In Our Time: S22/16 Catullus (Jan 9 2020)

this is the BBC hello Catullus 84 to 54 BC wrote some of the most sublime poetry in the late Roman Republic and some of the most obscene we found a new way to write about love in poems to the mysterious Lesbia married and elusive and he influenced Virgil and Ovid and others yet his scatological poems were to blight his reputation for a thousand years once the single surviving manuscripts were discovered in the Renaissance though anecdotally as a plug in a wine but he inspired Petrarch and the Elizabethan poets as he continues to inspire many today with me to discuss catalyst are Gayle Trimble Brown fellow and Tudor in classics at Trinity College at the University of Oxford Simon Smith reader in creative writing at the University of Kent poet and translator of catalyst and Maria Wieck professor of Latin at University College London Maria why what do we know about catalyst well we have to be careful about what we think we know about catalyst he writes many poems in the first person very passionately about his circumstances but this is poetry designed to be consumed by the public as poetry and what you say in poetry is not necessarily who you are but war during a murder but we have a few things that we do know about in one of which is that he was born in Verona which is quite significant because Verona then was not part of Italy it's a province we know that he his father was probably a magistrate because he was a friend of Julius Caesar they owned a country villa by Lake Garda so he probably passed on to his son Roman citizenship we know that he took the first step on the career ladder of elite Romans by going to bethey Nia which is sort of northern Turkey as part of a governor's administrative team we know that his brother died near there in in western Turkey by which he was devastated we are told that the woman that he calls Lesbia in his poetry was a pseudonym that that was a pseudonym for an aristocrat called Claudia and we know that he was good friends with many poets in Rome and with many key player in Rome such as Cicero and Caesar do we know why his life is so short 30 years well we don't seem to have any poetry much beyond 54 that we can we can date and this variation yes yes and there's speculation that he made have may have died young but sometimes people think we speculate like that because we want our pile of poets to die young and it may just be that he gave up writing poetry because he says he was devastated by his brother's death so we've given his date authority to be on this program as 84 to 54 BC but we may be wrong but we'll battle on nonetheless Rhea thank you very much what was the state of the roman republic when he was writing well it was in it was approaching absolute disaster because within a few years of his death or of the time that he sees to write we're going to have Julius Caesar crossing the river Rubicon the start of civil war battle between Caesar and Pompey the collapse of the Republic so all this is about to happen is this hindsight on your part Maria did they know it was about to happen did they know it was gonna cross the Rubicon did they know that he was going to be assassinated his hind time and that she's getting on with being a Roman Republic at the time when he's alive and you know when you're pushing all this back into it was significant it was going to be significant we look at some of the poetry that Catullus writes because he famously slanders Julius Caesar in one of his in several poems but he stand as him and calls him a pervert he calls him shameless and voracious because he allowed someone on his military campaigns to accrue disgusting amounts of money and some critics think that the reason that he writes like that about Caesar is because it's indicative of a real concern about the way power is now being focused concentrated on these great generals who are going to wage battles earn money and honor abroad in order to exert power back in Rome so he sees this as too much more than and an inevitable decay of the principles well so he seems disgusted by that and it's quite clear that in his poetry he doesn't write directly about waging war the state Roman history he writes about Greek myth and love and and and loss and betrayal and you get the sense that perhaps he's doing that because these other subjects are ones too terrible to contemplate but yes but they get that again we're not quite sure no no we're just making this up as we go along probably a better make her up or you three than anybody else around so we'll go with you three not with me Simon Smith and you know can you give us some idea of the range of Icarus poetry please well he perhaps what into quite a small over of poetry but you only have one volume with his don't we have there's one volume yeah um but I would argue in three parts we might might come back to that later but there's 116 poems and over a wide range so everything sort of to line epigrams to 400 line sort of mini epics such as the poem 64 and then we have a whole range of metrics from I am Bix to galleon Bix to all sorts of different metrics and then forms as well there are marriage hymns there are short lyric poems the love poetry that we are very familiar with that were most familiar with and the satirical poems about particular individuals and also the scatological poems as well and and he covers a whole range of topics as well friendship love between man and woman but also between man and man and politics as Murray has just been just been talking about and then there are various challenges that that come from that if you're trying to translate it particularly around ideas around tone getting to the tone can shift within a very short space of time within poems from reels of tenderness to vicious kind of hatred really you find that in poem 11 for instance not everybody would be familiar with firm 11 11 is is is the one