Arthur Delot-Vilain
Love Poems of Catullus, edited by Tynan Kogane. New Directions, 2023, 80 pp., $13.95
I opened the Love Poems of Catullus. The first poem was strange, old-timey: who polishes a book “with dry pumice”? Who swears “by Jupiter”? Flipping through, I understood this version of Catullus: I, too, want to receive “a thousand kisses, and a hundred / more.” But why was the poem labeled “5” addressed on one page to Lesbia, on the next Ellen, and on yet another Catullus himself? I looked down to the bottom of the pages, which read: “Translated by James Laughlin,” then “Translated by Lord Byron,” then “Translated by Muriel Spark.” Translated from what, I asked myself? I flipped back to the front inside flap—no answer. The flap does at least answer one pressing question: what is this? This, it says, is an “anthology of Catullus’s love poems showcas[ing] translations.”
The book is easy to enter, but difficult to make sense of. It shows us neither a single poet nor translator, but rather an editor’s curated gallery of existing English translations. We are left with a slim, short, paper-bound volume consisting of little more than a table of contents, various versions of 42 of Catullus’s 116 poems, and a permissions index. If you didn’t already know, there would be no way to tell Catullus had written these in Latin two thousand years ago. The book treats Catullus, the front flap says, as “timeless.” This is the latest of New Directions Senior Editor Tynan Kogane’s efforts to repackage poetry—he’s also edited a collection of French Love Poems and Cat Poems for the press, and New Directions also published a similar collection of Pablo Neruda’s work simply called the Love Poems. What are we to do with a reprint that dispenses with context, instead organizing the collection around a transhistorical concept of “love”?
Marketing departments probably hate the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover.” They put a lot of effort into covers that someone will see in a bookstore and be enticed to pick up and buy. After all, a book is an object. But I don’t know what the New Directions marketing team was trying to accomplish with Love Poems of Catullus. A reader familiar with Catullus will ask themselves what the hell his Love Poems are—it’s not a designation he ever used, and it’s not a particularly useful categorization for someone who wrote so prolifically about sex and desire. Readers who have enjoyed previous New Directions releases (if publishing houses even have dedicated followers anymore) won’t recognize this book either—the gorgeous Heinz Henghes-designed colophon that usually graces the spine has been replaced with an inconspicuous “ND.” Latin students—who are probably a sizable share of Catullus buyers—aren’t likely to pick this up either; they’re more likely to get whichever Latin or bilingual edition their teacher or professor recommends. That leaves three categories of people who might buy this book.
The first is the devotedly literary reader who gets e-mails from New Directions or regularly checks the website. Upon seeing a new release from New Directions, this reader, if they like Catullus, decides to chance it. This audience also includes the book reviewer, who sees in news of the release a check for a portion of that month’s rent. (Let’s ignore those of us who do this for free.) The second is the aesthete, who might find the book interesting, but is primarily interested in its unusual form and pleasant cover design. The white Milky Way stretching out across the black of the front and back covers (suggesting the constellation Catulli inside) is indeed attractive. The third is the demographic New Directions marketing department seems to be targeting. More than anything else this book, with its black-and-white paper cover, nondescript serif title font, and small stature, resembles a well-worn punching bag of the literati: Rupi Kaur’s milk and honey. So this is the game: to package Catullus as if it were popular contemporary poetry. For the cynic: in order to sell more books; for the optimist: to make the classics seem relevant.
Understanding the book this way helped make sense of my questions around the editorial (as opposed to the marketing) decisions. To start with the obvious: what does it mean to say these are the “love poems” of Catullus? The inside flap, which is about as close to an introduction, describes Catullus’s poems as “intimate, witty, and tender”—all true. It praises his “ability to truthfully reveal the fleeting instants of his bare psyche: moments of erotic passion, of scorn and jealousy, of heartfelt devotion, of consuming love.” Unobjectionable. It hints at a Catullus whose personal and sexual subject matter prefigures the American confessional poets of the 20th century, like Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton. At the same time, this “introduction” continues an expectation that Catullus will provide a kind of “ancient wisdom” version of poems like Kaur’s—which are indeed often bare, intimate, bite-sized, and erotic.
The same front flap finally describes what we have in this book: the “cycle of poems to his great love, ‘Lesbia.’” But upon closer inspection, this description doesn’t hold up. Catullus’s (in)famous 16th poem in this book shares a spread with its lesser-known but arguably more sexually graphic 15th poem. The 16th, beloved of adolescent Latin students, begins with the iconic pedicabo vos et irrumabo. As C.H. Sisson’s translation here has it, “I’ll bugger you and suck your pricks.” (Sisson has transposed receptive fellatio for the more aggressive irrumatio). 15 threatens Aurelius, the addressee, with a good time: “But, if you’re just plain stupid, or go / crazy enough to try it , you back-stabbing / son of a bitch, then I weep for you now, / ankles bound, bare-assed, gate wide open, / with catfish and carrots rammed up your hole.” And all this if Aurelius touches Catullus’s boy toy. These poems are delightful and funny and erotic, but are they love poems?
