Catullus: The Poems by Gaius Valerius Catullus
Poetry. Ever since the poems of Catullus were discovered in a wine cask in Verona in the 13th century, translators have returned to them over and over, insisting on their continued relevance. These troubling poems have scandalized and delighted generations of readers in translation, as they apparently scandalized and perhaps delighted the literary coterie surrounding Catullus in pre-revolutionary Rome. Brandon Brown's THE POEMS OF GAIUS VALERIUS CATULUS is a translation in which the decadent excesses of ascending Roman hegemony meet the decadent excesses of collapsing American domination. The meeting is staged as half confrontation, half party. And this confrontation/party monster goes down in the overdetermined and hyper-privileged site of translation: the translator's body. Instead of reduplicating what Lawrence Venuti calls the translator's invisibility, Brown is all too visible, exposing himself in various costumes: abject hero, demonic oaf, pathetic provocateur, swaggy braggart. These poems exploit the specificity of times and places to their maximal debasement, so the Gods of ancient Rome can't be distinguished from Brad Pitt watching Avatar, finally. And such spectacular cultural force doesn't just live in the sky, but irrupts into this sustained act of interpretive reading. Imagine if Brad Pitt came to your wedding. No, seriously. Dead serious and impossibly fraught, Catullus's poems lurch in the hallways of the social networks in which we live. The time just before the machines become part of our bodies. Dazzling and devastated.
Much the best translation in English -- Rex Warner
Catullus is fiendishly hard to translateTo bring him alive needs stringent discipline and love of the work: here they are ... 'Ave' I say to Catullus and his brilliant translator. There will be no 'vale' to this book for a very long time. -- Patrick Dickinson
... a performance of immense lucidity and pace, following the sense of the original with unerring accuracy and discernment. He catches the dirty rancour of the shorter pieces as finely as the formal splendours of the longer narratives. -- Alan Brownjohn
Catullus is fiendishly hard to translateTo bring him alive needs stringent discipline and love of the work: here they are ... 'Ave' I say to Catullus and his brilliant translator. There will be no 'vale' to this book for a very long time. -- Patrick Dickinson
... a performance of immense lucidity and pace, following the sense of the original with unerring accuracy and discernment. He catches the dirty rancour of the shorter pieces as finely as the formal splendours of the longer narratives. -- Alan Brownjohn
Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84-54 BCE) was born at Verona into a wealthy family. Part of the 'new wave' of Latin poets at Rome whose reputation for epigrams and making love to married women was accompanied by an intense interest in the Alexandrian school, Catullus remains today, with 116 extant poems, one of the world's greatest lyric poets. James Michie, born in 1927, was educated at Marlborough College, and Trinity College, Oxford, at which he was a classical scholar. His previous books include Possible Laughter and a translation of The Odes of Horace.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781853991295 |
| ISBN 10 | 1853991295 |
| Title | Catullus: The Poems |
| Author | Gaius Valerius Catullus |
| Series | Latin Texts |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing PLC |
| Year published | 1991-06-01 |
| Number of pages | 239 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |