Sappho and Catullus: Sexual Politics

Catullus demonstrates how translations are never definitive, monolithic versions but poems in their own right, absorbing alien literary forms and transforming domestic literature. The success of Catullus' own transformation can be seen in the popularity of his poem - still probably the most widely read and translated of all classical verse. He set the standard for all future translations of classical literature, setting in motion a chain of versions of Sappho 31 from Philip Sidney's elegant 16th century verse :

 My eys be dim, my lyms shake,/ My voice is hoarse, my throte scorcht,/My tonge to this roofe cleaves...

 from 'Arcadia' (1580) through Tennyson's florid nineteenth century offering :

I watch thy grace; and in its place / My heart a charmed slumber keeps, / While I muse upon they face; / And a languid fire creeps / Thro' my veins to all my frame / Dissolvingly and slowly...

from 'Eleänore' (1842) to Robert Lowell's 1958 'Imitations' :

And perhaps because of Catullus' attitude to translation, his own verse has also attracted some int eresting experiments, such as Celia and Louis Zukofsky's phonological translations which attempt to echo the sound of the original Latin in English : for example 'vale puella' ('farewell, girl') in Catullus 8 becomes 'vale puelling girl' ] or Douglas Young's Scottish dialect versions : Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire ('wretched Catullus stop playing the fool') from Catullus 8 becomes Catullus man, ye maunna gang sae gyte and Frank O. Copley's American beat-generation reading Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me ('you will dine well, Fabullus, with me'), the opening of Catullus 13, becomes say Fabullus / you'll get a swell dinner at my house. But whatever the approach and however often translated, Catullus' taut, teasing poetry still offers fresh challenges to each generation of translators - and their readers.

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