One thing I didn’t expect when I started writing this substack is that, as my subscriber base has grown from tiny to small, people have started sending me copies of books I might find interesting. This is fun and flattering though also leaves me feeling a bit responsible. Even at the modest rate at which this is happening so far, I can’t promise to mention all of them, or (of course) that I’ll like everything I’m sent. (Though if you send me a gratis copy of something, I do promise not to mention it unless I have something positive to say!)
Anyway, in the last couple of weeks I’ve received several versions and translations. I thought I’d write a bit today about Isobel Williams’s remarkable version of Catullus, Switch (Carcanet Classics, 2023). I’ve admired bits of this project before — Williams has published some poems in PNReview, and a longer sequence was in New Poetries VIII which I reviewed for Poetry Birmingham Literary Review a few years ago. She published a collection of about half of them, Shibari Carmina, in 2021, which I never caught up with. But here she has filled out the gaps and provides versions of all of Catullus. That makes it quite a different proposition: if you are teaching Catullus, for instance, or really trying to get to grips with him, then a complete collection has an added attraction. But for any project of imitation, too, especially one as distinctive as this, the shift from a selection to a complete version is a real test.
Catullus is best-known today for a handful of the short poems about Lesbia — perhaps especially the kiss poems — and for having written several strikingly obscene poems, some of which were still left without commentary in the edition I used as a student.1 He is sometimes grouped with the Latin ‘love elegists’, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid, and certainly his poetry is in important model for those works, but only about half of his poems (numbers 65-116) are in elegiac couplets, and most of his poems in elegiacs are best understood as epigram. His elegiacs have such a different feel and texture from those of Propertius or Ovid that it’s almost like a different metre. Catullus also wrote verse on a wide range of topics, not only about love or sex — only about 30 are about Lesbia herself. His reputation for passion is rooted as much in invective and revulsion as in sexual attraction (indeed, a lot of his invective is sexually aggressive), and he speaks with a distinctive libertas — freedom of speech, even extending to being very rude to Julius Caesar — which was no longer a feature of the generation to which Propertius and Ovid belonged.
As well as the short poems, on lovers, friends and enemies, there are a cluster of longer poems (61-68) in a dazzling array of styles and forms, including two marriage hymns (61 and 62), a sort of mythological mini-epic (64) in an intricate and allusive style then very fashionable, and a translation of Callimachus (66). These longer poems are often skipped over when undergraduates read a bit of Catullus.
The unique feature of Williams’ Catullus — you might think its gimmick, though I don’t think that’s fair — is that she reads and renders Catullus through the discipline and distinctive terminology — a kind of highly-stylized, courteous and consensual violence -- of shibari, a form of Japanese rope bondage. (The book contains a brief prefatory explanation of the practice, and a series of rather beautiful drawings and paintings: the author is also an artist.)
Here for instance is her version of Catullus 7, in which the uncountable basiationes (kissings) of the original have become ‘knots and rope marks’. In the Latin, the poem begins Quaeris quot mihi basiationes tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque (You ask, Lesbia, how many kissings of yours would be enough and more than enough for me):
Stress-testing are we, Mistress?
How many of your tropes in rope
Can be endured before the poet chokes?
Ply me hemp silk jute and tie me
Ichinawa, takate kote,
Futomomo, hishi karada,
Tasuki, kannuki,
Hashira, daruma shibari.
All of it. Semenawa for the burn.
Count the stars that spy on sly
Lovers when the night is ball-gagged —
That’s how many of your tight knots and rope marks
Will deliver me beyond madness —
More than a voyeur’s torch could spot
Or a jealous sensei take to pieces.
All those Japanese words in the second stanza reflect rather neatly some particularly exotic diction in line 4 of the Latin poem.
For Williams, rope bondage functions as a metaphor for the complex patterns of domination and desire between Catullus and those whom he addresses — not just Lesbia (whom Williams calls Clodia, one possible identification), but also friends, enemies, Greek poets, mythological figures, his brother, even Julius Caesar. But it is also a metaphor for the contortions of translation itself. As she puts it:
Shibari is a form of translation. The top arranges the bottom in a shape he or she could not hold or maybe even attain alone.
Not all of the poems refer to shibari, and the number that do so as densely and specifically as poem 7 — rather than to more general ideas of domination and restraint — are fairly few. Nevertheless, as the author herself explains, it was shibari that gave her a way ‘in’ to Catullus, and it’s the guiding metaphor of the collection. This is Williams’ version of the famous ‘sparrow’ poem, Catullus 2:
Oh little beak, how Mistress loves
To play with you and guard you in her nest,
Feed your craving with her fingertip,
Sharpen your need, make you nip hard —
She is the glowing core of my desire
But looks to you for flights of entertainment
And a fluttery release, we trust,
To let the tide of urgency subside.
I pray to uncage you as Mistress does
And make the crushing tortures of the soul
Lighter than a feather’s stroke.
This poem is a good example of how the imagery and emotional framework of bondage informs many of the versions, without referring in this instance to specific terms or positions.
In poem 2, the final three lines of the Latin text may not belong with the main poem, or if they do, something seems missing. Some translations run them together, some separate the end out as a fragment. Williams treats the fragment separately as 2(B) [?unrelated fragment], signalling the textual uncertainty and the vagaries of transmission by printing it as a text marked-up in XML:
<p>[?unrelated fragment]</p>
<p> <i>Something something would be</p>
<p>As much relief to me</p>
<p>As sprinting girl in story found</p>
<p>When glinting quince untied the waste of years<i></p>
I think the mark-up is a bit gimmicky and unnecessary, because Williams so beautifully manages to get the idea of textual fragility, of a fragment flickering across time, into the translation itself, with that pun on waste/waist: ‘When glinting quince untied the waste of years’. (The Latin word is zona, a woman’s girdle worn about the waist.)
