“There is nothing to invent but everything to get right” is how author and translator Jhumpa Lahiri recently characterized the unforgiving task of the literary translator.[1] Everyone who has attempted a translation destined for public scrutiny will recognize this oppressive feeling. But in the case of Catullus, one might argue that invention itself has become a strategy employed by several recent translators in their efforts to get more, if not everything, just right. Since 2000, at least twenty-four translations of Catullus into English have been published. These include a variety of creative approaches to the poet, such as Josephine Balmer’s collection of the shorter poems, unmetrical but frequently rhymed, and rearranged by theme;[2] a widely praised translation in verse by Peter Green;[3] a complete and metrically sophisticated translation by Len Krisak;[4] a collaborative effort between a classicist and poet (Jeannine Diddle Uzzi and Jeffrey Thomson);[5] Roz Kaveney’s deliciously smutty adaptations reimagined in contemporary settings and often made into sonnets ;[6] the brilliant version of Isobel Williams, which calls upon the imagery of Japanese rope bondage (“shibari is a form of translation”).[7]
The latest addition to the crowd comes from Stephen Mitchell, an experienced, popular, and award-winning translator whose body of work could corner the market on any Great Books program (Iliad, Odyssey, Tao te ching, Bhagavad Gita, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Genesis, Psalms, Job, Rilke). This slim book offers a short biographical introduction, a selection of translations with facing Latin text (based on Thomson’s 1998 edition), and 30 pages of notes that identify unfamiliar names, places, and other cultural references.[8] This is a book neither for scholars nor for students, but for the educated general reader who appreciates poetry, and who may know Latin or at least enjoys looking across the page to pick out a few words here and there. Mitchell aims for a natural sounding translation, never straying too far from the Latin, “neither stiffly formal nor vulgarly colloquial” (p. xvi), and that is indeed what the reader will find throughout.
There are a few things that stand out about this most recent translation. In all, Mitchell translates only 56 poems, leaving aside the other 58. As a result, less than a third of the total line count is included here. Of the Furius and Aurelius poems we find 11 and 15, but not the notorious 16, nor 21 and 26; we get 24 to Furius’ Juventius, but not its mate, 23, to impoverished Furius. Only one Ameana poem (43, not 41) and a single Mamurra poem (29, not 57) are included, but none of the Mamurra/Mentula poems make the cut (94, 105, 114, 115). The longer poems, 61–64, 66, 67 and 68b are also out, as are all the Rufulus/Rufus poems (59, 69, 71, 77) and all but one Gellius poem (91, not 74, 78, 80, 88–90, 116). In this respect, Mitchell’s volume is comparable to the recent selection in Richard Whitaker and Douglas Reid Skinner, which however offers a slightly larger number of poems (60) and a broader selection.[9] Mitchell’s introduction explains that the criterion for inclusion was nothing more than what he found pleasing. The unpromising confessions that he finds “many of the short poems rather weak” while the longer poems “leave me cold” (p. xvi, xvii), quickly reconcile one to the idea of a selection so slender.
Horace Gregory observed in the preface to his own translation that “every translation of Catullus is in a sense an interpretation of the poet’s life”, and it is telling that he used the word “life” and not “work”.[10] Most translators of Catullus have preferred to view his poetry as some form of autobiography rather than, say, attempt to situate it in the literary context of the first century ce or as an inheritor of Hellenistic and early Roman forms and themes. Mitchell’s translation is no different and is, in fact, so narrowly focused on the story of Lesbia that it neglects many of the other subjects a reader encounters in the collection. It is difficult, naturally, to resist one of Latin literature’s most compelling erotic adventures, but other Catulluses are available for the imagining.
Relatedly, I suspect, Mitchell’s conviction that the order of the poems is arbitrary (p. xv) has influenced his translations. For example, in c. 27 he renders inger mi calices amariores as “keep on pouring, fill my cup with the powerful dark nectar”, but the “bitterer” wine is widely read as a metaphor that serves to introduce the following poems with their invective themes. The decision to omit the final stanza of c. 51—sheer vandalism—with its repeated invocation of otium, obscures the connection between this and the immediately preceding poem to Calvus (otiosi, 50.1). The invocations of Callimachus that may open (65) and close (116) the elegiac portion of Catullus’s poetry have simply vanished.
