Reception studies has for some time now comprised a growing section in the garden of Classics. If its borders are in places difficult to define – is there a neighbouring field or wood not haunted by ghosts of ancient Greek and Roman materials? – the fuzzy boundaries only make it more exciting to find a plot whose tending does credit to the gardener by rewarding the visitor with views in disproportion to its size.
Such is S.’s lively and illuminating contribution to the study of Catullan receptions. The monograph builds on S.’s previous work on classical receptions in British literature (especially Greek and Roman Classics and the British Struggle for Social Reform, co-edited with E. Hall [2015]). With it S. enters the company of other Catullus scholars including K. Harrington, J. McPeek and J. Gaisser, to name just a few. Although S. in his introduction devotes only a few pages to the question of critical terms (‘Literary Engagements’, pp. 30–2), in several other places he considers aspects of the theory and practice of reception studies in some detail. In particular he develops an argument for connections to translation studies, to which I return below.
Although naturally of interest to students of Catullus, of his receptions in British literature and of Romanticism, this monograph will richly reward students of Latin poetry and classical receptions more generally. S. offers a detailed and convincing argument that the period 1795–1821 saw changes in modern Catullan receptions that were consequential not only for writers but also for a reading public that was growing larger and becoming socially more diverse. These changes helped lay the foundations (in educational practices, in critical editions, in new and comprehensive translations, and in changed attitudes and modes of allusion) for the modern Catullus that followed.
On S.’s reading, perhaps the single most crucial factor in Catullus’ changed position over the period in question is how he could be treated as an ‘ancient Roman precedent for social protest through poetry’ (p. 30). Catullus was able to be heard as a kind of ‘countercultural classical voice’ (p. 3) because of perceptions of him as being ‘the most Greek of all the classical poets who wrote in Latin’ (p. 29). Having previously been known to small audiences and in limited forms, Catullus was available – in ways that other, already-canonical Latin authors were not – to help represent ‘the importation of an ineffable Greek spirit into British poetry’ (p. 21) and thus into a changing national literary culture.
Catullus’ renewed and expanded reception thus coincided with, and helped represent, what S. characterises as a radical poetic movement refusing earlier modes, especially epic and satire on Latin (Roman) lines. Along with some other ancient authors like Anacreon, Catullus was perceived as embodying ‘the subversive power of the public display of hedonism in times of cultural and religious conservatism’ (p. 38). On S.’s reading, in contrast to the late seventeenth century, which had been prohibitive to Catullan reception in English for technological and moral reasons, ‘conditions in the late eighteenth century’, including ‘[p]rogress in print technology’ and an increased ‘quantity of readers with sufficient education to read Catullus’ in the original, ‘were perfect’ for Catullus’ entrance into ‘the British classical canon’ (p. 43).
In that context, S. shows that ‘those instances of a Catullan influence’ on cockney poetries ‘that have in the past been glossed over as coincidences of style and subject matter … must now be granted their true significance’ (p. 306). There is something radically poetic indeed in this cockney Catullus being described as ‘a colourful message of renewed hope for social reform in an otherwise colourless metropolis … in which civil liberties were restricted and new voices of social progress were being drowned out by a chorus of conservatism’ (ibid.). His own vivid language notwithstanding, S. focuses tightly on early nineteenth-century British society. But part of the value of his monograph is that parallels suggest themselves – for example, with the radical role of poetry in Catullus’ own late Republican Rome or in public culture in the United States today. For that reason, among others, the monograph is successful, provocative and to be recommended.
Chapter 1 focuses on translations of Catullus by John Nott (1795) and George Lamb (1821). Nott's bilingual edition offered ‘an experience of the Catullan text that had been previously preserved for those with advanced Latin’ (p. 93) and influenced writers including Frank Sayers, Leigh Hunt and Françoise Noël as well as Lamb – ‘an educational or scholarly tool in the first place’ (p. 97). Lamb's version in ‘smooth and readable verse’ spoke to ‘another growing market for classical literature’, namely ‘upper-class female and aspirant-class male readers of classical poetry in English translation’ (p. 94), and so offered ‘an entertaining cultural experience to the English poetry reading public’ (p. 97). Nott and Lamb thus represent the foundation and the first full result of Catullus being completely available for British Romantics.
Chapter 2 takes as a case study Catullus 64 as translated in part by Sayers (1803) and Charles Abraham Elton (1814) and as engaged with otherwise by writers including Thomas Love Peacock (Rhododaphne, 1818), John Keats (Endymion) and Leigh Hunt (Bacchus and Ariadne). S. argues for a ‘symbolic allegory’ in which ‘the abandonment of Ariadne and the arrival of Bacchus accrue polemical reformist significance in line with the wider goals of the Hunt circle in the 1810s’ (p. 304). This of course is the cockney Catullus, a countercultural classic available for helping express certain authors’ radical political messages.
Providing a sort of context, Chapter 3 focuses on non-cockney writers, including Thomas Moore, Walter Savage Landor, Lord Byron and William Wordsworth in addition to the weekly The Anti-Jacobin. In these writers and others are to be found other versions of Catullus, including those familiar from the kiss poems and the invective. On S.’s reading this diversity of versions shows Catullus’ ‘growing popularity among the classically educated people of Britain’ (p. 305).
Chapter 4 returns to the cockney Catullus by focusing on engagements with Catullus by Leigh Hunt himself, including in Catullan poems in his weekly The Examiner. Drawn to Catullus’ qualities of ‘eroticism, intimate sociality, and … highly emotive tone’, Hunt ‘significantly broadened the contemporary perception of Catullus’ and ‘brought to the fore aspects of Catullus’ work that supported his wider campaign for social reform’ (p. 305). In this way especially Catullus was made cockney, serving a radical countercultural role.
Finally, Chapter 5 focuses on ‘cockney bantling’ John Keats, arguing that ‘images and ideas associated with Catullus were an essential part of Keats’ countercultural classical style’. In this way S. shows that Catullus was more significant to British literature of the period than previously acknowledged.
Before leaving S.’s well-tended plot, I note his interest in a grafting that seems fruitful for other students of classical reception: renewed and strengthened connections between classical reception studies and translation studies (esp. pp. 93–6). Drawing on Lawrence Venuti's The Translator's Invisibility (1995), S. argues for a nuanced appraisal of translations of classical texts as constituting not only reading publics of different kinds but also, in relation to those kinds, acts of ‘ethnographic violence’. In Catullan receptions these would include previous ‘domestications’ of Catullus for a narrowly circumscribed ‘aristocratic reading elite’; in that context, the sort of translation practised by, for example, John Nott ‘was such a powerful act … because it rejected the dominant fashion of presenting a vernacular classic and in doing so became one of the first class-blind classical texts in the English language’ (p. 95). Thus Venuti's translation theory allows S. to say precisely how Nott's translation ‘provided unprecedented access to the whole of Catullus’ extant oeuvre’ (p. 96). Here then are the sorts of substantial and thought-provoking results that should encourage the further application of translation studies theory to the practice of reception studies.
