Latin.Lover
Lendon, J.E.
Latin Lover A new translation brings life to Catullus. BY J.E. LENDON Catullus, best beloved of the Latin poets, is happy to have found a friend in Peter Green. Acclaimed as a belle-lettrist,...
...One never feels that the sparrow walks in peril of being addressed as "dude...
...Nearing seventy, after many desiccating years as a professor of classics in Texas, he nevertheless brought forth The Laughter of Aphrodite, a fictionalized life of Sappho...
...Green's edition of Catullus is bilingual—Latin on the left and English on the right—with a pointed introduction before and plump notes behind: The admirer without Latin and the classical scholar both get their due and never feel each other's elbows...
...A bridge is thrown over the chasm of language for the reader without Latin, and the reader with Latin has his love of Latin fired again...
...Yet Green also seeks to revive the sound and rhythm of Catullus' original Latin meters...
...Goold's Catullus (1983): Mourn, you Venuses and Cupids, and all the lovers that there are...
...Woodman's fascinating translation of The Annals of Tacitus, where he labors not just to render Tacitus' words but also to reproduce in English the effect of Tacitus' sounds and artful wordplay on the Roman reader: As for the man himself, he would approach municipalities when it was dark, nor was he observed in the open or for too long in the same places but—because veracity is validated by vision and delay, deceptions by dispatch and uncertainties—he was always abandoning the reports of himself or anticipating them...
...Nor has he patience for modish theories that Lesbia, and the poet himself as he appears in the poems, are mere literary fictions...
...Here Green's metrical triumph takes him further than usual from the Latin, but in straining for effect, Green is faithfully imitating Catullus' display of his own virtuosity, for galliambics are even harder in Latin than in English...
...Catullus wrote in a vertiginous mix of colloquial Latin and high poetic diction, and so Green translates him, while wisely avoiding the excesses possible in English: no "eftsoons" or "forsooth," but no pathetic panting after hipness, either...
...Lendon, professor of classics at the University of Virginia, is the author of Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity...
...When Peter Green was a youthful soldier, he served, persistent rumor insists, as the model for the irresistible Guy Perron in Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown...
...But attempts to draw closer than they dared to the sound of the Latin have been discouraged by the appalling spectacle of C. and L. Zukofsky (1969), whose efforts to reproduce the noise rather than the sense of Catullus in English rendered fama loquetur anus ("ancient fame will tell," poem 78B) as "fame will liquidate your anus...
...The "dancing, perky" hendecasyllable, Catullus' favorite measure, is an 11-syllable line that starts slow and sounding with long syllables, speeds up sprightly with short, and then slows down again with a mixture of long and short: dum— dum—dum—diddle—dum—di— dum—di—dum—dum...
...But often the most useful translations were into flat, grammatical, English prose, like G.I...
...Acclaimed as a belle-lettrist, justly celebrated as an English stylist, a seasoned translator of ancient poetry, and an eminent ancient historian, Green also brings to Catullus a passionate sympathy for the poet of love and hate...
...Catullus has been more fortunate than most Latin poets, with excellent contemporary verse translations by James Michie and the literal Guy Lee...
...In his late thirties Green published a historical novel called The Sword of Pleasure, and in his fifties, a translation of Ovid's erotic poems...
...Green's and Woodman's is a new way of translating Latin...
...Frequently those who translated Latin into English poetry were ambitious to be taken as poets in their own right, strayed far from the original, and employed the English meters, the poetic conventions, and the damnable fustian of their day: Alack...
...Catullus can be as direct as a diamond-drill bit or as allusive as a flight of swifts...
...I satirize...
...In the past, translations of Latin poetry tended to come in three types...
...When words but also rhythms are rendered into English, the magic of Latin is heard again in a fallen world...
...O thou Loves and Cupids rare, And such wights as mayhap do dare: Slain is the sparrow of my fair...
...The most obvious parallel to Green's Catullus is A.J...
...Highly literal translations—"trots" or "cribs"—were prepared for the help of students, following the syntax of the Latin by doing violence to English, and tending to sound rather like an understudy for Yoda: "The sparrow dead is of my girl" (poem 3...
...For the most part, Green handles his Latin meters so nimbly that the reader does not consciously notice them at all: They work upon the reader's subconscious, just like Shakespeare's blank verse when properly spoken...
...To Green, Catullus is the most honest and immediate of all the Latin poets, his emotions as pure as the flash of a leaping trout...
...But Green is a familiar of Mars as well as Venus, a fierce and witty controversialist, a reviewer of lively renown: His knockabout battle in print with Victor Davis Hanson over the future of classical scholarship in America was savored even by the most jaded connoisseurs of classicists' invective...
...In Catullus' own hendecasyllables the sparrow dies like this: passer mortuus est meae puellae passer, deliciae meae puellae Compare, and admire, Green's metrical translation: Sparrow lies dead, my own true sweetheart's Sparrow Sparrow, the pet and darling of my Sweetheart Sometimes the harsh necessities of English thwart Green's hopes, but often Green's success with meter is striking, as in poem 63, in galliambics, a jostling of short syllables with a drum roll of shorts at the end of the line: Over deep seas Attis, carried on a rapid catamaran, eagerly with hurrying footsteps sought that forest in Phrygia, penetrated the tree-thick coverts, the goddess' shadowy habitat...
...more than a hundred surviving poems were still considered too improper for students, even in Latin—but Green does not pander and drool, as was common at the height of over-reaction to the old prudery...
...Green's notes deftly explain the obscurities of the poems, but they are far more than crutches, and much of the joy of the book lies in reading the notes straight through to enjoy the carnival of Green gleefully whacking down Catullus scholars past and present...
...My sweetheart's sparrow is dead...
...As an interpreter of the poems, Green is proudly old-fashioned, dismissing those who deny that Catullus' lover, who travels under the famous codename "Lesbia," was in fact the fascinating slut Clodia, the Paris Hilton of the age of Cicero...
...The translations do not censor Catullus' lan-guage—as late as 1961, 32 of the little J.E...
Vol. 11 • March 2006 • No. 24
