There are many Catulluses. Of all Roman poets he is now the most translated, with the rate of publication of complete versions accelerating since the millennium. The scholarship and quality of literal translations of Catullus are good enough, and Catullus’ relationship to poets writing in English close enough, that the original text can work as a starting point for departure, much as a jazz improviser might take a popular standard for a walk, much as John Coltrane takes the Rodgers and Hammerstein song ‘My Favourite Things’ to unexpected and new places. So, from the 1960s there is Peter Whigham's William Carlos Williams’ version, the Zukofskys’ homophonic scoring, and recently the postmodernist crisis management of B. Brown's The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (2011), where he holds up the late Roman Republic to the collapse of American world domination.
It has been a while since a version using metrical forms has appeared in English, J. Michie's is perhaps the last really ambitious attempt to use form in this way, from 1969. K.'s volume revisits this formalist ‘take’ on Catullus with real flair and panache. The translations are particularly effective in their treatment of the more eye-watering poems, Poems 36, 37 and 39, and Poem 97 is suitably accurate in its rendering as to be unrepeatable here.
The use of the sonnet form, almost as a kind of default setting for these translations is bold, with a challenging confidence Catullus himself might have found attractive. And of course, with Petrarch his admirer and imitator, Catullus enters (at least in sensibility) English poetry and love lyric via the sonnet as well as through the numerous versions of the ‘kiss’ and ‘sparrow’ poems penned by the courtiers of the Elizabethan period. K.'s versions have a canny and quick sense of how the tradition of Catullus in English curves back, full-circle, making the sonnet the quite natural vehicle for the shorter polyphonics of 1–60 and the darker epigrams of 69–116.
This publication comes with no scholarly apparatus or even perfunctory notes, which is a pity. The translator has removed many of the allusions from the Latin text, presumably in the name of readability. This technique can work in the shorter lyrics and epigrams, but glosses over a major feature of the longer poems, where Catullus is using his learning as a strategy to show sophistication and elegance in these most ambitious pieces of tour de force intelligence. The omission of many of the allusions that embed context to the poem is especially crucial to Poem 63, the ‘Attis’ poem, where the relevance to the cult of Cybele of self-castration is key to understanding the poem's entirety.
K.'s translations of Catullus are further proof that the Roman poet's work is so embedded in the DNA of poetry (and lyric) in English that all poets should try their hand at Catullus, as poets have at least since the sixteenth century. Catullus is looking over poets’ shoulders, whether they are aware of him or not.
