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Catullus
"Roz Kaveney's modern adaptations of Catullus' poems bring them right up to date - in all their, sometimes shocking, 'new-ness' a good reminder how edgy ancient poetry could be." - Mary Beard, Professor of Classics, University of Cambridge "To make Catullus' much-translated poems seem surprising and fresh is a rare achievement - but nothing less than the most scabrous, the most tender of Roman poets deserves. A wonderful feat." - Tom Holland, historian and novelist "Hilarious, poignant, mischievous, distraught, Roz Kaveney's twinkling versions capture the staggering range of Catullus' poetic moods, subjects, and forms ... She nails the jokes, uproariously; brilliantly sees how Catullus' world and ours superimpose ..." - Nick Lowe, Reader in Classics, Royal Holloway University "In a great time for female translators of Catullus, Roz Kaveney's versions are a particular delight. With her use of language and verse structure, she seems to capture the authentic voice of the poet." - Tony Keen, Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Notre Dame
- GenresPoetry
Unknown Binding
First published September 30, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 14, 2026
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:
Poor guy.
Catullus’ poems are personal and interpersonal; 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:
Catullus, Translated by Roz Kaveney
Decent and sometimes good translators or adaptors take what's old and unfamiliar and put it in a modern dress, so that we can recognize dynamics which would otherwise be obscure to us because of the unfamiliar cultural context. Writer, poet, translator, and pioneering trans rights activist Roz Kaveney sets out to translate the Roman homosexuality of Catullus into a "countercultural view that subverted the standard assumptions about penetration of inferiors and sexuality as subjugation" as she states in the afterward.
The strongest example of this, to mixed effect, is the famous opening invective of Poem 16, which she translates forcefully as "Eat out my pussy while I fuck you hard / my hands up both your arses." To this translation’s credit, Kaveney is the only one I’ve read who captures the jarring and explicit Latin of Catullus’ line. However, this ends up queering Catullus in ways which overwrite the actually existing sexualities of ancient Rome. Kaveney rewrites 16 to be a counterattack against accusations that Catullus’ poems say something about his personal sexual activities, rather than a defense against the idea that his poems show him to be an effete, feminine little bitch. "Eat out my pussy" captures the aggressive sexual invective of Catullus, but it flips the gendered and sexual dynamics around.
Kaveney elsewhere remakes Catullus to powerful effect. Her translation of poem 63 gets closer than Catullus is able to the story of Attis, priest/ess of Cybele who self-castrates to transition to womanhood in a fit of ecstatic mania before longing for the Rome she left behind. It is moving and powerful, highlighting Attis' yearning and sorrow for the loss of home after his/her self-castration/transition, rather than the regret. This interpretation is subtler and more complex, and certainly interesting.
A few other poems are done cleverly: 14, where Catullus complains about a collection of bad poetry gifted to him, is written so that every line until the last ponderously rhymes; in this translation, Catullus' complaint about bad poets is underlined sarcastically by the strained and unrelenting rhyming. Clever! 23, more than the more literal and accurate translations, doesn't have to be read three times to get the gist. "Furius, your poor home lacks both safe and slave, / no hearth, too cold for spiders or for fleas." Compare this with Peter Green's translation, where Furius' Stoic poverty isn't obviously the point at all: "You have, Furius, neither slave nor strongbox, / neither bugs nor spiders, no, nor kindling -".
However, many of the translations were just no good. Poem 5, swooningly romantic and rebellious in its rejection of social opinions, is confused in its imagery. "As long as we can go on living, dear, / my Lesbia, let's go on making love. / Old men may moan. A Penny's worth above / the price of all their whinging, that is clear." Following "let's go on making love" with a full sentence "Old men may moan" is confusing - they're moaning in the sense of whinging, not moaning in the sense of crying out during sex, which the preceding line opens up semantically but which is neither there as text or subtext. There's a version of this poem where the rūmōrēsque senum sevēriōrum is based on jealousy or sexual envy, but the following line doesn't follow thru on that at all and the final line of the poem entirely forecloses on: "kisses that no-one envies, for we say / we've no idea how much we've kissed today." The "dear" and "that is clear" are extraneous and not from the original Latin, but the lines need them to rhyme.
And the rhymes are where this collection really falls apart. Almost none of them come naturally to the translations, and often seem to require a extraneous words or a wholesale rewriting of the meaning. These aren’t creative, poetic, or thematic interpretations: they’re just called for by the need to get a rhyme scheme of ABAB, AABB, or pro di inmortales in 49 AAAABB (…Cicero/…know/…although/…below/….bad/…had). The literary effect is bad, but the poem loses the subtle sarcasm of Catullus’ original and simply adds stuff that’s not there: “I’m forced to offer you my thanks, although / you hate my verse.” Catullus is not forced to offer thanks and there’s no indication in the original that Catullus thinks Cicero hates his verse. One of the earliest and finest examples of a catty, sarcastic bitch offering backhanded compliments is just erased in order to get some uninspired rhymes in!