They are, I suppose, if one considers all instances of sex acts to be instances of love. But they are certainly not dedicated to Lesbia. Those poems that are written to Lesbia have an entirely different tenor—take Catullus 5. Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, it begins. The most “faithful” translation in this book is by James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, and it renders this opening line as: “Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love each / other.” It ends: “And when we have kissed many thousand times / we will lose count but go on kissing / so that no one with the evil eye / can hurt us or stop our endless lovemaking.” This is no less erotic than 15 and 16, but is a good deal more tender! And it is also helpful to consider those poems that were omitted from the collection. Among Catullus’s most moving and loving poems is his 101st. Known as ave atque vale, the poem recounts Catullus’s journey to the site of his brother’s death. The poem is framed as an address to his brother’s “mute” or “silent” ashes, and it ends atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. Roughly, “and for eternity, brother, I salute you. Farewell.” If this poem is not a “love poem,” then indeed it seems that the principle of this edition has been to select for sex. After all, sex sells.
This is not to say that the concept is silly. Catullus is indeed a love poet! But he’s not a voice floating in the wilderness prophesying desire—the fact of his doing love poetry in the first place is significant. Prior to Catullus and his fellow “neoteric” poets, Roman poetry was largely synonymous with epic poetry. The tradition, perhaps exemplified best by Ennius’s Annales, consisted of Homeric-style epics about Roman history. Catullus and his comrades were wealthy philhellenes living through the collapse of a powerful republic—so yes, they wrote about sex and love and art. They wrote smart poems and witty poems and poems about each other’s poems. But while this collection shows off Catullus, the choice to not write about Catullus means something. It means that we don’t quite get a sense of his radicalism, or how it got incorporated into a “poetic tradition,” if such a thing exists. That decision projects Catullus forward in time, framing him as an important figure to the Elizabethans through Marlowe; to the Romantics through Byron; to the modernists through Ezra Pound; to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets of the 1970s through Bernadette Mayer. This edition understands Catullus as a hoity-toity classical poet who’s been played with endlessly over generations—but that’s only half the story.
This book succeeds best when it manages to put contrasting translations next to each other—this is when it appears to have something to say. Not to pick on Catullus 16 too much, but Kogane has chosen to include only one version (a good decision, anything more would be a gratuitous delight in what amounts to a few bawdy words). Yet, the version he’s chosen only translates half the poem! In contrast, Kogane selects multiple translations for Catullus 5 and Catullus 51. The aforementioned Laughlin translation reads a little bit foreign, as if the “Latin” of it all has been preserved—as a reader, you can tell that the translator has tried to reproduce the text fairly closely. On the opposite page, a translation by critic and science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany melts some of the grammatical regularity to produce a lovely stream-of-consciousness version. Strangely, Kogane has included Lord Byron’s “To Ellen,” a Catullan imitation… but not of poem 5. “To Ellen,” with its references to kissing eyes, total insatiability, and corn harvest simile, is much closer to poem 48, of which there are three versions in this book. Muriel Spark’s version is deeply disturbing and pleasurable: she inverts the address, making it a poem to Catullus, before interrupting itself halfway through and playing on the unrealizable yearning incarnated by love poems themselves. But the crown jewel is Kogane’s inclusion of Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love.” These kinds of collections are at their best when they make the reader reconsider writings and poems they already know—placing Marlowe as a Catullus translator did that for me.
Scattered throughout the book are translations from Anne Carson’s Men in the Off Hours. These sections provide the oddest of the many “Catulli” in the collection. For example, her translation of 70, titled “(No One She Says),” reads:
Catullus wonders about lovers’ oaths.
No one but you she says she swore.
Why one night a god threw open the door.
I loved you more.
River.
River.
River.
River.
River.
River.
River.
River river river river river river river.
Across the page, Roz Kaveney’s more literal translation has:
My love says that she would rather be
in my bed than in Jupiter’s, but we
know that hot passion makes all women say
words carved in water and then washed away.
Carson’s version is delightful, and this book really lets it shine. Including, say, Marlowe’s version of 5, establishes the legitimacy of “radical” translation—translation as re-interpretation according to contemporary poetic styles. That decision argues against reading Marlowe as a figure of “traditional” poetry that symbolizes what we’ve lost in the English language and instead places the poet-translator as a tradition all its own.
The finer points—about the history of Roman poetry, about what is love and what is sex, about how this book is marketed—are more or less pedantry. A reader already familiar with Catullus probably wouldn’t pick up this edition, and that’s exactly the kind of reader who would be provoked by this edition. For all its incoherence, perhaps it is best to think of this book as an introductory text—the latest in a long line of “repackaged classics.” Maybe these editions are the wide base that allows New Directions to acquire and publish smaller, better books. But is that actually true? Does Love Poems of Catullus actually sell?
The edition is at once cowardly and savvy. It is afraid of being seen as stuffy and Latinate, and according to market logic, that attitude is probably right. All booksellers must sell to a market, and it’s remarkable that a hefty trade publisher like New Directions has even found the angle to sell Catullus, and to sell him to an audience without classical inclinations. Incredible, but I wonder: if this is meant to be an introductory Catullus, why not just write an introduction? Without even a short one, the edition remains committed to a flat, timeless vision of love poetry, one that relies on biochemical constants and the eternal oxytocin flood of kissing one thousand times, then one hundred more.
Arthur Delot-Vilain is a junior in Davenport college. If you can’t tell from the way he writes, Arthur does not like wearing shoes.