Metrical considerations have also played an important role in the choice of poems to translate. The dust jacket wishfully claims that these are “the first translations of Catullus to reimagine his rhythms in English”, but in fact there is a long history of reproducing or approximating Catullus’s meters stretching all the way back to perhaps the very first English translation of Catullus, Philip Sidney’s 1598 version of c. 70 in elegiac couplets—and in quantitative verse no less! Theodor Heyse’s German translation using Catullan meters inspired Robinson Ellis to do the same in English for the entire corpus in 1871, and subsequent translators have tried their hand at using identical or equivalent meters.[11] Mitchell’s focus is on the hendecasyllabic and elegiac poems, which he reproduces, along with cc. 11 and 51 in Sapphics and 29 in iambic trimeters, in a relaxed version of the Catullan meters. He otherwise limits himself to translating choliambic poems (“impossibly heavy in English,” p. 123) into iambic pentameters. It takes remarkable poetic skill to pull this off as successfully as he does with such consistency, maintaining the imposed rhythms without letting them distract from other aspects of the poetry.
Consider, for example, the start of c. 24:
O qui flosculus es Iuventiorum,
non horum modo, sed quot aut fuerunt
aut posthac aliis erunt in annis
Little flower, most beautiful of all the
great Juventius clan, and not now only
but of all who have ever lived or will live
Even though there is no “beautiful”, “great”, or “clan” in the Latin, and the Iuventii have been relocated to the second line in English, Mitchell stays true to the sense and produces a poem nearly as compact as the original. Even more impressive, these are eleven-syllable lines in English with stress-patterns that match the ictus of the Latin meter.
Every translation is constructed out of the alternatives that survive a process of elimination, and the results reveal in subtle ways the priorities of the translator. Consider the elegiac couplets of c. 75:
Huc est mens deducta tua, mea Lesbia, culpa
atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo,
ut iam nec bene velle queat tibi, si optima fias,
nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.
My mind is so debased by your betrayal, my Lesbia,
so totally destroyed by its own devotion,
that even if you were perfect I couldn’t get it to like you—
or cease to love you even if you were a monster.
Here Mitchell retains the antitheses of the poem, but loses the chiastic structure (tua…culpa, officio…suo). The ambiguity of mea in the first line is also lost (others place the comma after mea, taking it instead with mens), but Mitchell translates both “my mind” and “my Lesbia” in order to maintain the line’s rhythm. Deducta never means “debased”, but Mitchell has chosen a word that resembles the original both in sound and in size and vividly captures the broader sense of the line, though he has also lost the “wryly sardonic” connotation of marriage in the Latin word.[12] The concluding “monster” emphasizes the depravity of Lesbia for the English reader, but in so doing we lose the “bitter jingle” of the line endings si optima fias and omnia si facias.[13] The ends of the hexameter lines maintain a dactylic rhythm in English, but the pentameters have become mostly iambs.
Toward the end of Cervantes’ great work, Don Quixote visits a printing house where he observes a translation being printed. In a passage well-known to translators, Quixote muses that a translation is much like looking at a Flemish tapestry from the backside—the figures are visible but obscured and cannot be seen with the same “smoothness” (lisura) and “complexion” (tez) one observes on the front. Every translation faces this challenge, and it seems to be a particularly acute problem for translators of Catullus. In the present translation, for example, we sometimes encounter a flattening of important Catullan vocabulary: basia are simply “kisses”, the proffered meros amores are merely “friendship” (13.9), otiosi is “great fun” (50.1), lusimus “we scribbled” (50.2); iucunde “dear fellow” (50.16). So too, with the language of social alliance: pius is a “loyal friend” (76.2); sanctam violasse fidem “has broken his word” (76.3); pro pietate mea “for my decent life” (76.26).
