Reviews

Carmina by Gaius Valerius Catullus

spacestationtrustfund's review

2.0

This edition of Catullus's poetry was translated by Len Krisak. I've said before (and I stand by it) that the best way to get an idea of how adept a translator's work with Catullus will be is to look at their interpretation of XVI. Krisak says in his introduction that he'd "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," so let's judge:

I’ll bugger you, Aurelius, and dick
You, Furius, in the face. It seems you thought
My versicles were soft and feminine,
So I was less than chaste? Far gone in sin?
Well, poets should themselves be good; they ought,
If they’re devout. But what they write need not.
In short, their poems will have charm and wit –
If they’re both sexy-soft and far too hot,
And able to excite a flaccid prick
(Not in a boy, but in some hairy shit
Who’s having trouble finding his tumescence).
You think my ‘thousand kisses’ add up to
My lack of manhood and its manly essence?
I’ll dick you in the face and bugger you.

(Krisak notes that this vituperation is "a puzzling change of attitude about these two characters, considering they’re called good friends in XI." That's Catullus, baby.)

Well, this is... certainly a poem. Note that Krisak attempts a regular metre and rhyme in his translations. I think such determination to adhere to a metre and rhyme detracts from the overall potency of a translation. I've yet to find a translation of pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo that carries the same gutpunch weight of the original. Some translators, like Peter Whigham, don't even translate the opening and closing lines. The first four lines of the poem, here translated as:

I’ll bugger you, Aurelius, and dick / You, Furius, in the face. It seems you thought / My versicles were soft and feminine, / So I was less than chaste? Far gone in sin?

are, in the original Latin:

pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.

Krisak's isn't as bad as, say, Peter Green, but it's not great. Notably, the second line is entirely absent, hobbled by the decision to include rhyme. The phrase "far gone in sin" is also added; no equivalent exists in the original. The evocation of chastity is also Krisak's addition. A quick bit of context: Romans considered the act of giving oral sex incredibly demeaning and emasculating. The words pathicus and cinaedus (from κίναιδος) both refer to someone the receptive partner in anal sex, with a derogatory connotation. The word molliculus, apparently applied to Catullus's poetry, means soft or delicate, in the same sense as sissy or pansy. The word versiculus (pl. versiculis), which Krisak turns into the neologism versicles, carries a self-deprecating meaning: i.e., "my little poems" or "these humble verses." I translated the first four lines a while ago, as such:

I will sodomise and orally rape you both,
pathetically submissive Aurelius and Furius,
you who think that I, just because my little poems
are sissy shit, have no sense of modesty.

and I (pardon me) still prefer my version. I do not believe that the inclusion of a rhyme scheme or even a regular metre is a necessity in translating poetry, and in fact it often works against the translator, significantly restraining and restricting the translation.

martgecx's review against another edition

funny informative inspiring fast-paced

4.0