Kaveney makes several choices to create a more readable work with 64, an epyllion (mini-epic) with stories-within-stories is written for an educated audience familiar with the myths of Theseus, Peleus, and the others: the Argonauts are described as Earth's Mightiest Heroes, but without doing anything to play with the nauseating insistence on connecting superheroes with ancient myths. I guess the Argonauts are like the Avengers in that they're a collection of famous heroes with their own individual stories, but the gesture is just toward a familiar modern landmark, rather than new literary terrain to work with. Kaveney also adds explanatory lines for the various myths: *why* Jupiter approves of the marriage between Thetis - whom he once pursued - and Thetis, *why* Theseus and the Athenians are sent to the Minotaur, etc. It's fair and reasonable to explain what a modern audience won't immediately remember, but what's lost is the poems lore-dense approach to stories, and the fact that it assumes an audience of Greek myth nerds that Catullus was writing for. Kaveney already gestured towards the plague of Marvel movies; a more interesting approach would have been to recreate the feeling of being dropped into Avengers 5 or whatever where you are expected to have seen 20 movies and 4 TV shows already, but a Greco-Roman version.
What's galling is that Kaveney reorders the episodes in the poem in the lengthy ecphrasis covering Theseus and Ariadne: Catullus weaves a dense and complicated timeline, starting with Ariadne abandonment, flashing back to her meeting Theseus, his killing of the Minotaur and their flight, before returning to her abandonment and her invocation of the Furies to curse Theseus, then flashing back again to Theseus and his father at the start of his journey and his arrival on Crete, a return to Ariadne's Lamentations, a flash forward to Theseus' arrival and his father's death, and then a return to Ariadne and her rescue/rape by Bacchus. The effect produced is of Ariadne's grief and rage moving backwards and forwards through time and reaching out well beyond the shores of the island she is stranded on. (A hack like Christopher Nolan could have learned a thing or two from Catullus about scrambling the timelines of narratives centering around someone trapped on an island). Kaveney straightens out the chronology, with one flash ack to Theseus and his father at the start of his journey, producing a version that's more coherent but flat and lacking the power of Catullus' original, as well as the display of poetic and narrative intricacy that the Neoterics prized. This version is for the readers who are excited to say "I understood that reference" to the Avengers but need anything from before 2008 spelled out for them.
Kaveney is trying some fun and interesting stuff here, but the poems are hobbled and flattened by the form she fits them into. I wish I had liked this one more, but I frequently did not enjoy the poems as poems, or thought that the interpretation of Catullus was flat and dull compared to the original. There are a few with spark, wit, and insight, but the Muses were not with Kaveney when it came to translating the complete Catullus.
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 and interpersonal; 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
Catullus, Translated by Roz Kaveney
Decent and sometimes good translators or adaptors take what's old and unfamiliar and put it in a modern dress, so that we can recognize dynamics which would otherwise be obscure to us because of the unfamiliar cultural context. Writer, poet, translator, and pioneering trans rights activist Roz Kaveney sets out to translate the Roman homosexuality of Catullus into a "countercultural view that subverted the standard assumptions about penetration of inferiors and sexuality as subjugation" as she states in the afterward.
The strongest example of this, to mixed effect, is the famous opening invective of Poem 16, which she translates forcefully as "Eat out my pussy while I fuck you hard / my hands up both your arses." To this translation’s credit, Kaveney is the only one I’ve read who captures the jarring and explicit Latin of Catullus’ line. However, this ends up queering Catullus in ways which overwrite the actually existing sexualities of ancient Rome. Kaveney rewrites 16 to be a counterattack against accusations that Catullus’ poems say something about his personal sexual activities, rather than a defense against the idea that his poems show him to be an effete, feminine little bitch. "Eat out my pussy" captures the aggressive sexual invective of Catullus, but it flips the gendered and sexual dynamics around.
Kaveney elsewhere remakes Catullus to powerful effect. Her translation of poem 63 gets closer than Catullus is able to the story of Attis, priest/ess of Cybele who self-castrates to transition to womanhood in a fit of ecstatic mania before longing for the Rome she left behind. It is moving and powerful, highlighting Attis' yearning and sorrow for the loss of home after his/her self-castration/transition, rather than the regret. This interpretation is subtler and more complex, and certainly interesting.
A few other poems are done cleverly: 14, where Catullus complains about a collection of bad poetry gifted to him, is written so that every line until the last ponderously rhymes; in this translation, Catullus' complaint about bad poets is underlined sarcastically by the strained and unrelenting rhyming. Clever! 23, more than the more literal and accurate translations, doesn't have to be read three times to get the gist. "Furius, your poor home lacks both safe and slave, / no hearth, too cold for spiders or for fleas." Compare this with Peter Green's translation, where Furius' Stoic poverty isn't obviously the point at all: "You have, Furius, neither slave nor strongbox, / neither bugs nor spiders, no, nor kindling -".
