Suave, suave Calvus’, ‘my dear Calvus’) in further poems. Catullus also wove the finest poem he ever wrote around a bedspread, which he embroidered with the myths of Theseus and Ariadne, sister of the Phaedra who inspired Robert Lowell’s play of 1961.

Frost was probably unaware of how far his bedside copy of Catullus coloured Lowell’s experience of his smart Brewster Street home. Catullus’ book shone more brightly than any of the others in his library, which Lowell’s eyes darted off too eagerly to render more than ‘miscellaneous’. The younger poet’s description of the house itself as ‘a town cousin of the farmhouses he wrote about’ even evokes one of Catullus’ poems, in which he described his retreat on the outskirts of Rome: ‘Dear country pile of mine, whether Sabine or Tiburtine … your suburban dwelling …’ 3

The grandeur of Frost’s former residence and its smart surroundings might have felt at variance with what Lowell described as ‘some middle ground between luxury and poverty’, but Catullus courted the same indeterminate line. Across his 117 surviving poems, which are translated in full in this volume, 4arise several references to men who are cash poor but asset rich. 5A certain Furius, very probably a contemporary rival poet called Furius Bibaculus, ‘has neither slave nor savings’, but possesses a little villa with ‘a bill fifteen-thousand-two-hundred steep’ (Poem 26). Poverty, moreover, was a rich man’s fashion. While Catullus came from a wealthy family, with houses in Verona and on the most beautiful peninsula of Lake Garda (Sirmione, see Poem 31), and who counted among their friends and dining guests Julius Caesar himself, Catullus could still complain that his wallet was empty, ‘full of cobwebs’, and request that a friend provide him with the food and accoutrements required for a lively dinner party (Poem 13).

If Frost’s house recalled a ‘traveler from the last century’, then Catullus’ poetry was the place where travellers converged and traded in new tongues. Familiar as he was with the poetry of his Greek and Roman forebears, he ingeniously combined ideas from a variety of genres, including epigram, epic, and comedy, and imposed upon them a new vocabulary, forging many neologisms – new words – and affectations; he was particularly partial to the diminutive, which he employed for pathos and affection as often as he did for size. In Poems 2 and 3, for example, he describes the sparrow that belongs to his favourite lover, whom he refers to in his poetry as ‘Lesbia’. She was, in all likelihood, Clodia Metelli, from one of the oldest and most prominent families in Rome. She was married to the Roman senator Metellus Celer until 59 BC, when she was widowed. Catullus describes what was nominally her pet bird and the ‘small release’, solaciolum (a diminutive) it gave her from her frustration. In death, the sparrow is miselle passer (‘poor little sparrow’); in life, deliciae … puellae, his ‘girl’s darling’.