Switch: The Complete Catullus

by Isobel Williams

During the latter phases of Covid, Isobel Williams completed her celebrated translations of the polyamorous ancient Roman poet Catullus. The poems that proved impossible when she prepared Shibari Carmina, published to acclaim in 2021, finally surrendered to her. 'Translating Catullus has been, for me, like cage fighting with two opponents, not just A Top Poet, but the schoolgirl I was, trained to show the examiner that she knew what each word meant.' The conflict was resolved by a third component, the context of shibari, a Japanese form of rope bondage with its own knotty terminology. Due to its severe restraints Catullus came alive in all his 'tormented intelligence and romantic versatility'. Critics called the work 'explosive and impactful', 'one of the most exciting translation volumes of recent years', 'lyrical, funny, engaging, and insightful', 'a bracingly foul, but also a shrewd and funny Catullus' – 'Isobel Williams' naughty translation puts the Roman poet in a bondage dungeon.' He will never be quite the same again. Like its incomplete predecessor it is illustrated with bondage drawings by the translator herself.

Genres: Poetry, Classics

220 pages, Paperback

Published October 26, 2023

About the author

Isobel P. Williams is a retired medical consultant physician who has gone on to become an author, speaker and lecturer on polar matters. Her work includes biographies of Edward Wilson and Edgar Evans.

Reviews

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’re not familiar with Catallus, he is by far the raunchiest, crudest, and sassiest of the ancient poets. Imagine a rapper in a beef crossed with a Real Housewife. This translation is faithful to his work, but casts it in a modern light. References to things like Loro Piana clothing and Taschen books abound. I think I would have appreciated this work more if I had a greater familiarity with more straightforward Catallus translations, but overall, I enjoyed this immensely.

[C]

One thing I liked about this book is how the corrupt form in which Catullus's poems come to us is neither disguised, as with the Oxford World Classics' version, or disregarded, as it seems sometimes in Anne Carson's Sappho. Instead, Williams finds resourceful ways to dramatise, theatricalise, and even eroticise, the act of translation: it seems to happen there, on the page, right in front of us. She is a different type of artist to Carson, whose Carmina in 'Men in the Off Hours' are hard to beat as modern versions of Catullus, but she captures in her own way this sense that his thing was newness. The next moment always arrives that little bit sooner than expected. Williams puts this in terms of the shifting power dynamics in bondage. This makes the book feel experimental in a good way. That Williams was determined to 'do' every poem by Catullus helps the collection, because it presents the book's conceit as an exercise rather than a key, a question repeatedly posed rather than an answer. Some work better than others, but none fail so miserably as to upset a sense that we are witnessing, over the course of the book, one large effort to rig this antique author by shibari, and make his words and work submit. Instead they stay on squirming.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s hot Roman summer, baby! When you’re living in the imperial core of a dying, corrupt republic, nothing helps get your mind of things by reading multiple translations of a randy and rambunctious writer living in… a different dying, corrupt republic.

Unlike Catullus, who if his poems are any indication was constantly feuding or fornicating, I’ve had a pretty chaste and amicable past two months, which gave me time to dig in to a bunch of different translations of his work. They are varied! I’ll add links to my reviews of the other translations as I finish them.
- The Poems of Catullus: A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text, translated by Stephanie McCarter. 5 stars!
- The Poems of Catullus, translated by Peter Green. 3 stars!
- Catullus, translated by Roz Kaveney. 2 stars!
- The Poems of Catullus, translated by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish. 1 star!
- Switch: The Complete Catullus, translated by Isobel Williams. 4 stars!

The Roman poet and noted fuckboy Gaius Valerius Catullus celebrated in verse the publication his friend Cinna's miniature epic, the Zmyrna, and contrasted it with the long and turgid verse of their traditionalist literary foes. Catullus declared: "Zmyrnam cana diu saecula pervolvent." Zmyrna thru the long ages will be read. Catullus, and the other so-called Neoterics of the Late Republic like his friend Cinna, eschewed the ponderous, epic, and mythologically-focused verse in favor of elegantly composed short poems focused on personal themes and events, and subjective viewpoints.

