Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate, and: Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations, and Transgressions, and: Catullan Consciousness and the Early Modern Lyric in England from Wyatt to Donne, and: The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition (review)

Josephine Balmer's aim, in her translation of selected poems of Catullus, is 'for the poetry to be as accessible as possible, as enjoyable – but most of all as funny – to those with no prior knowledge of Latin'. But Catullus' way of being funny is often at odds with accessibility: his humour typically involves learned allusions to recondite Hellenistic sources, and the in-joke banter of the ruling classes. His humour isnot 'as accessible as possible': the poet has earned his epithet doctus. Seeking to reconcile 'accessible' with 'funny' leads Balmer to some stooping, as when she renders the opening line of Poem 32 ('Amabo, mea dulcis Ipsithilla') as 'Please please me, my dear Ipsithilla'. It may be funny to make Catullus allude to the Fab Four, and it is certainly accessible. But whether it gives the Latinless reader access to Catullus' sense of humour is doubtful. Balmer seems to proceed on the assumption (she may be right) that the typical reader will prefer broad humour to the subtler varieties Catullus offers. So she lays it on thick. The Beatles joke is astonishingly repeated in her translation of Poem 31, where her Catullus urges the waters of Lake Garda to 'please please him'.

She is anxious to persuade readers that Catullus' verses everywhere intermingle sparkling wit with conspicuous aural texture – logopoeia and melopoeia together, as Pound might put it. Think of the rich patterning of vowels, and the clever phrasing, of the closing linesof Poem 31: 'gaudete vosque, o Lydiae lacus undae; / ridete, quidquid est domi cachinnorum'. Intricate tracery of this kind would tax any translator. Balmer's approach to such richness throughout is to render phonetic subtleties as blatancies, mostly by jazzing up lines with loud internal chiming: 'Sparrow, my own sweetheart's sweetness, / whom she teases as she pleases'; 'a honey boy who knew his joy … hopped hither and tripped thither … from whence (we sense) none may return'. This sort of racket is better-suited to the more jocund poems; it spoils the more solemn moments, such as the great epigram Poem 85: 'I hate you. I love you. How do you do that? you might cry. / I don't know yet I feel it so – and I'm crucified.' 'I don't know yet I feel it so': such chiming will help to assure Latinless readers that Catullus' aural effects are dynamic, but may lead them, too, to assume the poet is a great deal moresing-song than he really is. Again, 'accessibility' to qualities other than Catullus'.

In the name of accessibility Balmer chooses to ignore the order of the poems as they have come down to us from the manuscripts, and to re-order them thematically instead. Several Lesbia poems, for instance, are lumped together into a single section; swipes at rival poets into another; still another is set aside for poems of mourning, and so on. This may help a newcomer to Catullus come rapidly to a sense of the variety ofhis themes, and prove convenient to students wishing to run downpoems suitable for comparison and contrast. For a reader, though, the arrangement can mean monotony instead of variety, and an odd feeling of imbalance (where one section piles on twenty-four poems on the same topic, another section contains only one). Whether the arrangement distorts Catullus' intentions is impossible to say, since it remains uncertain whether the manuscript order of the poem represents the poet...