where he he's basically asking his friends furious now really is to take a message to to Lesbia his lover and he starts out talking about actually Cesar's various things but Cesar's conquest of of Britain but also that the range of the territory that the Romans have conquered all the way across to Syria so there's all those kinds of things going on but it comes down to a focus upon he's the way he's feels wronged by by Lesbia and her infidelities and he ends with this fantastic image of his love being like a flower being touched by the plow yeah so that huge range of tone and subject there what are the challenges facing you when you were translating him and obviously a particular language but you've given us some idea of the range of the metrics the different techniques you use the different forms he put it that way so you went across some other forms in comparatively few poems young sixteen isn't all that many after all people have volumes volumes enter and what if but your did you have a problem with the language and orange your friend another language what happened what all of those things it did feel like you were you had to kind of reinvent translating him every time you approach any of the poems because the the challenges are so different if you take some of the shorter eschatological poems or the kind of sad satirical poems that's you know you're dealing with languages which is pretty direct and seemingly straightforward saying we're now saying something that we could not be repeated on radio four can you give us an example of these short poems well if we take poem 85 which is a two-line poem it was the the famous odious mo poem which is I love and I hate I mean it's pretty powerful isn't it do you want to read its mother I loathe and I love yeah you may want to ask why I can't tell it's under my skin and I'm wrecked yeah curiously powerful isn't it yeah I mean it's it is almost I mean extra pound is a modernist poet who takes takes up catalysis being an example of one of the great poets of the past and it's because of that concision that is why pound so interested in him use your translator prepared you is very modern ish language I mean bimbo appears in London because the bimbo yeah yeah um I I just wanted something that was going to be what I would see to be a contemporary equivalent to the kind of quickness that you you're getting in the Latin that's really what I was trying to get to and we just come back to the odious mo no the poems just very brief hello and I heard the thing is is that is that Odie actually and correct me if I'm wrong but it's much more than just hate there's a kind of physical revulsion about it about that word which is kind of beyond the word hate which is why I use the word loathe because it's kind of a physical reaction to it's a good strong those two about it and and it also has the word oath in it so if there's a kind of in the background there's a thing about promises being broken which i think is very important to Catullus it's not only he's dealing with Lesbia but it's also with friends thank you very much girl tremble he was called a neo tarik in his life erm what was that was it a compliment well that wasn't a compliment from the person who used it who is Cicero and we think he was using it about poets like Catullus this is in a letter of Cicero and he comes up with it with a very high falutin hexameter epic line which he says to his friend you can sell that to a neo tarik and that's sort of all the evidence we have for neo Tareq's although sister who does also refer to new poets in a similarly disparaging way in another letter but we've always thought it meant Catullus because that hexameter line sounds like it could have come straight out of Catullus mythological epic I'm 64 and there's evidence to that Catullus had friends poetic contemporaries who were also writing similar kinds of stuff to what he writes not while only fragments of their poetry survives and they are both his friends they turn up in his poetry he compliments that their poetry like the Smyrna of Cinna the poet or he talks about writing a kind of quick easy jocular poetry with his friend calvess the other poet over drinks but also as I say fragments of their poetry survives and they also seem to have written miniature epics to have written love poetry to have written marriage hymns to have written rather scurrilous poetry alluding to political figures of the time so it sort of fits to think about their Catullus as part of a group and again we have I mean the wonderful thing about this this beard it keeps coming up now and then is it that you simply mixture of jigsaw puzzles and archaeology isn't it really and that's good that's what you do you say many of his love poems were addressed a lesbian has been mentioned can you say a little bit more about her well she's a character in katella's poetry first of all and she's often referred to by this name Lesbia but also there are other poems in which he just talks about my girl my woman even on one occasion my goddess and most readers identify that person with less fear as well because there's enough of a sense of this one woman throughout the the corpus that it makes sense for my girl to be Lesbia and that word of course just means a woman from lesbos there's only a further connotation in that not lesbian in the modern sense necessarily certainly not catalysis Lesbia although of course it's all very relevant to Sappho quite so catalyst translates one of her poems in particular and and in Sappho's original just about how she's looking over to a woman she had Myers talking to a man there's no name for the woman she's looking at desiring but when Catullus translates the poem he puts the name Lesbia in and some people think this might be the first poem that went to Lesbia but as as some has been mentioned already Lesbia seems to be a pseudonym we have a later writer Apuleius from the