Sappho and Catullus: Sexual Politics

Sexy, sensitive and, above all, witty, now, more than ever, Catullus seems a poet for our times; a dazzling and often outrageous versifier, constantly coining new constructions - and new vulgarisms, yet also an intellectual, a literate, scholarly writer, well aware of the traditions of classical poetry within which he worked. The son of an aristocratic, provincial Roman from Verona, Catullus lived in the first half of the first century BC, at the time when the Roman republic was beginning to make way for the empire. He was part of a fast city-set whose exploits he records in his poetry, including the elegant and articulate Suffenus who nevertheless writes poetry like a 'goat-milker' and Egnatius who whitens his teeth in the rather unsavoury 'Spanish' manner.

Like his fellow would-be poets, Catullus was very influenced by Greek culture, which had filtered back to Italy following the Roman conquest of Greece, and in particular the work of the Alexandrian poets of the second century BC, noted for their erudite word- play and ironic mix of high and low art. But Catullus was also very much a Roman; the expressions of everyday Latin feature regularly in his work, if often wrapped up in elegant poetics. For example in 16, he begins and ends the poem with the line pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo - 'Buggar off and get stuffed!' - an obscenity couched in an elegant poetic chiasmus. And alongside the mythological themes and satirical banter, he takes an unblinking, almost detached, but by no means unaffecting gaze at such deeply-felt personal emotions as the death of a brother or the loss of a lover. By far the most well-known (and least risqué of his poems are those he addressed to his lover, 'Lesbia', probably the infamous Clodia, wife of the consul Metellus. Included in the group is this translation of Sappho's famous poem on the physical symptoms of desire. And just as Sappho's poem stands at the beginning of lyric poetry, so Catullus' new version stands at the beginning of poetry translation.

Read more...Transliteration with Literal Translation 

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