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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
A Telegraph Best New Poetry Books for Christmas 2021Carcanet publishes several Catulluses: C.H. Sisson's, Len Krisak's, Simon Smith's. But Isobel Williams's Catullus: Shibari Carmina is different in kind from the earlier versions. 'Translating Catullus has been, for me, like cage fighting with two opponents,' the translator writes: 'not just A Top Poet, but the schoolgirl I was, trained to show the examiner that she knew what each word meant.' The struggle is intensified by the presence of a third element, something that made Catullus come alive, his 'tormented intelligence and romantic versatility'.'It eventually happened at a fetish venue in South London, The Flying Dutchman - an echo of Catullus's doomed obsessive love? Someone at life class, knowing I like a drawing challenge, had told me about a Japanese rope bondage (shibari) club called Bound. I asked the management if I could draw there; on arrival I was treated like the Queen Mother. Best of all, the schoolgirl was too young to be let in.' The dynamics of shibari released Catullus from conventional constraints and delivered him to new rigours: 'I found context, metaphor and idiom for Catullus - whom one could glibly define as a bisexual switch from the late Roman Republic when such concepts were meaningless: a stern moralist who splits into an anxious bitchy dominant with the boys, a howling sub with his nemesis, the older glamorous married woman he calls Lesbia (here called Clodia, which might have been her real name).' The poet uses the terminology and forms of social media, a very contemporary idiom which is at once subjected to severe scholarship and tight syntactical discipline. All the crucial language knots are firmed up, the sense of the Latin emerges with Catullus's own laughter restored, along with the other registers of love and loss. Isobel Williams's drawings add immediacy to her versions which 'are not (for the most part) literal translations, but take an elliptical orbit around the Latin, brushing against it or defying its gravitational pull.'
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Catullus: Shibari Carmina
ISOBEL WILLIAMS
For the riggers and the models
With thanks to Belinda Bamber for triage, to Taki Kodaira for calligraphy instruction and to Meredith McKinney for Japanese translation; Jill Ferguson and Violet Hill for Latin teaching; Tristan Franklinos, Stephen Harrison and Stephen Heyworth for tolerating a gatecrasher; the editors of Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, Poetry Salzburg Review and Stand where some of these poems were first published. A selection also featured in the Carcanet anthology New Poetries VIII.
Trinidadian Creole version of 93 © Jason Anthony Henry 2021.
Photography by Dick Makin Imaging, dmimaging.co.uk.
The Propertius epigraph is taken from S. J. Heyworth’s Oxford Classical Texts edition (2007).
libertas quoniam nulli clam restat amanti, liber erit, uiles si quis amare uolet.
Lovers have no freedom now. To be free, abandon love.
Propertius II, xxiii
CATULLUS: SHIBARI CARMINA
Shibari (Japanese): bindingCarmina Catulli (Latin): poems or songs of Catullus
These hemp bondage rope characters incorporate sōsho, Japanese cursive script, and say shibari no uta (shibari carmina).
CONTENTS
1
This book belongs to _________
… misappropriated
Words glistening raw, vellum exfoliated –
Yours if you want to navigate its folds,
Diving for cargo in the drowned holds.
Tell the teachers dead and alive I’m sorry.
While they were splitting Gaul in three they knew
I’d waste a lifetime waiting for the ferry.
Drop in. Whatever. Take a generous view.
This house dust/book dust will grow damp with tears
If I outlive him, cursed with my hundred years.