second century AD who says that Catullus used it for claudia and we have a likely suspect for a claudia in a speech of cicero who presents a woman who sounds like the sort of dominating woman that Catullus might have been in love with but we're not sure i find it unless we really know the more intriguing it is really absolutely maria mayor why is there anything fresh in the way that Catullus wrote about love and if so what was it I think there's plenty that's quite extraordinary about how he writes about love he has a poem that starts with aa was mere lesbian to me Moss which means well let's live and let's love and what's extraordinary about that is that he's implying that the entirety the totality of your life should be spent in love and this is in a world where Romans elite Romans are expected to spend the entirety of their time on business on politics on war but absolutely if they have any devotion it should be a devotion to their family and to the state but not to love so that in itself is quite extraordinary and he also then excavates that love and examines closely from many directions what it feels like to be betrayed what it feels like to be to disintegrate when you realize that your beloved is not in love with you is this new learn to do it from so many angles to do him consistently about an individual insofar as when we read his poems one after the other we pick out the sense of a story it's a story not told in order which is interesting but we feel that we can gather together this sense of many aspects of love so he also for example in a long poem describes lesbian he named her as lesbian as a bride coming to the house in which they conduct their affair as a goddess as a mythic heroine and there what's fresh and external about what he does is he he prepares and tells a parallel in this mythic heroin for Lesbia but as he put as he unfolds it it starts to become apparent that lesbians not like that at all because she's not a bride she's an adulteress she has her husband if she's his mistress he uses the word domina and it's new this metaphor to mean a mistress in love it means he's her slave and therefore he should be grateful for any moment he can have with her and this language of goddess of the slavery of love this is all part of what's going to become a new romantic tradition in poetry there's also an excessive which takes us right forward to the owner and a source of Lazarus excessive and up to pop songs really we have a and kisses and report let me have another thousand kisses and and that absolutely so not only is the the language the imagery that he uses once that you use later including how can I hate and love the same the same person at the same time he also I think very interestingly takes the language of male to male relations from Rove and applies them to his ideal of how love should be so he takes the language of reciprocity contracts sacred friendship and he uses all those and he says this is what I want from love and it's a kind of mutuality that you haven't had in the ancient world before except perhaps with Odysseus and Penelope thank you very much Simon Schama Smith catalyst translated that sapphir yeah that's been mentioned can you tell us more about that and more about influence on his writing okay well poem 51 is the poem we're talking about and it's I don't I mean I don't really think of it as being a translation it's more an adaptation and one of the ways that you can read the poem is that it's a form of masculinization or feminization well what well okay what he's doing is is that he's Roman izing what his thing is the feminine Greek that's one of the things that he's doing so he changes the perspective from a female perspective to a male perspective that's the first thing he does and then he also as Gail was saying earlier he introduces the word Lesbia which is not in the original in the original the poem is much more general or seems to be it's not specifically at a particular person so would seem and then most revolutionary of all is he changes the fourth stanza now some scholars believe that it's a kind of cut and shut poem so the the last stanza is actually from another poem that's just been added on to the bottom of the translation my view is though is that this probably isn't the case Sappho also writes for the poem in four stanzas catalases version you could see if you take out his fourth stanza could be seen as a kind of condensation of Sappho's poem if I die a squad yeah specifically and most importantly he got from Schaffer what would you say the idea of of intimacy and the intimate voice is probably the most important thing there and this idea of can we back to what you touched on earlier about about the idea of popular song and and also what we get in contemporary lyric poetry I suppose is that idea about falling in love with somebody you know in a situation like it a dinner party or something like that for the very first time you know it's sets a kind of kind of norm for how you might want to think about that and unright about it love at first sight that kind of thing it is very much about a lot of first sight absolutely yeah and the description of the way what they describe in that film yes and it's certain it's about scatological but hot not not at all scatological and was very tender you see that's this is the tender Catullus until we get to the last stanza which is then becomes about leisure well OH - Oh Tim is the word that he used by translators as leisure and the idea that suddenly it's about the falling of Empires and cities can you in Gale let's come to perm 64 it's what this one of his - it's one of his longer perm it's a mini epic people think it's one of the finest of his time can you find a way to tell us about that thank you well it's as you say short for an epic but long for a poem by Kate Ellis and it shows the extremely sort of highly wrought effortful side of Catullus