Welcome
Who is Catullus?   Links
Catullus Forum   Search Translations
 

  Available Norwegian translations:  
 
1 2 2b 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 14b 15 16 17 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
52 53 54 55 56 57 58 58b 59 60
61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70
71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 78b 79
80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89
90 91 92 93 94 95 95b 96 97 98
99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108
109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116
 

 Available languages: 
 
Latin
Afrikaans   Albanian   Arabic
Brazilian Port.   Bulgarian   Castellano
Catalan   Chinese   Croatian
Czech   Danish   Dutch
English   Esperanto   Estonian
Finnish   French   Frisian
German   Greek   Gronings
Hebrew   Hindi   Hungarian
Interlingua   Irish   Italian
Japanese   Korean   Limburgs
Norwegian   Persian   Polish
Portuguese   Rioplatense   Romanian
Russian   Scanned   Serbian
Spanish   Swedish   Telugu
Turkish   Ukrainian   Vercellese
Welsh  
 

 Gaius Valerius Catullus     
About Me
Send a Reaction
Read Reactions
 

 
Introduction on Catullus
taken with kind permission of Ken Hope
The poems of Catullus might have suffered the same fate as those of Archilochos and Sappho but for a single manuscript which made its way to Verona, the poet's home town, early in the 14th century. Since Catullus is generally thought to have lived between 84 and 54 B. C. E., this manuscript was a copy of a copy of a copy... going back for some 1400 years--though nothing is known about those earlier manuscripts. In fact, the text of Catullus that we use today, while it derives ultimately from this single manuscript, is based on copies, and on copies of copies, of that one, since the manuscript itself is long gone.
So we know roughly when Gaius Valerius Catullus lived, and we have a few facts about him. He was born in or near Verona in 84 B.C. to a family of considerable wealth and connections--his father was a friend of Julius Caesar. Encouraged by his elder brother, he wrote poetry as a youth, in which he was influenced by Callimachus and other Alexandrine and earlier Greek poets. His poetry was in the style of the neoterics, who prized highly polished technical achievement in their sophisticated, urbane, witty, short poems. His brother died in 58, and between 57 and 56 he spent a year in government service in Bithynia, where he visited the tomb of his brother. He had by then apparently begun and possibly already ended a tempestuous relationship with a married woman whom he named in his poems Lesbia (allegedly after the Greek poet Sappho who lived on Lesbos). Scholars have identified the poet's Lesbia with a real woman named Clodia. Catullus made fun of Julius Caesar and one of his hechmen in his poems, but apologized and was easily forgiven. He died, apparently at age 30, in 54. We do not know much more than that, although the poems, like the others in this collection, do encourage speculation as to character and temperament.
If Archilochos is the first lyric poet in the West, the poet who invented the "I," as it were, Catullus is the first poet we know enough about to construct a sense of who he is from the poems themselves. In fact, everything we know about him is created in his poems. Without them we know next to nothing.
The character that emerges in these poems is lively, dynamic, engaging. If it is not Catullus whom we come to know, yet we do feel we come to know someone with a personality, whom we may as well call Catullus, since that is how he is called in the poems. Certainly there are inconsistencies of character, but these seem to be part of the poet's basic material: "odi et amo," he says, "I love and hate." He is not saying that he swerves from one passion to the next, but rather that conflicting emotions dwell within him at the same time, and these help as well as anything else to define who he is.
These poems read like letters to friends--Catullus is deeply aware of friendship and of who his friends are--which we catch a glimpse of. We can't always figure out the context--it is like we are overhearing a conversation or reading over somebody's shoulder--but we pick up enough to be intrigued, and curious. As we read these poems we begin to realize several things. Although they are in much better shape than the poems of Archilochus and Sappho, we may still think of them as fragmentary. Although the poems appear to be complete as poems, in reading them we find ourselves being asked to construct a sense of the writer and his milieu and immediate siuations in our own minds. The poems are our only clues, and in that sense they remain fragmentary, incomplete. We fill things in from our own lives and imaginations with what the poems suggest to us.
In the first poem Catullus dedicates his "libellum," little book, to a fellow writer, and calls attention both to the attractive physical qualities of the scroll itself--which has been carefully polished with pumice-stone to sand down the edges and smooth them out--and to his own ironic sense about these poems as "trivial." From this initial image, we have the sense that Catullus is a consummate artist who chooses to comment both directly and indirectly on his poems themselves, and what he is doing with them. As helpful as this is for readers of the poems as poems, because it gives Catullus marvelous opportunities for poetic turns and ironic stances, it does little for those who wish to come to know the historical Catullus any better. As with Archilochus, we do not always know when Catullus means to be funny, but we have the strong suspicion that he is having fun, and pulling some tricks on his readers. While apparently writing about himself and his friends, Catullus seems most interested in writing about poetry itself.
Catullus is particularly well known for his rude and crude poetry which, however finely polished, astonishes us with vitriolic obscenities and gross violations of good taste. Many of his poems were routinely left untranslated--or left out altogether--of early editions. That such gutter language exists in poems as finely crafted as these is just one of the ironies. He is also capable of the most refined and lovely language--and the most jocular. Even when he seems to write at his most trivial, however, as in his two songs about Lesbia's pet sparrow, there is much that is apparent below the surface--though we may not all make it out in the same way.
Catullus is, with Sappho, one of the world's best and most influential love poets. Since so much more of his work has survived, he is far better known than Sappho, and has been a major influence in lyric poetry throughout the west. In some respects these poems help to define the term for us, or at least to provide us with a frame of reference by which the term is understood. The poet's creation of Lesbia is the first of many important creations in which male poets summon through their poetry the image of a woman whom they love--perhaps at a distance, perhaps not--and whose attraction is so powerful it helps the poet write the poems that, in describing this love affair, define himself. Other such figures include Dante's Beatrice, and Shakespeare's "dark lady" and "young man."
 


  © copyright 1995-2013 by Rudy Negenborn