Catullus, sadly, was wrong: only a collection of his own poems survive, via a manuscript tradition that involves a miraculous amount of luck rather than the institutional support that kept works from his contemporaries Caesar and Cicero around. We also have a book-length amount of fragments from contemporary poets, preserved thru quotations and scraps of papyrus, but Fragments of Roman Poetry C. 60 BC-AD 20 costs over $140 so it's as good as gone for anyone without access to a decent university library. Cinna’s Zmyrna is no longer with us and, he is mostly remembered for his memorable death scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caeasar where an angry mob confuses him with the other Cinna who helped poke holes in Caesar’s ambitions to rule Rome:

FIRST PLEBEIAN: Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.
CINNA: I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet!
FOURTH PLEBEIAN: Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses!

Poor guy.

Catullus’ poems are personal; many of them are addressed to named (explicitly or under pseudonyms) individuals, while others have an implied specific recipient. They document his amorous affairs and interests, his friendships, his fights with foes, and also one where he calls Caesar and Pompey cunts who like to take it in the ass when they’re not competing with each other to see who can fuck little girls. Like the best of ancient literature, he is both shockingly modern, and shockingly alien.

If you have any questions about my qualifications to review an ancient Roman poet, or criticism of my reviews, please hesitate to leave a comment, and remember the immortal words Catullus shared to his (presumably former) friends who thoughts his poems were a little too effeminate:

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo

Switch: The Complete Catullus, translated by Isobel Williams
Isobell Williams' translation of Catullus has the only introduction that made me laugh out loud! The short chronology of Catullus' life is more helpful than some of the scholarly summaries, and the brief and eclectic selection of his work’s afterlife is more entertaining than the usual dull overview of which dead English poets cribbed from the Veronese fuckboy genius of the Late Republic. The chart of who's fucking who is brilliant, hilarious, and honestly actually useful.

This is a very playful interpretation of Catullus. Take Poem 5: "And when we've made a killing kissing / Shake the total's to lose count / Take them beyond the kiss inspector's reach." The kiss inspector is absolutely not the translation for the Latin at the end of the poem, but it absolutely is a wonderful, flirtatious, and humorous description for the strict moralists and gossips who plague Catullus during his affair with Lesbia. Or 6: "that fuck-wasted look" is a great translation of ecfututa. Elsewhere there's brilliant and creative translations. Translating a fragment with broken HTML coding is inspired!

Williams takes inspiration, and then some, from shibari rope bondage. The book has her sketches of the practice littered about, which didn't do much for me. More pertinently, it leaves her attuned to the complex dynamics of submission and dominance which Catullus displays in his affairs and longing. Sometimes, however, this overpowers Catullus’ actual words. In 7, which is very much a poem about kissing, Williams transforms into a poem about shibari, including a stanza in Japanese. Asking how many kisses would be enough is not the same as "Stress-testing, are we Mistress? / How many of your tropes in rope / Can be endured before the poet chokes?"

The poems are interpretive enough that this probably shouldn't be your introduction to Catullus. Anachronisms abound in this intentionally modernized adaptation. Mentions of: the Seattle Erotic Art Festival, Tokyo, combine harvesters, Gucci, e-cigarette, Fender guitars, fire hoses... And that's just from a randomly selected handful of consecutive pages. Personally, I like to make the effort to reach an ancient author on their own terms, rather than modernizing them; discovering what's common and what's alien, and the friction of this process, is part of the fun. At least Williams is deeply explicit about what she's doing, and not slipping her academic morals in the backend.

What's totally lost is Catullus' very real social and political context: Catullus was witness to a pivotal period of Mediterranean history. Williams' sex web visualization in the introduction is more helpful than some of the context scholarly translations offer, rewriting the names of people and places in her translations turns it into a complex melodrama, or a messy situation ship; you can't get insight into the lives of Catullus and his culture this way. This likely won't matter to anyone who isn't interested in the Fall of the Republic cinematic universe; part of the fun I have with this body of writing is attempting to reconstruct a world from fragments and the eclectic mix of manuscripts which survived for 2000 years.

Williams’ introduction claims that Catullus had "a book-keepers eye" because 20.35% of his poems include numbers or counting." I don't see this in Catullus, and I don't know if any evidence about the Neoterics nor from Catullus' life (the scarce evidence points to him being a barely employed trust fund kid) to indicate he had this inclination. This leads to some lines with extraneous bookkeeping and accounting language. But I don't really mind this. Catullus is so multifaceted that I can accept what is, to me, an out of left field interpretation as long as it isn't the usual boring misconceptions he's been saddled with.