yet it's also very emotional and sort of gorgeously visually appealing at the same time what's it about let me tell you what it's about it's two stories one inside the other at least two stories it starts off by sounding as if it's going to be about jason and the argonauts and then it turns out that it's actually about Pelias who is one of the Argonauts falling in love with fetes who's a sea nymph and they're going to get married and suddenly we're inside their house which is like a ground Roman decorated house at their wedding feast and following a Roman custom the marriage bed is displayed and on the marriage bed Catullus tells us he starts describing it there is on the coverlet a picture of Ariadne abandoned on the island by Theseus on the way home from killing the mine at all Catullus gives us a flashback telling us all about her backstory how she came to fall in love with Theseus and then suddenly she's making a speech cursing Theseus lamenting her situation and all the rest of it by which point it's not even clear if we remember she's meant to be in a description of a picture on a marriage bed etc at the very end was not taken up by Virgil in Indian well yes his fine yeah it's more traditional but anyway he was certainly interested in Ariadne um cuz all this eventually ends this versus this description by saying open by the way in another part of the picture that god Bacchus was arriving to rescue Ariadne nowhere as well you might well ask almost because um he suddenly then reminds us and this is what all the guests appears and that is wedding enjoyed looking at and you thought think but they didn't hear her making a speech surely and then we're back in the wedding but it's not over yet so what makes it so good well if you like formal complexity and why on earth you might tell two stories one apparently sort of quite happy the other one apparently quite miserable except with this sudden deus ex machina happy ending you might wonder well what are these two stories meant to be saying to each other as I say you can appreciate the extremely beautiful sort of individual latin lines and the rhetoric very Abney's speech for instance and eventually you have to come to terms with the ending which relates to some of the things Maria was saying earlier about the The Times and the Roman Republic because suddenly the narrator of this poem he's already chosen a very strange order to tell this story in two stories at least um steps forward and says and all this goes to show how gods used to visit humans but now they don't because we've committed all these terrible crimes of incest and violence and we're totally divorced from the divine realm which point healed how was this poem shown that exactly so it's very mysterious - well thank you very much that was a noble effort Maria um we've talking about Catullus identifying with women in the love poems more sometimes and with the traditional male role which is interesting can you develop that sure it's me touch'n already in a number of ways because in perm 64 as Gail was mentioning Catullus pens for a long time taking on the voice of Ariadne describing what it feels like to be left desolate honesty sure having lost absolutely everything including the person you'd left your family for so he's taken on this female perspective in in the the poem of Safa that he translates he's taking on her description of the physical sensations you have when you look at someone that you desire so much so your tongue is paralysed there's fire through your limbs your ears ring and darkness covers your eyes that's a description he's borrowed from Sappho's love for another woman but he does this in a number of other places as well an extraordinary way again the reference to his description of his love for Lesbia as a flower on the edge of a meadow that's been cut down by a passing plow that's amazing because the flower is sapphic metaphor for a woman's beauty and also for her fragility in societies where once you've had sex with a woman she has no value at all except as as wife and and mother so women are really vulnerable and he's taken that metaphor and he's used that for his love so that makes him the woman and Lesbia the plow that has destroyed him and hasn't even noticed because it's a passing plow so that's quite a really interesting metaphor which which resurfaces again in an amazing way in a poem that's about a wedding and just to mention that very briefly in this wedding poem there's a competition between boys and girls the boys have to win otherwise there is no wedding and the girls the girls say the marriage that maiden at her marriage is like a flower that should be kept protected because if she's taken she'll be destroyed and the boys say oh no the virgin is like a vine which needs to be supported by an elm to reproduce so you have this contrast between the plant that's productive as the boy see it and the beautiful flower that's going to be destroyed by marriage and at the end of the poem the boys do win but you're left with that vision of the withering flower the vulnerability of women in ancient society thank you very much I was great Simon Simon Smith can you find a way to tell the listeners how disease how does it does he write in a different way about his love for men than from women if so can you tell us about that well he does but he also employs some metaphors and some lines that are almost the same particularly when he's writing about you Ventus he event is being he's well he's a young man that's really about all we know about him and the katella's loved him and there are four poems poems 24 48 81 and 99 and poem 48 can be seen as the equivalent of poem 7 they're both kiss poems and he employs the same metaphor writing about kissing Aventis as he does about Lesbia so there's a kind of equivalence in in terms of how how he loves the boy with how he loves lesbian are you saying there's no difference