I’ll acknowledge now that I’m dumbstruck by the generosity of recent comments I’ve received, especially Curtiss’s, and it’s gonna take me a little while to digest them. With such generous comments, along with others people have offered in the past, there’s no way I can ever call the ideas I’m working on in this dissertation entirely my own — which is perhaps a fine model for a writing classroom, as well. I know part of the project composition teachers undertake in assigning papers that require research and citations is to ask students to start to become familiar with the notion that one’s ideas always owe a debt to other people — Newton’s famous comment to Hooke about standing upon the shoulders of Giants seems an appropriate counter to the myth of the solitary and individually inspired Author here — but Curtiss and Charlie have helped me to think about ways in which that project might go even further; about ways in which perspectives on collaboration in the classroom might interrupt rationalizations of inequality based on artificial “I Me Mine” constructions of textual and intellectual scarcity.
With that in mind, I’ll offer tonight — as my Friday non-dissertational — my translation of one of the carminae of Catullus; the ever-popular Number 11. I did this a couple years ago in a 300-level Latin course that I took as a graduate student in order to help fulfill my language requirement (and also because I’m a classics geek wannabe, and really like studying the language and the people), and found that my translations tended to accentuate the bawdy side more than those of my classmates. And Catullus puts the glorious Charles Bukowski to shame with his gleeful potty-mouthedness. My translation ain’t much, but I think it goes with what I was saying about indebtedness and originality: creative work can (and almost always does) owe a lot to other people.
And I just love “ilia rumpens”. Enjoy.
Catullus 11
Furius and Aurelius, you comrades of Catullus,
Whether he travels to farthest India,
Where the wide shore is pounded
By the long, echoing eastern wave
Whether he goes among the Hyrcani or the soft Arabs,
Or among the Sagae or the Parthian archers,
Or to the waters
Colored by the seven-throated Nile,
Whether he crosses the tops of the Alps
Going to see the monuments of great Caesar,
Or the Gallic Rhine and the terrifying sea
And furthest Britons,
All these things, whatever the gods’ will brings,
You two are ready to attempt:
Do this small thing for me.
Give my girl some nasty words.
May she live and thrive with all her fuck-boys
The three hundred she flings her arms around at once,
Truly loving none, but over and over
Bursting all their cocks.
Let her not look back, as before, for my love,
Which fell just as by her fault
The flower of the farthest field fell
When touched by the passing plow.
Yay, Catullus! As a fellow classics-geek wannabe (I almost majored in classics, and one of the first courses I took was on Catullus and Horace), I applaud your choice of poems. #11 always impressed me with the way it juxtaposes the tragic “flower cut down by the plow” image — which was originally an epic simile, wasn’t it? I think I recall that from Latin class — with that terrifically bad-tempered and penultimate stanza. I love how Catullus makes Latin seem like anything but a dead language. (For sheer gleeful potty-mouthedness, I think #16 has the edge over #11 — but there are a lot of contenders for the “most potty-mouthed” category, aren’t there?)
Ha, thought you might be interested in this story. Fun fact from the article: Latin students’ SAT scores are 140-160 points higher than students who haven’t taken Latin (oh, that’s two or more years of Latin).
Amanda, the contrast of that “terrifically bad-tempered and penultimate stanza” to the epic simile (with its apparently inverted gender conventions) is really why I love it so — and I think that contrast, itself, is wonderfully set up by the contrast of the monumental travel narrative of the first three stanzas to the small task of the fourth. Plus I’m just happy ’cause it was the first translation I’d done that didn’t come out sounding (too much) like bad, stilted English. But gleeful potty-mouthedness — yeah, 16, and so many more, as you say; 21, 23, 28, 33, 74, 80 is charming, and even the ones that aren’t so bad, like 57, make me smile, and in 58 I can’t help reading a skinning-back motion to “glubit”. It’s enough to make one wish English had a single word with the elegant and filthy compression of “irrumator”.
Clancy — I like the article, and I’ll have to send it along to my friend who teaches high school Latin. Actually, Pierre Bourdieu shows something very similar in Academic Discourse for students who have taken Latin or Greek, though he does some test score analysis to (rather compellingly) attribute it to a process of selection rather than any instrumental utility of the languages. Worth checking out. (And so’s Catullus!)
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