While reading and writing about these translations, a friend asked me why I was speculating about the sexual histories and proclivities of the various translators. I thought about it and my answer is: because Catullus totally would. Williams', even when some of her translations don’t work for me, actually fucks. I'm not saying the other translators never had sex, but some of them - Raphael and McLeish - at the very least probably view anal play as something dirty (why do the English frequently conflate the erotic and the scatological?), which is just as much of an obstacle to Catullus as not knowing Latin.

I went into this translation skeptical – on the surface it looked like a weeb Catullus. But Williams entirely won me over, not just because she captures aspects of Catullus that many of the other translators fail to grasp (again, and I really want to stress this, due to personal failings that can only be described with mean ad hominum attacks); Williams also captures the spirit of Roman translation, which is very different from our academically-informed understanding. Translation, in some ways, was more akin to conquest: the (usually Greek) original was remade in a Roman image. Poem 51 is a translation of Sappho 31 (your lesbian or trans friend’s favorite ancient poem in college), but swaps Catullus in, switching the gender dynamics around, and likely adds a final fourth stanza. Poem 66, one of the longer ones, is a translation of a Callimachus poem, but redone for Roman audiences.

The longer poems are significantly reworked as well: 61 is shortened, to good effect. Williams avoids the issues of consent and pedophilia in Roman culture: there are no weeping girls told to stop crying. More interestingly, Williams turns into a wedding celebration song from the perspective of the still single onlookers who are already bored of the heterosexual obsession with matrimony and lineage.

She takes the opposite approach in 62, another wedding song focused on social mores around female sexuality and purity. Peter Green describes it as "the boys' and girls' choirs compete in a sung impromptu exchange, in virginity versus marriage, in which (as so often in real life) while the girls make the best points and the boys mouth social platitudes, it is still the male cliché-mongers who have the last word." Williams doesn't soften the poem at all to fit modern sensibilities; instead she adds an additional line at the end of each strophe which describes a modern feature of our still virginity-obsessed culture today. Catullus, she insists to readers who are taken aback by the claim that a girl’s virginity is owned two-thirds by her parents who sell it to her husband-to-be, is still thoroughly modern. It is a blunt, jarring, and impactful take on a poem that would be easy to dismiss as regressive or archaic.

63 straddles the two approaches. Catullus' version of the myth of Attis is hard to recontextualize for today, since it is essentially about Attis conducting a self-castrating gender transition which they later regret, but when they want to return to regular society, the Great Mother Cybele violently terrorizes them into staying in her oriental (probably sex) cult. Basically, the kind of story which The Atlantic would invent wholesale and slap on the cover if they thought they could get away with it. Williams focused on the dynamics of submission and domination and skirts around what today would read as reactionary panic around gender.

64, the longest, stands out for just having some beautiful language: "Argo flew at a hint of breathe / Curved hull corseted with woven line, / And scored a rudimentary shipping lane / On the unmarked bloom of Neptune's wife." Her own spin on Catullus' paeon to the prelapsarian golden age is great: "Oh! If we could choose our time / The lost is best - / An age of gorgeous gods and godlike others / With glamorous mothers / When sex made better people / Before we edged each other to extinction."

Elsewhere, Williams is just exuberant, saying fuck it and giving half a dozen different translations of 85. Points for maximalism!

Gilles Deleuze once (jokingly?) described his monographs on individual philosophers as like fucking them from behind so they give birth to something monstrous, but still recognizable as the philosopher’s own. Williams’ does something similar – everything is still recognizably Catullus, but fucked thru and thru. Poem 32 is a great example: it is recast from Ipsitilla's perspective, and entirely captures the spirit of Catullus' demanding and entitled booty call while being its own thing, and very playfully done at the same time. I loved it! I think if Catullus wasn't such a misogynist he'd have loved it too! This edition is simply too exuberantly far from Catullus to be a good first translation for anyone interested in Gaius Valerius, but it should definitely be your second.

[rachel selene]

deeply pains me to dnf this but alas. this was my first time reading catullus in translation (beyond my own translations at least) and i can definitely appreciate the attempt that was made here but the result just isn’t for me! surprisingly i think i prefer the more traditionally faithful translation style

[Judiejodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

the same take-away as shibari carmina: worth the read for the poems that are splendid, but not every poem is a banger. still, the entire collection is a tour de force. catullus' spitfire sparkles.