then I don't think there is much difference really in that particular case I mean the way he writes about make other men is a completely different thing I think and he talks about the idea of he takes further the idea of the kiss in terms of overcome the kiss of death really in poem 99 because you ventus he rejects him in the end and and there's a description of it of of the boy I think his mouth of catalysis kiss and how a sort of hurtful this is which comes on to the idea at well the Austin Purim the idea of the dirty mouth he's related to that concept as well but he doesn't employ that as a metaphor with with lesbian Gail what would more would've impressed what would have impressed catalysis contemporaries like Ovid and Virgil well I think one crucial thing is Maria was already implying is this idea that sort of ongoing romantic relationship with one particular woman primarily can become the subject of sort of connected poems and that gets very much sort of solidified into into a genre of love elegy vibe reverses into Burleson and of it but also I think coming back to some of the themes from the longer poems especially 64 this idea that you can tell them if the logical story in quite such a subjective way that you as the poet can sort of step forward and address your characters and also tell the story in a very contentious way emphasizing some bits to the exclusion of others this is very influential on Virgil and also on Ovid insofar as he's an epic writer in the metamorphosis also telling one story inside another telling short mythical stories which the metamorphosis is basically a tissue of also specifically Ariadne as we were mentioning and having that kind of sympathy for a heroine and this has a huge impact on Virgil's portrayal of Dido in the Aeneid and of course that creates great ethical complexity for Virgil's poem because as far as we can see in Katella 64 Ariadne has just been abandoned by Theseus because he is a nasty piece of work but of course Tyler is being abandoned by Aeneas because he needs to go off and found Rosalie exactly and for Virgil and he's normally on on Aeneas aside and for him to be quite as much on Dino side as he suddenly seems to be shows the great influence that chrysalis is way of doing fm what followed thank you Maria Maria Wieck then we have these scurrilous poems they've been called quite rightly scatological and obscene poems now we can't mention them we can't repeat them and I don't think it's any great loss actually I think there'll be pure but what do you think well I think they're they're they're rather interesting in some respects in that I'm thinking of how to be careful here there is for example a short poem in which Catullus talks about the past with Lesbia and he says once I loved you alone I loved you more than I love myself I loved you more than I loved my nearest and dearest but now you can be found down the alleyways and at the crossroads which for a Roman means prostitution and you and she and he said so he talks about her and he says she gloob it all the descendants of Romulus and Remus so scholars have been greatly perplexed right what does glue beret mean we we know it is from agriculture to mean stripping the bark off a tree skinning a sheep clearly here it has a profoundly vulgar meaning but we don't know exactly what it is and that's kind of ironic because the way the poem has been structured is precisely to invite the reader to imagine and to think what is Lesbia doing right now and that's part of the invitation of catalysis poems not just to be concerned about love and betrayal and loss but to think in a quite pure salacious way Simon Smith when I said the word pure I saw distinct shaking of your head now these these poems we were told were recited at Roman dinner parties and and he thought fit to collect them so what do you think is their value it's their rhetorical value in the poetic value I mean he talks about things I mean we again we if we go to the sort of the the dirtiest poem which is poem 97 which I will not in anyway okay well I won't do that basically what he comes back to this idea of the awesome pure and the dirty mouth and and and the way that that poem through its unfolding as you read it it connects the mouth with the anus basically and what you end up doing as you as you read it or if you were part of the audience hearing it you start to be implicated in that that sullying I suppose is one way of putting why don't you give that value though because it has because on the face of it yes the the subject matter seems to be it basically he's taken a subject matter that he's unpoetic and made it into something that actually through the use of elegant couplet that is the hazard that has an aesthetic value he's and also he then counter points that with with the way that the images unfold to so he starts out it starts out as something that seems to be completely sort of outrageous and that's it an intention something's grotesque and right at the end becomes something that's almost a kind of like a surrealist fantasy really so it progresses through hyperbole so he's building a kind of artistic value into it even though what he's talking about is something that obviously has no artistic value at all well I think you've got people rushing to regale trimble um do we have a single image of Catullus this young man from his poetry's there is a single Catullus well interestingly I think a lot of people despite the range of his poetry would would say that there is I mean Catullus is very interested in himself a lot of Roman poets are but he presents himself quite a lot he uses his own name I think about 25 times and we very much get the impression of what he values both among his friends and sort of in society and in poetry and those two things are really quite similar they're about being sort of refined and and putting the effort in Nice opposed because I wanted to say