Several modern translations seem to concentrate their best efforts at vividness on the lines they find obscene. Mitchell occasionally indulges in the ever more wearisome trend of producing a line coarser than the original. For example, quos simul complexa tenet trecentos…sed identidem omnium ilia rumpens is made into “all three hundred studs whom she fucks at one go … forever draining them dry” (11.18–20). For mala multa di deaeque dent we get “they can go to hell, those assholes” (28.14–15). The insulsi are “O you pathetic jackoffs” (37.6). Then again, occasionally some extra sizzle seems warranted. For example, when Catullus asks his postprandial lover to prepare novem continuas fututiones (32), using a rare word he may well have coined, Mitchell offers “nine delirious bouts of nonstop fucking”. This is an improvement on Martin’s joyless “copulations” (a translation almost more Latin than the original), but less imaginative and less near to the spirit of the comic polysyllable than many other fine renderings: “fuckifications” (Godwin), “fuckfests” (Green), “fuctions” (Lee, Krisak); “nonstop fuckathon” (Flynn), or “fucktuations” (Williams).[14] Or consider 58.5, where Lesbia is said to glubere men in some seedy alleyway. Catullus uses another rare and probably slang word otherwise attested for agricultural contexts such as peeling the husk from grain or the bark off trees. To communicate the force of such an unusual and surprising word the translation requires something more dynamic than the dreary “gives handjobs”.
Elsewhere, however, Mitchell offers some bold and imaginative translations that joyfully break free from the dictionary’s stranglehold. I conclude with a few favorites, and I encourage readers to go hunt out their own: scortillum, ut mihi tum repente visum est “First impression: a sassy little bimbo” (10.3), irrumator praetor, nec faceret pili cohortem “with a son of a bitch as boss, who doesn’t give a shit for his officers” (10.12-13), provincia mala “a crappy province” (10.19), Varus’ girl is cinaedior, a “rude little slut” (10.24), tu insulsa male et molesta vivis “you ill-mannered little dimwit” (10.33), ad severos migrate “go find some prim old farts to hang out with” (27.6-7), vappa “scumbag” (28.5), omnes pusilli et semitarii moechi “every last small-time back-street punk in town” (37.16), quis deus tibi non bene advocatus vecordem parat excitare rixam “What god, sloppily called upon, will stir up some ridiculous fight between us?” (40.3–4), malus liber “dreadful garbage” (44.21).
Notes
[1] J. Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others (Princeton, 2022), p. 28.
[2] J. Balmer, Catullus, Poems of love and hate (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), reviewed BMCR 2005.01.11.
[3] P. Green, The poems of Catullus (University of California Press, 2005), reviewed BMCR 2006.04.16.
[4] L. Krisak, Gaius Valerius Catullus, Carmina (Fyfield Books, 2014), reviewed BMCR 2015.04.05.
[5] J.D. Uzzi and J. Thomson, The Poems of Catullus (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
[6] R. Kaveney, Catullus (Sad Press, 2018), reviewed BMCR 2019.10.34.
[7] I. Williams, Switch: The Complete Catullus (Carcanet Classics, 2023), reviewed BMCR 2024.04.16.
[8] D.F.S. Thomson, Catullus (Toronto, 1998).
[9] R. Whitaker and D. R. Skinner, Gaius Valerius Catullus: selected lyric poems (Crane River, 2020), reviewed BMCR 2021.01.18.
[10] H. Gregory, The Poems of Catullus (Covici-Friede, 1931), p. viii.
[11] Sir Philip Sydney, ‘Out of Catullus’, in Certain Sonnets, first printed with The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1598), reprinted in J. H. Gaisser, Catullus in English (Penguin Books, 2001), p. 5; T. Heyse, Catulli liber carminum (Berlin, 1855); R. Ellis, The Poems and Fragments of Catullus (J. Murray, 1871). See also Gregory (n. 10); R.A. Swanson, Odi et Amo: the complete poetry of Catullus (Bobbs-Merrill, 1959); C. Martin, The Poems of Catullus (Johns Hopkins, 1990); D. Mulroy, The Complete Poetry of Catullus (Wisconsin University Press, 2002); Green (n. 3); Krisak (n. 4).
[12] J. Godwin, Catullus: The Shorter Poems (Aris & Phillips, 1999), p. 189.
[13] K. Quinn, Catullus. The poems (Macmillan, 19732), p. 406.
[14] Godwin (n. 12); Green (n. 3); G. Lee, The Poems of Catullus (Oxford, 1990); Krisak (n. 4); L. Flynn, Slim New Book (The Lifeboat, 2020); Williams (n. 7).