Catullus: Shibari Carmina

Isobel Williams

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781800170742
• eBook ISBN: 9781800170759
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient Poetry
• Index: Literature

A Telegraph Best New Poetry Books for Christmas 2021

Carcanet publishes several Catulluses: C.H. Sisson's, Len Krisak's, Simon Smith's. But Isobel Williams's Catullus: Shibari Carmina is different in kind from the earlier versions. 'Translating Catullus has been, for me, like cage fighting with two opponents, ' the translator writes: 'not just A Top Poet, but the schoolgirl I was, trained to show the examiner that she knew what each word meant.' The struggle is intensified by the presence of a third element, something that made Catullus come alive, his 'tormented intelligence and romantic versatility'.

'It eventually happened at a fetish venue in South London, The Flying Dutchman - an echo of Catullus's doomed obsessive love? Someone at life class, knowing I like a drawing challenge, had told me about a Japanese rope bondage ( shibari ) club called Bound. I asked the management if I could draw there; on arrival I was treated like the Queen Mother. Best of all, the schoolgirl was too young to be let in.' The dynamics of shibari released Catullus from conventional constraints and delivered him to new rigours: 'I found context, metaphor and idiom for Catullus - whom one could glibly define as a bisexual switch from the late Roman Republic when such concepts were meaningless: a stern moralist who splits into an anxious bitchy dominant with the boys, a howling sub with his nemesis, the older glamorous married woman he calls Lesbia (here called Clodia, which might have been her real name).' The poet uses the terminology and forms of social media, a very contemporary idiom which is at once subjected to severe scholarship and tight syntactical discipline. All the crucial language knots are firmed up, the sense of the Latin emerges with Catullus's own laughter restored, along with the other registers of love and loss. Isobel Williams's drawings add immediacy to her versions which 'are not (for the most part) literal translations, but take an elliptical orbit around the Latin, brushing against it or defying its gravitational pull.'

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 1. This book belongs to
• Introduction
• 2. Oh little beak, how Mistress loves
• 2(b). <p>[?unrelated fragment]</p>
• 3. Break, break, break, love gods and gorgeous people
• 5. Song of Snogs Open out to life and love with me
• 6. Mr Gold:
• 7. Stress-testing are we, Mistress?
• 8. In tears again, Catullus. Just get out of bed
• 11. Be prepared You two – you’re my camp
• 13. We’ll have an engorgement party on my sofas
• 15. Mr Blond, commending
• 16. Sweet Beware the mighty sodomite face-bandit
• 21. Mr Blond, the all-devouring
• 24. Ancestors blossom
• 30. Ah! perfido Alfenus. Stirrer, traitor, heart macerator
• 32. It’s from Catullus. Pleeease, he says
• 34. Blessed Diana’s girls intact
• 36. Now we turn to the Andrex annals
• 37. You boys queueing outside Berlin Berlin –
• 38. …with a murmur… my ravings… Can’t go on but does
• 40. Mr Grey, what slip of the mind
• 41. Ameana, Lady Fuck-me
• 42. I’ll chuck verbiage at her
• 43. And a big Veronese hello to you, lady
• 45. Septimius perched his girlfriend Acme
• 46. Sprung from shielding by a sigh on skin…
• 47. Pig. And your pig-pen friend
• 48. Let me do that
• 50. Yesterday we filled
• 51. I can’t compete with the rock-god superhero
• 51. Oh go ahead with giving head to the godhead
• 52. Still here, Catullus? Why put off the lethal dose?
• 56. Oh you’ll love this
• 58. Glue. Bit. Oh Caelius –
• 60. You got your manners from scavenging mountain lions?
• 63. Attis Superhighway vector Otis otorhinolaryngeal
• 68. Floorwork You write to me tearful castaway gasping
• 68(b). Eight transitions Muses, unpeg my tongue
• 70. She says she wouldn’t marry
• 72. When I saw everything through gauze
• 73. They won’t break your fall but they smash up everything else
• 75. This is what we’ve come to, Clodia
• 76. Intra-Venus What does being honest feel like?
• 77. Well, Captain Scarlet
• 79. Brother/switch
• 81. Couldn’t you find a decent rigger, Juventius
• 82. Look at me, Quintius
• 83. Clodia lingers over all my faults
• 84. Haspirations, says ’Arry
• 85. Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
• 86. And that’s supposed to be beautiful –
• 87. No woman can attest that she
• 91. No, Gellius.
• 92. Clodia slanders me on oath
• 93. Trinidadian Creole by Jason Anthony Henry Caesar yuh see me
• 93. And your mother I can’t be arsed to please you, Caesar
• 96. If the silent coffin space
• 99. I couldn’t stop myself
• 100. Verona’s hottest boys
• 101. Flight-shamed through the earthbound ports and checkpoints
• 103. Be so gracious as to
• 104. You think I cursed the woman
• 107. Breaking If the single object of hope and longing
• 109. Lockdown Our special place
• Notes on the poems
• The Scholars
• Strands
• Picture credits
• Caution and training
• Also by Isobel Williams
• Copyright