sort of effortlessly cool but it's not it's being effortfully cool that everything is sort of as it should be that you don't break the rules of what he expects how he expects his friends to behave towards each other and similarly the poetry that you write is not sort of long and careless and sort of churned out it's small its elegant very much in the Alexandrian Greek tradition of calamitous and therefore has value and can be celebrated by his friends as a group and Katara's himself then is sort of somebody who tries to live up to all these expectations on one level on the other hand he writes about his own emotions and how he sort of feels when he feels trade in any of these values I think either aesthetically or socially Maria what I'll do we learn much about Roman society from his his work well I think there's two things that strike me about reading his poetry one is that it's a culture of empire and the sense that his poetry shows that Rome is so thoroughly bilingual in its literature and in its society that this is a world in which people are completely engaged with great literature and Greek language and that they use it as part of their strategies of playing as Gail said these games of sophistication and a vanity at their dinner parties but I think the other thing that strikes me is how I suppose you could say homosocial the world was it's a world of male male relations highly competitive often abusive and we see that it's a world where to be a man is supposed to be being a soldier a husband a politician but when political life is moving away from you because it's accruing in different quarters masculinity becomes in crisis it's fragile he can't perform being a proper man so you get this amazing poetry about the crisis and masculinity about challenging what it is to be male Simon why is it that it took his manuscript that long thirteen fourteen hundred years Paul 56 years to come to the attention of West gets called the Western Wall the results when Ovid who learned from him and Virgil who learned from menara purchase learned from him was sailing away in the intervening time why did he take him so long well probably the obscenity has a lot to do with it and he certainly as I understand really after Marshall he's he he's mentioned by marshals 200 years later but then he seem to slip away but we don't really know why that happens but they survive very often because well for a start something like Marshall you know wrote 12 books 13 books of both event of epigrams so because it's because the the body of work is small to begin with but it is also because of this business over the way that you know much of the work is obscene and you can't use it to teach Latin but you could be used you could use the book and just cut those poems out couldn't you isn't healing the wit of man and there's only about five or six of them anyway there's a few more than man's mother all right seven right there's quite a few more 116 how many other oh I I don't know I mean it's it's minority let's say about twenty you cut twenty our youth silver eighty-six perms and why didn't they probably shared the six per I don't know is the honest answer to that it was also the forum in which he it's produced so he's you know the the poems are written on papyrus rolls and that doesn't in later time that he's not the way that things are transmitted but what seemed happen that when he did get rediscovered or discovered that he rolled into the Renaissance poets minds and rolled through Elizabethan poetry and rolled on from that quite effortlessly and importantly well no I'm wrong about that and what he does but it's very very small number of poems so we're talking about the kiss poems and the sparrow poems the lesbian poems know that the major ones are translated again and again and again mainly as a way well he becomes a way of proving yourself as a kind of courtier pretty clean the Elizabeth important places up so in such places as that so sorry okay I'm just coming we're coming to the end I go to him what did people at that time we've talked to and Sam Shoen about court here and mr. beat imagine what what appeal to them what why did that there were fewer firms and there were from well for your line certainly the number from Virgil and all that we saw but what appeals that market Ellis I suppose a kind of directness that also I think appeals to us very much today with some of his short and accessible poems that includes in the lot in their more colloquial and some of them are sort of seamless bound by the kind of rule genre but a Jessica tell is saying something like I do it to a fellow poet I can't believe you sent me a book of horrible poetry as a joke Saturnalia present tomorrow in the book shops open I'm going to buy one for you so it's it's simple but I mean Simon mentioned that the poem is about kissing must be many times poems on the death of her pet sparrow those are the ones that immediately become popular because I think they seem more accessible than even the you know love poems of other poets yes and there's also something about they can present and he then presented as a heterosexual poet as well I think that's really important that the the poems about young boys just are just a no-go area you can't really Christian era yeah that's out exactly comes a crime scene yeah exactly so so that category of poetry can't come into the Canon either so you do limit well he is limited to the love poems for women many seem to be heterosexual which he's not and and he suffers from that for a long time when I was studying Latin when I was 14 15 in a convent school we had selections of Catullus so there was a lot left out we had poems that we were taught we were told what the translation was of certain words and they were just not true so we were told the school to lament little cabbage and it means little but you couldn't have had that in the convent school and then we