It’s fair to say that Williams’ Catullus is somewhat more vulgar even than the original — or at least, more consistently vulgar. By this I don’t mean only sexually explicit language — though there’s certainly a lot of that, and not always only where it’s in the Latin — but also that her default register is closest to that of the earthiest bits of Catullus, rather than the middle. But she is sensitive to shifting tones and moods, and uses quotations and allusions, of everything from popular culture to medieval literature, to give a sense of the depth and range of Catullus’ own literary allusiveness. Amidst all the cleverness and violence, there are wily glimpses, for example, of the simplest kind of song. Here is her version of Catullus 70:
She says she wouldn’t marryAnyone but meEven if God AlmightyGot down on one knee.Her words. But what a womanTells a rampant loverScrolls out on the windAnd the swollen river.
Williams only puts the complete Latin text itself in once, that I noticed: for poem 85, the much quoted epigram:
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
Her version here is perhaps the most expansive in the book, the closest to poetry-as-commentary. Here the link between emotional distress and the struggle to translate is particularly explicit. After quoting the Latin couplet, the piece begins with the most literal kind of gloss, and follows it with a series of possible translations:
Hate I/loathing I and love I/loving I. By what thing it do I/doing I perhaps enquire you/enquiring you
Not know I/not knowing I but to happen/to be happening feel I/feeling I and tortured I/tortured I am being
I hate where I do love. Perhance
Thou seek’st to know de quelle façon
[Doffs hat, strums lute-strings].
I don’t know. It’s hurting. Here.
Hate-love-hate-love you ask why the needle’s stuck
I can’t say but the pain is an endless track
HATE/WANT. Since you’ve got to ask —
Me neither. But [because?] it’s torture.
I’m in love with loathing. You demand reasons
I can’t give. But they’re real, the hooks in my flesh.
Attraction-repulsion. You shove your probe right in.
[shrug] It’s a vocation, having my liver plucked out.
Stuck in a hate-love trap
‘How does it make you feel?’
Don’t give me that counselling crap.
Wheels have spikes. Bones snap.
I don’t love any of these, but I think the sequence would be fantastic to teach with.
I was particularly interested to see what Williams had done with the long poems (61-68), which form a distinct corpus, and point in so many different directions. These present huge challenges to any translator. I’m still digesting these, but my first reaction is that I don’t think they all quite come off — for me, the diction, form and tone of 61, 62 and 64 in particular are not distinct enough from the short poems. These three are all, in their different ways, rather formal poems. Williams has made them seem like they belong in the collection, she has made sense of them in relation to the more familiar Catullus — which is an interpretative achievement in itself — but at the expense, I think, of a lot of what is distinctive about them. Her version of the Attis poem (no. 63), though, is very effective: it’s truly disturbing — Attis is a devotee of Cybele who castrates himself — but it also sounds lovely, just as the Latin does:
Skimming deep realities Attis scudded over water
Pierced the sunless forest rimming the home of the goddess mother
Crested a personal best of disgust mind undone
Sawed into his scrotal sac with sharp serrated stone
Felt the tag of maleness gone
Warm blood spattered on the ground
Grasped taut skin
With snowdrift hands
Japanese rope bondage seems an odd way in to Catullus, and these poems are often discomforting or actively shocking: but so is Catullus, especially if you sit down to read right through it. They are obviously not going to displace a more literal translation for anyone working with or referring to the Latin.2 But Williams has found a way to pinpoint what is most distinctive about most of Catullus — a combination of passion with the utmost artifice. I think it’s a significant achievement.
I have a good anecdote about this. In my first week at university, we were supposed to read all of the ‘short poems’ of Catullus, over 100 of them, and be ready to translate whichever our tutor decided to focus on. Our prescribed edition and commentary, however, provided no commentary at all on a handful of the rudest of them, leaving us without help. One particular word was a real mystery (I think, though I’m not sure, that it was irrumator from Catullus 10, or perhaps the related irrumabo from 16). It wasn’t in our standard dictionary. Inspired, we had the idea of looking it up in the shelf-long Latin dictionary in the classics reading room of the library: the word was duly there, but the definition read simply an obscenity, and then gave a Greek term. Filled with the thrill of the chase, we duly turned to the shelf-long Greek dictionary — which, perhaps predictably, said an obscenity, and gave the Latin. Some of my worldlier fellow-students probably had an idea what was going on, but I have to admit that I didn’t have the foggiest. In those days, of course, we didn’t have Wikipedia, which clarifies the matter pretty clearly.
Though it’s quite old, for these purposes I think I would still recommend Guy Lee’s 1990 version for Oxford World Classics, not least because it’s a handy parallel text. I’d be interested to hear what others use or recommend though.
Really interesting - although I think IW makes too much of a meal of Odi et amo: loses its intense, succinct, despairing fury completely. Also (based on my reading of your excellently detailed review) there's a danger, in translating someone who writes frequently and explicitly about sex, of assuming that that's the only prism they see things through, missing out on the playful affection and lovers' baby-talk of some of the Lesbia poems; as well as the swooning romance -"Give me a thousand kisses and then another thousand" etc., which is clearly at the nexus of passion and romantic love occupied by some of Donne's love poems.
Brilliant review, though.
I would be intrigued to get your take on Simon Smith’s earlier, likewise complete Catullus (also from Carcanet).