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.