were also told oh when men kiss each other as they seemed to be doing in this particular poem that's because Romans are just like Italians today they're much more outward looking and friendly than you know us Brits and you realize it's a completely false education you're not really learning about the Catullus that was there but at least it gives you a taste of what you could find out if you were able to access the totality of his work I mean could tell us where all the education is just so interesting because he's such a good introduction to Roman poetry isn't he because you've got sort of tasters of so many different genres and so many different levels of Latin some of which are quite simple and then you can work up to sort of vary in intense ethnic language and yet there's this obscenity and ant but because it's such a varied set of poetry because it doesn't present the Lesbia story if it is a story in any kind of order he's just so suited for anthologized that as you say you can just create selections from Catullus fairly easily and put them on syllabuses and that still happens today your average GCSE are a-level syllabus we just have this list of numbers which is sort of sum of catalysis greatest hits that so it's thought should be read that year finally what was his chief legacy Maria I think a kind of an intensity his capacity to investigate what it feels like to love and be betrayed I mean oh dear it Amory does it for me because he also says that to experience that to be loving and loathing someone at the same time is is excruciating but it's precisely how he feels and that's what happened to him as you generalize I know I've only read what the two lines well this issue of loving and being portrayed it comes up in all shapes and forms in all sorts of places including at the level of myth so so it's a thread that runs through his poetry the sense of of of how people can say one thing and do another how they can have behaved so lovingly towards you at one point and then move away from you the next those sorts of things can seem really immediate even though they're they're described in a world that's so alien to us so it's it's an extreme version of things that we feel today well thank you very much I enjoyed that thank you Mary Wieck Gail tremble and Simon Smith next week it's the siege of Paris in 1870 during the franco-prussian war under commune that followed thanks for listening and the inner time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests here we go what did we miss out that you would like to put in yeah I mean it's variety I think is really important it's also why so so many modern contemporary poets of translator katella's I mean one of there are so many different types of translation now well some of the more extreme idea it is would be an American book called Brandon Brown he doesn't actually translate the poems he he gives you instructions on how you might want to translate the poems each one of them so poem 51 for instance has a series of ovens of what he might do to translate it and number twelve is to is to leave it to a polka Bernadette Mayer to do because she can do it better than he can you know it's this kind of thing but what does anybody the listeners would know well there's an Carson who put together a fantastic it's called Knox it's a translation of just one poem poem 101 which is the poem about the death of his brother and it's a memory box about the death of her her brother and so it's it takes you through I mean it's a short epigram poem but what she does with it is she talks about the death of her brother in the same terms as Catullus does but she uses it as a use of the box as a kind of memory box of postcards that should be she was sent over decades by her brother and all this kind of thing so so it kind of enacts the process of mourning I suppose so it's a katulski and he offers up so many different ways that you can rethink and reimagine a great example of the way that what engages people with Catullus is that sense that he can touch upon things that you feel and and the variety of feelings that you can do that to is also I think quite extraordinary because I was always really taken by a poem where he talks about hanging about in the forum and his mate takes him off to see the little Hall that I mentioned earlier and he's asked so when you went off from your your trip to the province you know what goodies did you bring back with you and he he says in this poem and I just completely lied and I said in an 8 litter bearers which is the number you would expect a nice Tintin potentate to have so she the little says oh great can I borrow them right and he has to say he completely made it up and so on the one hand it's a poem about a completely different world you know this this world of the forum of the Empire of litter bearers and on the other hand it's about what what it feels like when you get caught out lying in order to see more attractive than you really are and he turned that into a poem of course which is so strange I told this whole story to present himself in this ridiculous way and so that's relevant to what we were thinking about sort of the catalyst who emerges from the the poetry because once you sort of realize that he's doing that you can see some of his really quite emotional poems as putting himself forward as behaving in quite a strange way and yet of course he's written a poem about it that as he said Melvin has been put into his collection has been circulated is to be shared and that we're still reading today and so you can sort of infer there's another catalyst behind that I could tell us sort of presenting the ridiculous book and she's also caught him out intellectually that's that's quite important that he puts a woman in the position that he wouldn't normally do that with that she actually has outwitted him and you know wit Sal is the kind of really important thing I