The Poems of Catullus, a new translation by Daisy Dunn (William Collins)There's a bit more to translating Latin than my grounding in the discipline from 40 years ago allows for. Having been told quite categorically that amo, amare was the verb for both 'to love' and 'to like', I immediately wondered, in Catullus 72, how a translator could differentiate two meanings from the same word in a line like,
Because such a wound compels a lover
To love more, but to like less.
So I go back to my Bristol Classical Press edition, with commentary by Kenneth Quinn, to see if amare was the word used both times. This remarkable volume was clearly a mistake purchase because it has Latin text only but the poems begin on page 1, the commentary on page 88 and the index on page 457, such is the magnificent detail of the notes.
Of course, the original line does not use the same word for both senses but we have,
sed bene uelle minus
which the note tells us has the sense of 'being fond of' before providing much further enlightenment.
It is a brilliant poem that captures a complex emotional contradiction but the eternal problem with poetry in translation is that, unless one is fluent in the original language (in which case you don't need a translation), one only has the translator's word for it. Poetry can only exist in its first language and the translator has to choose between a number of options how to render the poem into another.
Our versions of Ovid at school were accurate prose translations of the meaning of the words. Our aim was to get good marks in exams rather than create an alternative poetic masterpiece so we learned the whole set book in translation and in the exam only had to recognize the beginning, write down our version from memory and realize when we had to stop. That part of the exam was more a memory game than a test of translating ability but it worked and the results achieved by Mr. Winstanley's class were tremendous.
Nevill Coghill's Canterbury Tales reproduce Chaucer's couplets but such a strategy can lead one into needing a rhyme and not having any available word, and Peter Dale's versions of Francois Villon surely reduce the medieval French poetry in places to a condition of doggerel somewhat below the quality of the first-hand text. The other option is to make a whole new poem from the author's but that seems to me to make the translation more the poem of the translator than the poet. It is a difficult subject and one needs to be careful. When I wrote about Tomas Transtromer a few months ago, I found myself re-tweeted by a poet who does some translating and she said I was a 'poetry translation sceptic'.
Well, yes, I am. But having enjoyed Daisy Dunn's life of Catullus and finding that my edition of the poems didn't have translations, I thought I'd better get her versions. I was convinced there was a book of translations here somewhere because I thought I had a book so old and prudish that it refused to even Bowdlerize poem 16. But I can't find it and I don't know how anybody could produce a version of 16 in any other terms anyway although it must be said that Kenneth's Quinn's commentary is more than somewhat circumlocutory, and eventually decides,
We may translate line 1 with Copley, 'Nuts to you, boys, nuts and go to hell'. But the literal, obscene meaning, though submerged, remains available...
Oh, really.
Those of us who remember the outrage summoned up by some of the less literary daily newspapers when Channel 4 broadcast Tony Harrison's v, in 1985, can only guess at how many burst bloodvessels they would have suffered had Catullus been writing then.
It's no big deal, is it. Daisy's Catullus is a laugh out loud collection. I refer you to 15, 32 and 33, among any number of others but I'm not going to quote the highlights here because my mother and father sometimes look to see what I've been writing about. Catullus is forthright, frank and unabashed in such poems and probably best known for them but he can also be exquisite and when one sees, in 70,
'But what a lady says to a lover in the moment
Ought to be written on the wind and running water.'
one remembers that poems are made out of other poems, books out of other books, everything comes from somewhere else and either Keats' epitaph was not as original as we thought or great minds do think alike.
But Daisy is clearly a poet in her own right as well as a classical scholar. These new translations are elegant, very thoughtfully made and highly readable. In an inspired piece of translating, she uses modern French, as she explains in the introduction, to recreate Catullus' use of Celtic words where the usual Latin wouldn't do because his native Verona was 'a part of Gaul for as long as he lived'.
Poetry-in-translation-sceptic I may be but the point I was making about Transtromer, and it applies again here, is that a translator with both a complete grasp of the original and a genuine talent for poetry of their own can make hugely satisfying versions that represent the poem authentically in another language.
And, for those who get beyond the shorter poems, those pieces of reportage from his social life in which he was never backwards in coming forward or prepared to call a spade anything less than a combine harvester, there are the magna opera with titles in the 60's. It's as if Shakespeare was known for having characters called Bottom, some innuendo in Twelfth Night about 'her C's, her U's and her T's', and the range of insults that emanate from Thersites and was never given credit for the profundity of Hamlet or Lear but a genuine bad boy is only convincing if he can show he can do the proper job as well (let's have a footnote here to make it look more academic). Catullus was the real thing and as translator, scholar and poet in her own right, so is Daisy Dunn.
My own few versions of Ovid were 'poems' made into 10-syllable lines, to at least acknowledge that Ovid wrote in strict metre, but they were done from other translations and I only glanced back at the Latin to see if I hadn't strayed too far from the primary source. I wouldn't claim to belong anywhere in the same league as Seamus Heaney or Sean O'Brien but I suspect they had a similar strategy in their respective Aeneid's and Dante's if we really knew. I doubt if Daisy needed as many artificial (sic) aids, though, and that is evident from the freshness of these poems.
I've never had a book of translations on my shortlist for Best Collection of the Year before and I usually include only books of poems first published in the year, rather than poems written over 2000 years ago,
but I'll begin this year's notes towards a shortlist with this book and make up a rule about that later.
NOTE. Just attaching the 'labels' to this effortless exercise in shallow name-dropping, I did at least swerve the opportunity to list such names as George Best, Pete Doherty and Alex Higgins as examples of 'bad boys who could do the proper job as well'.