The Poems of Catullus. Daisy Dunn
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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 …’2 He 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,4 arise several references to men who are cash poor but asset rich.5 A 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’.
Deliciae, like iucundus (‘pleasant’), was part of the vocabulary Catullus used to communicate his poetic taste. These words prove difficult to translate in English, but for me deliciae in Poem 2 has become ‘apple of my girl’s eye’, since I venture also to suggest that the last three lines of Poem 2, which many commentators view as a distinct fragment, belong with his sparrow lines. Just as the little bird provides relief, Catullus imagines that Atalanta, the indomitable huntress of Greek myth, finds relief when a suitor beats her in a foot race – after she slows to pick up some golden apples – and wins her hand.
The nature of Poem 68 in the collection is problematic. Catullus addresses the first part of it to a certain Manlius, probably the young nobleman Manlius Torquatus, for whom he also wrote the wedding hymn at Poem 61 (other hymns may be found at Poem 34 and Poem 62: they have a marked formality). The second part is addressed to an Allius. The poem probably started life as separate poems. In this edition, I have demarcated the two main parts with a line break.
Like Lowell seeking the approval of Frost, Catullus spent time offering his work to fellow poets to edit, and digesting theirs in turn. He belonged not so much to a fixed coterie as to a loose set of like-minded individuals who enjoyed a shared language and poetic heritage. They knew that when Catullus asked for ‘salt’, he was seeking more than a condiment: he wanted wit and urbanity. It would be a pity to lose the word in a translation of his work.
In Poem 95, Catullus celebrates the publication of his friend and fellow poet Gaius Helvius Cinna’s work Zmyrna, which described an act of incest between a princess and her father. Catullus compares it favourably with some Annals by a certain Volusius, which in Poem 36 he describes with more colour as cacata carta (‘shit-smeared sheets’). There is a corruption in the text, but it seems likely that Volusius is described as coming from Hatria, near Padua, and producing ‘five hundred thousand’ verses in one year. Such productivity was reason enough for Catullus to despise him. Catullus, Cinna, Calvus, whom together Cicero would describe as poetae novi, ‘new poets’, were united in their preference for brevity and concision over verbosity.
This was a stylistic feature that Lowell, too, was taught to savour. The manuscript he carried to Robert Frost as a young man, he once recalled, was heavy with words.6 He had written, in barely legible pencil, an epic on the First Crusade in blank verse. Taking hold of it, Frost began to read as far as his eyes and patience allowed. ‘It goes on rather a bit, doesn’t it?’ Frost said, and retrieved from elsewhere in the room a copy of Keats’ Hyperion, which he read aloud, as Catullus did his own poetry, and circulated also in written form.7 Lowell would learn to refine his art, and to great effect.
Catullus received a similar education at the hands of the god Apollo – through the Greek poetry of Callimachus, one of the finest writers from the great Library of Alexandria. In the third century BC, Callimachus wrote of how the god instructed him to fatten animals for sacrifice, but keep his poetry slender, inventive, recherché, ‘even if you drive a narrower path’.8 In ‘The Road Not Taken’, Robert Frost proudly took the road ‘less traveled by’. Catullus worked in accordance with these precepts, and translated several of Callimachus’ poems from Greek into Latin. Catullus’ Poem 66, written from the viewpoint of a lock of hair that belonged to Queen Berenice II, wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes of third-century BC Alexandria, was a close translation of a Greek poem by Callimachus.