asked you to borrow his bearers well no what's the puppy's had then had to lie what happens is is that although it is written in meter the lines break up in the way that he can't he can't come back at her basically he did oh yeah yeah I kind of remember that it was actually long term and a friend of mine you know yeah so you know she's caught him yeah she's caught him out brilliant poem well there are many brilliant poems zukovsky we didn't talk about Louisa Koski to mention him as a strange translator well he well he's an entry is very interesting translation not it goes kind of beyond catalysis as well so it's a homophonic translation so it's got a feel the listeners in on the essential details of cookie okay our zhukovsky 1902 to 1978 wrote a long poem called a road to whole series of short poems that were collected called all and he and he translated Catullus or rather the and the important thing about this is that he co translated it with his wife she crate a litter of a very literal version of the poems and then he took that as the basis to then create a sound translation and what's interesting about it is that what ends if you read the Latin against his English you start to see where the English falls directly onto the Latin and then where and then you can also see where it it doesn't because he has to just give you sounds in the place of a literal meaning so just echoes all the sounds of the Latin and that if I use any of the same thing that I decided lowness exactly well but yes but but what's important about is you there's an argument you could have that it's more faithful because a lot of translators are kind of covering the cracks half the time because things don't quite fit and then they don't fit at all sometimes as well so translation can fail and so he's showing where the failure is so it's a kind of more honest translation in a way it's particularly difficult isn't it when we're talking it's one thing to talk about mythical poetry the one we sort of saying this is a poem about meeting my friend's girlfriend in the forum this is a poem about a joke Saturnalia present summing up the content of course leaves us with the problem that that doesn't show why it's poetry at all but a large part of what's making it so witty and controlled and elegant and aesthetically satisfying is Catullus using that very everyday material and even everyday language but turning it into a beautifully controlled poem and that's very difficult to get across obviously when we're just summarizing but I imagine even for our translators oh yeah yeah absolutely and the evolution of Trump of katella's translation is is far ahead of of other poets I would say certainly classical poets so he's kind of become if you think about catalysis poetry is being about occasions because they are about they do speak to occasions and that all they become occasions in themselves he has now become an occasion for a translator to create a new kind of group of poems as kind of improvisation Zoff catalysis work because the scholarship is so good there are plenty of good literal translations now so what do you do with catalyst you know you you know you can start to as I say start to use use him as a kind of platform for improvising what you do I was just thinking that that Latin I mean Latin poetry like he is is also incredibly challenging I'd imagine for translators because it contains things like words that are completely made-up so how how do you translate that like his buzzy RTO neighs is you'd have to try it's a made-up word so it's like kissing's or kis ations or Kisling z' or something like that you have to bring out the fact that it's it's it's not a real-world word and that makes it more forceful in its circumstances and then he has lots of words that would sound to roman thoroughly greek and the greek nosov the matters to the poems so how do you translate that and then you have the the slang which do you translate that literally into slang which might not work for our modern slang or do you as Simon has done have to find a modern word that's going to give the force of what's in the original so there's some really interesting issues there and of course Latin itself is always difficult because it's an inflected language doesn't need all these prepositions the office in the US and the the article so you can have these really concise lines that contain so much in them and English have to sort of drag it out a bit you know through force of circumstance it's so relevant to the other end of his style as well to the formal style because one of the things he does to the hexameter is to become terribly fond of creating these five word lines you know like a dry stone wall no water in at all but just elegantly sit there and then there's another one and then there's another one and that's gorgeous and hugely influential in a large part of the appeal but exactly can't do that because we need the little words it's just a sign couldn't do so you have to take certain paths so if you look at translation from the 1950s of Catullus from the 1950s onwards Horace Gregory does a kind of Ezra Pound version Peter Wiggum the penguin translation he does a William Katt Williams version Zhukovsky does his homophonic version and then you've got the Ross caveny and have you seen that translation recently her translation what she's done is she turned most of the short lyric poems into sonnets so to come like a reading back into Petrarch which i think is really interesting you know the tradition of the reception of catalysis into English has gone full circle with that I think we're about to be offered given an offer you can't refuse from our producer Simon have another tea coffee for me Oh jeepers thank you

Channel: In Our Time

Views: 1,905

Rating: 4.8620691 out of 5

Keywords: BBC, Radio, Four

Id: FmwoAoPFslk

Length: 51min 35sec (3095 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020