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.