Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry

An Anthology of New Translations

Diane J. Rayor, William W. Batstone, Diane J. Rayor, William W. Batstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317512943
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry, first published almost 25 years ago, offered students accurate and poetic translations of poems from the sudden flowering of lyric and elegy in Rome at the end of the Republic and in the first decades of the Augustan principate. Now updated in this second edition, the volume has been re-edited with both revised and new translations and an updated commentary and bibliography for readers in a new century, ensuring that this much-valued anthology remains useful and relevant to a new generation of students studying ancient literature and western civilization. The volume features an expanded selection of newly translated poetry including:

• fresh Catullus translations, with a greater selection including Poem 64
• fresh Sulpicia translations and the five poems of the "Garland of Sulpicia"
• six new Propertius poems
• new and revised selections from Tibullus, Ovid and Horace.

The second edition reflects changing interests and modes of reading while remaining true to the power of the poetry that has influenced the literature of many cultures. The combination of accurate and vibrant translations with thorough commentary makes this an invaluable anthology for those interested in poetry, world literature, Roman civilization, and the history of ideas and sexuality, allowing readers to compare different poets' responses to politics, love and sex, literary innovation, self, and society.

Poems

1 Catullus

We know little for certain about either the life of Catullus or the publication of his poetry. He was born in Verona, probably between 87 and 84 B.C.E., and probably died at about the age of 30 during or shortly after 54 B.C.E. In his poetry, he refers exclusively to events between 56 and 54 B.C.E., which would suggest an extremely short creative life for the young poet, but he himself tells us that he took up poetry and sex at about 15. We do not know when he came to Rome from Verona, but there he knew some of the most prominent men in politics and literature; some he befriended, others he hated and attacked in his poetry. We learn from his poetry that he went to Bithynia as a member of the staff of C. Memmius; this was probably from the spring of 57 B.C.E. to the spring of 56 B.C.E., and some time before that his brother had died while away from home in the Troad which borders the Aegean in Asia Minor just south of the entrance to the Black Sea.

As a poet Catullus offers a remarkable combination of intensity and flippancy, of passion and obscenity. It has been estimated that of his shorter poems one-third include explicitly sexual material. He was known in the ancient world primarily as an iambic, or invective, poet and as an epigrammatist. He is generally thought of as a love poet in the modern world, and as a love poet, he was a precursor of the elegists in that he wrote a series of poems about a single woman in elegiac meter. He also wrote about the woman in other meters, which is not a feature of the elegists. His beloved is called Lesbia, a name chosen because it was the metrical equivalent of her real name, Clodia, but also as a reference to the Greek poet, Sappho of Lesbos. We do not know which of the three sisters named Clodia she was, but it is generally believed that she was Clodia Metelli, the wife of Q. Caecilius Metellus, cos. 60 B.C.E. On the other hand, it seems that she is already a literary figure, a beloved girl who, like the persona of the poet himself, allows the poet to explore issues of passion, desire, loss, and jealousy, but is not to be confused with a real historical person.

The poetry which has survived seems to divide into three parts: sixty short poems in lyric and iambic meters; some longer poems in different meters (usually grouped as poems 61–68), and several shorter poems all in elegiac meter (poems 69–116). Some consider all the elegiac poems regardless of length to be a single group (poems 65–116). Many believe today that at least the collection of short poems was arranged and published by the poet in his lifetime; some believe that all three “collections” reflect Catullus’ intentional arrangement; and a few believe that all 116 poems were published together as a book. We should see Catullus’ poetic output as reflecting a new attitude in Rome. Before his poems, lyric and epigrammatic poetry was produced by public men as a kind of entertainment. Longer poems were written by clients of important and powerful patrons. Catullus and his friends raised poetic production to a new level of self-conscious professionalism. They opened the door to a range of literary expression and culture that made possible the achievements of Vergil, Horace, and the Roman elegists: to explore their own depths of emotion and their relationship to society, to reflect on power, gender, ideology, and the limits of poetry, and to adapt the learned and allusive poetry of Alexandria to Roman realities.

Catullus

1

I am making a gift of this smart little book

just now polished to a shine with dry pumice.

To whom? To you, Cornelius, because you

always thought my foolish fluff was worth something,

even when you dared, first of the Italians,

to unravel every age of the world

in three papyrus rolls—Gods! Elegant, elaborate! What hard work.

So, take this book for yourself, whatever it’s worth,

and for what it is. And may it, O Virgin Muse, Patroness,

last forever—or more than one lifetime. 10

2

O Sparrow, my love’s sweetheart,

to play with you, to hold you to her breast

to hold out a finger to you as you come close,

even to provoke fierce pecks,

this is what she does when—blazing

because she misses me—it suits her

to be silly, some sweet fun and a solace for her sorrow

(I think it’s so she can soothe her relentless need for me).

I wish I could play with you in the same way

and gentle the harsh cares of my own heart. 10

2b

It is as pleasing to me as the golden apple was,

they say, to that lithe-limbed lass.

It? That she has lifted a skirt too long left down.

3

Weep for sorrow, deities of love and desire,

and each human being who feels love strongly:

my sweetheart’s sparrow, oh god,

my sweet love’s sparrow has died.

She loved that sparrow more than her own eyes;

he was sweet as honey and knew his owner

as well as a girl knows her own mother.

He would not move from her lap,

but hopped about here and there

chirping the whole time for his owner alone. 10

Now the sparrow travels a dark, shadowed road

to that place from which they say none return.

May you suffer, evil shades of Orcus, you

who devour a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prefaces to the second edition
• Translators
• Introduction
• Poems
• Maps