Catullus, Carmina 16

[starlady]

I nearly inflicted this (as well as 15 and 48, coming tomorrow) on my students today, and then I decided that I wasn't going to traumatize them without it being completely pedagogically relevant.


Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.
Nam castum esse decet pium poetam
ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est;
qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem,
si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici
et quod pruriat incitare possunt,
non dico pueris, sed his pilosis,
qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos.
Vos quod milia multa basiorum
legistis, male me marem putatis?
Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.

I'll bugger and face-fuck you,
Aurelius the cocksucker and Furius the faggot,
You who think, from my little verses,
That I am soft and indecent, because they are.
Now the dutiful poet ought to be pure himself,
But that's not necessary for his little poems;
Which, in the end, have salt and charm
If they are soft and immodest
And are able to stir up desire,
And I'm not talking about in boys, but in those hairy men
Who aren't able to move their stiff thighs.
You, because you've read about many thousands of kisses,
You don't think that I'm a real man?
I'll bugger and face-fuck you.

Although I've chosen to use current homophobic terms for "cinaede" and "pathice" in line two, it's important to emphasize that the tenor of the insult is completely different in context. Contemporary society categorizes sexuality in terms of bodies: which kind of biologically sexed body are you attracted to, and is it the same as yours or different? In the ancient world, specifically in the Greek and Roman context, the distinction was about who did what to whom, rather than what kind of body was being done to: the concern was not to be the sexually "passive," i.e. the penetratee, in sexual acts, but rather to be the penetrator, i.e. "active." It was perfectly permissible for adult men to take an active role with whomever, and for boys and youths to take the passive role in such relationships--however, the ideal (or the ideology) was that these relationships would involve at most intercrural sex, rather than anal penetration.

Comments

[rachelmanija]

Cocksucker, though it has homophobic connotations nowadays, is literally what pathice means, right? And cineade means "one who takes it up the ass?" Maybe for the latter, "assfucked" would be more accurate than "faggot," which is only about orientation and not about specific acts.

I love that poem. ;)

[starlady]

Yeah, "cocksucker" and "pathice" are basically synonyms. If I were going for strict literal accuracy, "assfucked" would work for cinaede, but I don't know that English speakers would understand the point of it right off the bat. ;)

[rushthatspeaks]

We just don't have the correct register of obscene insult. In that 'catamite' isn't insulting enough...

[starlady]

Side note that you will get: I really wanted to say "molly" or some variant for "molliculis," but not enough people know what it means in English, I think, argh.

[recessional]

Depends on your audience, I think ("catamite" hits me fairly hard, actually), but certainly true for most people.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

No, Catullus, your verses don't make me think you're soft and indecent. They make me think you're a whiny, spineless little punk who can't make up his mind about Lesbia. "I love her! Though she's kind of a bitch. I love her! Except I sometimes hate her. I love her! I hate her! Waaaaaah!"

(I might have liked him better had we translated a different selection of his poems.)

[starlady]

Did you only read the Lesbia poems? Because, having read all of the poems in either English or Latin or both, I have to say that I unironically love Catullus. (Also I'm convinced that the Carmina were an influence on Shakespeare's Sonnets, but I can't prove it.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

We translated some others, too, but because this was for high school AP Latin, it tended to be pretty bland. And there was a whole lotta Lesbia.

I should probably try some of his other stuff.

[epershand]

You might be interested in this recording of my personal favorite set of Catullus recordings. It hits the part of Catullus that I adore, really well :)

[epershand]

I really like your translation. "Faggot" hits it well. I might go for something like "needy bottom" but that doesn't quite fit into a poem as well.

ETA: I have a friend with a Catullus icon that says "the sparrow is my penis." It makes me wildly happy.

[starlady]

OMG that icon is clearly amazing.

Thanks.

[everchangingmuse]

This is the poem that I couldn't translate in front of my male professor at college, only to have it inspire my entire senior thesis. Went to a women's college, and the new Latin professor was male and relatively young. And he picks shy little me to translate aloud. Beet red, I tell him I can't, because (I roll my eyes at this now) you don't say those words in front of adults. And one of my classmates was chosen instead, and she gave the most mechanical translation possible for the first line, at which our professor stopped the translation, and, from his meek-seeming face, came the words, "No, what he's really saying here is, 'I will fuck you up the ass and make you blow me'."

You have never seen a room full of young women go so wide-eyed so fast. It floored me that teachers could do this (but, college, so yeah, naive me).

And then I wrote my undergraduate thesis on sexual invective during the reign of the Emperor Domitian.

[starlady]

That is a great story. I love those sorts of stories. Unfortunately, in this class (comparative empires) this poem would ultimately have been more derailing than not.

My own personal Awkward Classics Moment came in my junior year, and involved my lyric professor (unintentionally, I think) dropping into a sex voice to explicate a line reading. We read some of the more explicit Catullus in my intermediate Latin class freshman year, and then in my sophomore year we read Lucretius (and oh man, Lucretius on sex and gender roles during sex is eye-popping), so by the time we did Catullus again it was less shocking.