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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Classics
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
During the latter phases of Covid, Isobel Williams completed her celebrated translations of the polyamorous ancient Roman poet Catullus. The poems that proved impossible when she prepared Shibari Carmina, published to acclaim in 2021, finally surrendered to her. 'Translating Catullus has been, for me, like cage fighting with two opponents, not just A Top Poet, but the schoolgirl I was, trained to show the examiner that she knew what each word meant.' The conflict was resolved by a third component, the context of shibari, a Japanese form of rope bondage with its own knotty terminology. Due to its severe restraints Catullus came alive in all his 'tormented intelligence and romantic versatility'. Critics called the work 'explosive and impactful', 'one of the most exciting translation volumes of recent years', 'lyrical, funny, engaging, and insightful', 'a bracingly foul, but also a shrewd and funny Catullus' – 'Isobel Williams' naughty translation puts the Roman poet in a bondage dungeon.' He will never be quite the same again. Switch joins Carcanet's Classics series. Like its incomplete predecessor it is illustrated with bondage drawings by the translator herself. She adds a 'who shagged whom' chart so readers can move confidently from one engagement to the next.
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Switch: The Complete Catullus
Isobel Williams
CARCANET CLASSICS
For the riggers and the models
With thanks to Hubert Best, Dr Sarah Cullinan Herring, Dr Tristan Franklinos, Professor Stephen Harrison; Taki Kodaira for calligraphy instruction; Meredith McKinney for Japanese translation; Jill Ferguson and Violet Hill for Latin teaching; the editors of Blackbox Manifold, Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, PN Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and Stand where some of these poems were first published. A selection also featured in the Carcanet anthology New Poetries VIII.
Photography by Dick Makin Imaging, dmimaging.co.uk.
The Propertius epigraph is taken from S.J. Heyworth’s Oxford Classical Texts edition (2007).
Read ’em and weep, the dead man’s hand again.
Ace of Spades, Motörhead
libertas quoniam nulli clam restat amanti,
liber erit, viles si quis amare volet.
Lovers have no freedom now.
To be free, abandon love.
Propertius II, 23
Switch
Catullus controls several poetic metres. From poem 65 onwards he uses only the elegiac couplet: dactylic hexameter, then dactylic pentameter. Six feet out, five feet back. Rise, fall, lead, follow, a form for a switch. Catullus splits into an anxious bitchy dominant with the boys, a howling submissive with his nemesis, the older woman he calls Lesbia.
In Japan, the English word has been adopted with its street meaning: these rope hiragana characters say suittchi.
Contents
1. This book belongs to
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.
Introduction
I draw Japanese rope bondage (shibari) as an outsider. What I see is created for an audience, with the consent of all parties. No! I am not Miss Whiplash, nor was meant to be.
Catullus was held in emotional bondage by affairs with men and women. The Roman Republic knew nothing of the Japanese archipelago: I use shibari simply as a context.
Shibari (‘binding’) is derived from the ancient martial art of hojōjutsu. A dominant top, or rigger, ties a submissive, also called a bottom, model or bunny. Performers start with floorwork. The rigger may then suspend the bottom in a sequence of transitions, communicating via breaths and glances. Theatrical elements can include dripping wax on skin (the candles used have a low melting point).
There is a fluid dynamic with a constant flicker of role-reversal. Gorgone, a French star of tying and being tied, describes the paradox of who’s really in charge: being a top is about humility, being a bottom is about power.
When tied, Gorgone feels like the golem, the formless creature of clay given shape when the Hebrew word אמת (emet, truth) is written on her forehead. The rigger’s vision creates her in rope. ‘I was nothing and your eyes saw me,’ she says.
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
Psalm 139, verse 16
Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated
Shibari is a form of translation. The top arranges the bottom in a shape he or she could not hold or maybe even attain alone.
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom temporarily has an ass’s head when he is ensnared in Oberon’s quasi-shibari public domination of his wife Titania. Translators must try to avoid giving a text the head of a donkey through misreading or doubtful taste, but at least they do no permanent harm to the original. Rope marks on the skin should leave a pleasing pattern but will soon fade.
Side-stepping one problem, my versions here are not (for the most part) literal translations, but take an elliptical orbit around the Latin, brushing against it or defying its gravitational pull.
belinda: Ay, but you know, we must return good for evil.
lady brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.
Sir John Vanbrugh, The Provok’d Wife
The Poet
Catullus gets under the skin. You suffer with him if you meet him in the schoolroom: all that wounded self and thwarted desire.
