The Books of Catullus

Gaius Valerius Catullus, Simon Smith, Simon Smith

• Publisher: Carcanet Classics
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781784105518
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Books of Catullus is the first full English translation to take the Roman poet at his word. Simon Smith's versions are scholarly yet eccentric, mapping theme and register to contemporary equivalents (such as poem 16, which echoes Frank O'Hara). He divides Catullus's complete verses into three 'books', the form in which it is thought the poems were originally received. 'Smith gets the all-important rhythm of Catullus, whose meters, like all else about this poet, are deceptively complex', writes Vincent Katz. 'He achieves a delicious frisson again and again by fusing the classical and the contemporary. The reader is repeatedly pleasured by unexpected felicities.' (Peter Hughes)

Book One

1

To whom do I send my pretty little sequence

buffed up this very minute with light-grey pumice?

To you, of course, Cornelius, for only you

were friend enough to think something of my ditties –

first and only amongst Italians, who’d risk

chronicle The Whole Story in three episodes,

well-read, by God, an obvious labour of love;

keep my booklet (trim and slender) for all it’s worth −

let us pray, Great-Good-Lady patroness on high,

it’ll live longer than one trip around the block.

2

Sparrow, her pet, my darling’s darling,

whom she always plays with on her lap,

to whose peck peck she offers her fingernail

pushing or prodding to grip harder,

when on a whim all glistening eyes

she fancies my charisma and play,

I expect that as her love-ache ebbs,

she finds a little consolation for the hurt

to play with you as she does − I wish −

and brighten each sad care my heart beats with!

3

Go on, cry, you Cupids and Venuses,

and you beautiful people of the World.

My dearest girl’s sparrow has passed away,

my darling’s darling, her petted sparrow,

that she loved more than her own eyes:

he was sweet as honey, could read her mind

as easily as a daughter her mother’s;

her lap was all the world he dreamt of;

hopping here and now there, this and that way

piping his song to her and her alone.

Now his flight is a one-way trip only

into darkness where no-one’s known return.

Damn you to Hell, dreadful agents of Orcus,

for destroying all beautiful things,

what a darling sparrow you’ve stolen

(what awful cruelty! Sad little thing!);

you’ve done what you did, my dear girl welled-up;

her poor little eyes burning with the tears.

4

The craft before you, fellow citizens,

declares he was the quickest of vessels,

for speed unsurpassed, no lumber more limber,

would yield not one chance to passing clippers

with lightening flight of paddle and sail.

The Adriatic’s rejections he rejects

tossed to its beaches, the Cycladic islands,

illustrious Rhodes, Propontis trembling drenched

in Thracian hurricanes, or the blackening gulf

of Pontus, where he, shortly to be a skiff,

was once dense follicles, topped Cytorus

rattling with chatter other leaves close by.

Pontic Amastris and box-full Cytorus,

this craft says you know what was and what is.

You know. He’s po...