The Book of Catullus

03/09/2024

Authors • Literature • Books

By PAULO MARTINS*

What remains of Catullus is enough to say that his generic eclecticism (of poetic genres) is impressive.

There 28 years I wrote in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul what he thought about the Veronese poet Catullus (approximately 87 or 84 BC – 57 or 54 BC), specifically about The Book of Catullus. On that occasion, a complete translation of the poet's work by João Angelo Oliva Neto was launched, published by Edusp in a bilingual publication, something that is still rare today.

The book was a publishing success in the field of Greco-Latin literature in Brazilian Portuguese, and even won the award for best translation of the year from the São Paulo Association of Art Critics (APCA). As a result, it was soon sold out. The interested public was left with, first, paper photocopies and, more recently, the infamous PDFs.

I return to talk again not about the same book, but about an absolutely different one, although it is the same.

Let me explain: the same publisher, in a bold move, commissioned João Angelo Oliva Neto to produce a second edition of the same 116 poems and two fragments. In the years following the first edition's sell-out, the translator and USP professor dedicated himself to producing a revision of the book that totaled 904 pages, while the original had 278.

Why such an expansion? As an answer, I propose three fundamental questions to be reflected upon: the poet, the translation and the edition.

Catullus is a great poet both in form and content. He was born in Verona and lived in Rome at the time of Julius Caesar, therefore at the end of the Republic, in short, somewhere between 87 BC and 54 BC. He was part of a group called new poets (new poet), or, as the orator and philosopher Cicero pejoratively referred to it in Greek: the “neoteroi“, the youngest, in fact, young people.

They applied themselves to a new trend that differed incisively from the more serious, grave poetry, whose exponent was Ennius, a circumspect, serious poet, given to valuing the epic tone, not that this meant a defect. Catullus and his colleagues practiced a Hellenistic poetic strand that went back to the Greeks Callimachus of Cyrene and Theocritus of Rhodes. Poets and librarians.

In fact, in Rome at that time, there was no lyrical or iambic poetry close to what some archaic Greek and Hellenistic poets had already produced. Invective poetry and love poetry were not in the Roman canon, they were not part of the “menu”.

What remains of Catullus is enough to say that his generic eclecticism (of poetic genres) is impressive. He goes from the highest sublimity to the harshest mockery.

The most interesting reference in this sense concerns his muse, who is none other than his beloved, his poetry, Lesbia. She is the target of the most sublime praise, but also of the harshest vilification:

“Let us live, Lesbia, let us love, / And the rumors of the most severe old men, / all of them!, are worth nothing. Suns / may die and be reborn, but we / when our brief light sets, / will sleep for just one eternal night. / Give me a thousand kisses and then a hundred more, give me / then another thousand, then another hundred, / then another thousand and after another hundred, / then when we have completed many thousands, / we will lose count, become confused, / because no wicked person could envy / if he knows of so many, of so many kisses” (poem 5).

It seems clear that two questions arise. The first concerns the “severest old men”, who would be those to whom Cicero would have opposed the “neoteroi", you "new poet".

Secondly, Lesbia is his beloved, his muse, his poetry. It is curious that her name refers to the island of Lesbos, where the famous Sappho, a woman poet, a producer of poetry, came from. From this we can infer that Lesbia is poetry itself personified, female poetry, part of Catullus' poetry.

But we were talking about the path from the sublime to the debasement, a path that the poet often follows. If we look at another reference to Lesbia, we will notice this contrast: “Celius, my Lesbia, Lesbia, that one, / that Lesbia only whom Catullus / loved more than himself, more than his own, / today in alleys and on street corners, / the sons of Remus magnanimously peels off.” (poem 58)

The reference to the previous poem is obvious, after all, how much love is written there. To the contemporary reader, the last two verses sound enigmatic, even strange.

Perhaps “alleys” and “corners” suggest something still common today, but what does the verb “to peel” refer to? Fellatio, oral sex? Yes, that’s what it seems to be. The Latin verb has its meaning deciphered in its onomatopoeia, “glubit“, which results in tremendous amplification: magnanimous sons of Remus, according to legend, symbolize all Romans.

The transition from praise to vituperation – Aristotelianly, possibilities of epideictic or demonstrative discourse – is a metalinguistic reference. If Lesbia is with all the Romans, she does not lower herself, on the contrary, she elevates herself, it is the poetry that everyone knows.

But The Book of Catullus has much more. It has three sections. The first, “The Trifles” (nugae), which João Angelo Oliva Neto translated from Latin into Latin, nugas, with small poems of everyday life that deal with love, delight, pleasure, anger, friendship, grace. It seems to me to be Rome seen poetically and archaeologically.

The second consists of long marriage poems, some even hexametric, the meter of the epic, as in the epilium (small epic) of the wedding of Thetis and Peleus, which, according to the chronological-mythical antecedence, would be the moment before the birth of Achilles, therefore the true starting point of the saga of Ilion, after all the epic deals with the wrath of Peleus' son.

The third and final moment of the book is the collection of poems in elegiac couplets, a two-line stanza with regularly varying measures. Poems that parallel the lament and the erotic. Let's say that it is about ill-fated love that the Roman elegy deals with.

In this section, the scholar-translator, I believe, gains prominence both in form and content. Poem 65 is a gem in Latin or in the excellent Portuguese of João Angelo Oliva Neto. A couplet from this section sums up the crucifixion of the love poet:

“I hate and I love. “How then?” you may ask. / I do not know. I feel it happening and I crucify myself.” (poem 85)

I will now turn to Edusp's masterful work. I have rarely had access to such an edition. The book is hardcover; its images have meaning and importance in comparison to the written content. The color of the pages, which are interspersed with poems, translations and notes, the precise and intelligent sections, and an exhaustive bibliography that is rarely accepted by publishing houses, make the whole thing even more important.

Finally, João Angelo Oliva Neto, when reviewing his translation work, which was previously dedicated to “make it new“, from the lineage of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, apart from the Brazilian concretes, radicalizes, as it abandons that avant-garde and assumes its philological and historical vocation. The product contributes to the understanding of those who do not know Latin.

The translator radically adopts the function of operating two equivalent levels of meaning, not making an interpretation that is often anachronistic, thus assuming the historicity of the text.

João Angelo Oliva Neto is today a mature translator and an important philologist. Few, perhaps none, could offer us such a well-finished work. All that remains for us, readers of Catullus, is delight and learning. We are faced with the “sweet and useful" Horatian. That is, what is sweet and pleasing and what is useful and convincing.

Fernando Pessoa would say, “feel, let the reader feel”.

* Paulo Martins Professor of Classical Letters and director of the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at USP. Author, among other books, of The representation and its limits (edusp).

Originally published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul.

Reference

The Book of Catullus. Translation and organization: João Angelo Oliva Neto. 2nd. Edition. São Paulo, Edusp, 2024, 904 pages. [https://amzn.to/4dT5Tsz]