Catullus and Sir Richard Francis Burton

The great Victorian eccentric, explorer and man of letters Sir Richard Francis Burton translated Catullus, and a self-published version appeared after his death in 1894. I have a copy of another privately printed set of 750 books dated New York 1928. The work is a delight, and includes illustrations, Latin text, and a prose translation alongside Burton's verse translation by his collaborator on Latin projects Leonard C. Smithers.

Burton's translation is my favourite for a number of reasons:

• he insists on sticking to the Latin feel of the work, without recourse to modernisms, and neither adding what isn't there or taking away what is. Indeed his sole object for the work was 'to prove that a translation, metrical and literal, may be true and may be trustworthy';
• he uses metre - and pretty exactly, not allowing too much flexibility, but rather preferring flexible word positioning to 'normal' English;
• he uses titles for the poems, which gives them a better identity than just numbers;
• he uses illustrations (there are eight plates in all) - this breaks up the text and helps define the cultural context.

Here's his translation of Poem 3, On the Death of Lesbia's Sparrow, in iambic pentameters.

Weep every Venus, and all Cupids wail,
And men whose gentler spirits still prevail.
Dead is the Sparrow of my girl, the joy,
Sparrow, my sweeting's most delicious toy,
Whom loved she dearer than her very eyes;
For he was honeyed-pet and anywise
Knew her, as even she her mother knew;
Ne'er from her bosom's harbourage he flew
But 'round her hopping here, there, everywhere,
Piped he to none but her his lady fair.
Now must he wander o'er the darkling way
Thither, whence life-return the Fates denay.
But ah! beshrew you, evil Shadows low'ring
In Orcus ever loveliest things devouring:
Who bore so pretty a Sparrow fro' her ta'en.
(Oh hapless birdie and Oh deed of bane!)
Now by your wanton work my girl appears
With turgid eyelids tinted rose by tears.

A very Victorian rendering!

You can find his translation in the online Perseus Digital Library.

Catullus the erotic poet?

You quite often see Catullus described as an 'erotic' poetic. However, this does not bear up to close scrutiny.

If you look at his love poems to Lesbia and Juventius, they would better be described as 'romantic': he speaks about kisses, but not in a way you would describe as erotic. In fact, this is precisely why Aurelius and Furius criticised him in The pious poet (Poem 16): he was altogether too 'soppy' in his terms of endearment. His poem to Ipsitilla (Poem 32) is also not erotic as it has humorous undertones which rather undermine it.

When Catullus uses explicit sexual language, he does it not in a erotic context, but in a pugilistic one. Much as we say 'fuck off', Catullus says the same to a number of people he has fallen out with (Poem 16 is a good example of this). In fact, Catullus has more 'hate' poems than he does 'love' ones, plus a good deal of other poems on other lyric themes (friendship, for example), not to mention the non-lyric poems such as Attis and The wedding of Peleus and Thetis.

No, Catullus is basically a lyric poet, not an erotic one.

Peter Green's translation of Catullus

I first read Peter Green's translation of Juvenal's Satires at university and thought it very smart and modern. However, since I have been translating myself, I realise he takes too many liberties with the Latin and produces something very different culturally from the original. Here's my assessment of his translation of the poems of Catullus on Google Books.

This is an awful 'translation' of Catullus. It distorts the meaning of the original, constantly paraphrases, and unnaturally modernises Catullus. It says more about Peter Green than it does about Catullus, and loses the flavour of the classical culture Catullus represents. How come Attis' ship (ratis) has become a 'catamaran'? Why are Ancient Romans going to and fro in the 'piazza'? A 'phaselus' is not a 'cutter' - it's essentially a merchant galley, but could be light and small and carry passengers, using both sails and oars as in the poem in question. It is not culturally correct to translate 'cinaedus' as a 'bugger': it's just the opposite! Should Caesar really be described as 'Duce', making an unnecessary link with Mussolini. 'Glubit' may roughly mean 'jacks off' but there's a metaphor here that has been ignored.

The metrical scheme is also a mess. The author attempts to make stress equivalents of the Latin quantitative metre to create the rhythms. The problem with this is that he is not a poet and doesn't appear to understand where the stresses fall in English, and he makes constant departures from the Latin equivalent so as to make the exercise pointless. The scheme amounts to free verse in the end.

All in all, typical Peter Green. No wonder true classicists shake their heads at the very mention of him.

Check out his translation for yourself here.