He collars you with urgent clarity (what Robert Herrick calls his ‘terse muse’). Vital and volatile, elegant and cruel, he is a learned master of poetic form who covers the range: beauty, anguish, tender lyrics, spite; low-life drama, glittery wedding poems, street encounters, sweeping myth; love laid bare in all its moods; and vengeful smutty attacks – a streak of powered-up Viz without the good intentions.
Facts about Gaius Valerius Catullus are scarce. His life, or a version of it, is in his poems. Here are some stepping stones to the present:
Circa 84 bc: Born into the minor aristocracy. His father, a citizen of Verona, has a villa on Lake Garda and knows Julius Caesar.
?? bc: Moves to Rome. This is the late Roman Republic, buffeted by rivals grabbing wealth and raising armies. Catullus thrives in a cultured elite. Makes friends and enemies.
Money: Complains about being broke but has private means (so needs no patron). Targets bankrupts and a love rival who can’t afford slaves. A book-keeper’s eye: 20.35% of his poems include numbers or counting.
Morals: Conflicted. Combines traditional Roman fastidiousness with a racy life which he mines for material, using real names. Targets shaggers, incestuous shaggers, politicians and plutocrats.
Boyfriend trouble: Jumpy and jealous over a sought-after Lord Alfred Douglas type called Juventius.
Woman trouble: Hangs out the love and hate in his excoriating affair with an older married aristocrat he names Lesbia, maybe to highlight her learning: the poetess Sappho was from Lesbos. Sometimes he calls her domina, the word a slave would use for his mistress. If she exists, and as a woman, she might be Clodia Metelli, a politician’s wife then widow. Whatever her deeds, trying to live as freely as an unfettered man of the time is enough to get this Clodia a bad rap. The orator Cicero implicates her in incest (with her brother Clodius) and even murder – is her husband’s sudden death natural?
Poetry: Writes for a coterie, has an eye on posterity. Targets bad poets. Will be the leading survivor among the neoterics, a polished clique of new poets following Greek models, notably Callimachus who lived about two hundred years earlier. They discard the inimitably weighty Homeric epic for lyrics, elegies and epigrams on more personal themes, and the epyllion, an epic in miniature. Poetry doesn’t yet rhyme but Catullus almost does at times, internally and at ends of lines (angiportis/…nepotes), building up the music with alliteration and assonance (ave atque vale; tunditur unda) and snatches of repetition.
?? bc: Bereavement: his cherished nameless brother dies in the Troad, the region where Troy stood in what is now Anatolia.
57–56 bc: Sampling politics, joins the retinue of Memmius, governor of the Roman province of Bithynia, now north-western Turkey. Is rude about him afterwards. While on this tour, visits his brother’s tomb. His lament for his brother (poem 101), full of plangent ‘ah’ sounds, ends with the lapidary ave atque vale (hail and farewell), a monument to the untranslatable and un-updatable.
By 54 bc: Accuses Julius Caesar, who is subduing Gaul and Britain, of lechery, sodomy, letting his chief engineer loot conquered lands, and (possibly the worst in Catullus’s eyes) being a pseudo-intellectual. Gets away with it.
Circa 54 bc: Dies – or not – aged about twenty-nine (older than Keats, close to Marlowe). C.H. Sisson’s ‘the body burnt out by lechery’ is not ascertainable. Will influence pillars of the canon, including Horace, Martial, Ovid, Propertius and Virgil, and disintegrate into mere fragments quoted by others.
9th century: A spark – poem 62 pops up in an anthology.
Circa 1300: Crashes through to posterity. A manuscript full of errors, from a time more recent than his, turns up in Verona. It is lost again, but not before being copied to start the chain reaction which draws in Petrarch. Poems 1-60 are short, in a variety of metres, with gaps left by three poems incorporated in the sixteenth century, rejected in the nineteenth. They are followed by seven longer poems, a compact epic and forty-eight epigrams. Scholars debate whether Catullus assigned the poems’ order. All I know is that when I rearranged them into boy poems and girl poems it looked like a dog’s breakfast.
1472: Printed for the first time, in Venice. Catullus scholarship gets going.
1570s: Has been echoed by other English poets, but translation into English kicks off with Sir Philip Sidney and poem 70; pitch invasion starts about 200 years later.
1680: Jean de La Chapelle begins the novelisation of Catullus with Les Amours de Catulle