However, many of the translations were just no good. Poem 5, swooningly romantic and rebellious in its rejection of social opinions, is confused in its imagery. "As long as we can go on living, dear, / my Lesbia, let's go on making love. / Old men may moan. A Penny's worth above / the price of all their whinging, that is clear." Following "let's go on making love" with a full sentence "Old men may moan" is confusing - they're moaning in the sense of whinging, not moaning in the sense of crying out during sex, which the preceding line opens up semantically but which is neither there as text or subtext. There's a version of this poem where the rūmōrēsque senum sevēriōrum is based on jealousy or sexual envy, but the following line doesn't follow thru on that at all and the final line of the poem entirely forecloses on: "kisses that no-one envies, for we say / we've no idea how much we've kissed today." The "dear" and "that is clear" are extraneous and not from the original Latin, but the lines need them to rhyme.
And the rhymes are where this collection really falls apart. Almost none of them come naturally to the translations, and often seem to require a extraneous words or a wholesale rewriting of the meaning. These aren’t creative, poetic, or thematic interpretations: they’re just called for by the need to get a rhyme scheme of ABAB, AABB, or pro di inmortales in 49 AAAABB (…Cicero/…know/…although/…below/….bad/…had). The literary effect is bad, but the poem loses the subtle sarcasm of Catullus’ original and simply adds stuff that’s not there: “I’m forced to offer you my thanks, although / you hate my verse.” Catullus is not forced to offer thanks and there’s no indication in the original that Catullus thinks Cicero hates his verse. One of the earliest and finest examples of a catty, sarcastic bitch offering backhanded compliments is just erased in order to get some uninspired rhymes in!
Kaveney makes several choices to create a more readable work with 64, an epyllion (mini-epic) with stories-within-stories is written for an educated audience familiar with the myths of Theseus, Peleus, and the others: the Argonauts are described as Earth's Mightiest Heroes, but without doing anything to play with the nauseating insistence on connecting superheroes with ancient myths. I guess the Argonauts are like the Avengers in that they're a collection of famous heroes with their own individual stories, but the gesture is just toward a familiar modern landmark, rather than new literary terrain to work with. Kaveney also adds explanatory lines for the various myths: *why* Jupiter approves of the marriage between Thetis - whom he once pursued - and Thetis, *why* Theseus and the Athenians are sent to the Minotaur, etc. It's fair and reasonable to explain what a modern audience won't immediately remember, but what's lost is the poems lore-dense approach to stories, and the fact that it assumes an audience of Greek myth nerds that Catullus was writing for. Kaveney already gestured towards the plague of Marvel movies; a more interesting approach would have been to recreate the feeling of being dropped into Avengers 5 or whatever where you are expected to have seen 20 movies and 4 TV shows already, but a Greco-Roman version.
What's galling is that Kaveney reorders the episodes in the poem in the lengthy ecphrasis covering Theseus and Ariadne: Catullus weaves a dense and complicated timeline, starting with Ariadne abandonment, flashing back to her meeting Theseus, his killing of the Minotaur and their flight, before returning to her abandonment and her invocation of the Furies to curse Theseus, then flashing back again to Theseus and his father at the start of his journey and his arrival on Crete, a return to Ariadne's Lamentations, a flash forward to Theseus' arrival and his father's death, and then a return to Ariadne and her rescue/rape by Bacchus. The effect produced is of Ariadne's grief and rage moving backwards and forwards through time and reaching out well beyond the shores of the island she is stranded on. (A hack like Christopher Nolan could have learned a thing or two from Catullus about scrambling the timelines of narratives centering around someone trapped on an island). Kaveney straightens out the chronology, with one flash ack to Theseus and his father at the start of his journey, producing a version that's more coherent but flat and lacking the power of Catullus' original, as well as the display of poetic and narrative intricacy that the Neoterics prized. This version is for the readers who are excited to say "I understood that reference" to the Avengers but need anything from before 2008 spelled out for them.
Kaveney is trying some fun and interesting stuff here, but the poems are hobbled and flattened by the form she fits them into. I wish I had liked this one more, but I frequently did not enjoy the poems as poems, or thought that the interpretation of Catullus was flat and dull compared to the original. There are a few with spark, wit, and insight, but the Muses were not with Kaveney when it came to translating the complete Catullus.
February 17, 2021
This is right on the line between a translation and using the originals as a jumping-off point. It does out-filthy the original in many places, and has all the hallmarks of the translator having a great time. Pretty great.
August 5, 2021
Never expected to find an english version of Catullus that approached what I experienced reading him in Latin, but this charming collection comes closer than I’d hoped.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews