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.
Then there’s the referee. In the introduction to his honest translation, The Poems of Catullus (OUP), Guy Lee writes: ‘There is surely no point in adding yet another to the number of free translations or paraphrases, however lively.’ Yet here are my versions jostling with the rest. The trouble is that Catullus’s tormented intelligence and romantic versatility make him irresistible. But in order to approach him I had to find out where he was, which took decades.
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.
Before you get carried away, rope bondage people are dismissed as train spotters by the rest of the fetish community because of their nerdy devotion to knots. I’ve found a similar sense of acceptance and dedication around the tea urn at Kensington Gardeners’ Club.
But as I became absorbed in drawing the emotional dynamic of performance in ink, with feathers, coffee stirrers, bamboo, oiled hemp bondage rope, the tip of a white man’s dreadlock and actual pens, 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 flow of power between dominant and submissive is key to Catullus and to this bondage discipline. French rope star Gorgone – who does indeed leave men in various states of petrification – points out that being a top (someone who ties) is about humility; being a bottom is where true power lies.
I sometimes slipped through the floorboards to draw a club which met in the dungeon below the rope anoraks and catered for a different clientele, but Catullus would have been at home here too. Again, the management approved: ‘She sits there like a little mouse, and gets us.’
I had another lucky break. I discovered that even as an alumna, or mere ectoplasm, I could seek permission to attend a Catullus textual criticism class at Oxford. The two professors in charge, Stephen Harrison and Stephen Heyworth, kindly allowed me to glimpse what was happening at the coal face. Apart from scattered quotations in others’ works, Catullus’s remaining poems were transmitted via one corrupted manuscript, now lost, so scholars are on an endless quest for authenticity. I wanted to peer closely at the meaning even though, while some of my versions hug the shore of the text, most of them plunge into choppy waters.
Here I offer two of the speculative readings. In poem number 56, was the boy alone or with a girl? And in number 101, nineteenth-century philologist Jacob Maehly speculated that Catullus wrote amoris (‘of love’) instead of mortis (‘of death’).
Finally, I owe a debt to the notes in Professor Kenneth Quinn’s edition of the text. When I can’t even work out what part of speech something is, he’s on it.
*
Stress-testing are we, Mistress?
How many of your tropes in rope
Can be endured before the poet chokes?
Ply me hemp silk jute and tie me
Ichinawa, takate kote,
Futomomo, hishi karada,
Tasuki, kannuki,
Hashira, daruma shibari.
All of it. Semenawa for the burn.
Count the stars that spy on sly
Lovers when the night is ball-gagged –
That’s how many of your tight knots and rope marks
Will deliver me beyond madness –
More than a voyeur’s torch could spot
Or a jealous sensei take to pieces.
Beware the mighty sodomite face-bandit
(Me). You two batty-boys dishing out lit crit
Insist my kissy-fit verse is Hello Kitty.
Look, being the guardian of what’s good
Is work for the poet, not for the poet’s works.
Liberation from your taste police
Gives my words a musky allure that can stir
Not just boys but the prick-memory
Of shaggy old ex-shaggers.
So writing kiss poems is an unmanly feat?
First line, repeat. XX
You boys queueing outside Berlin Berlin –
You think you’re the only ones with cocks,
Let in to fuck the girls
While the rest of us get herded away?
Have another think.
The poet fantasises about ejaculating in the reluctant faces of two hundred male clubbers. He then considers his options.
I’ll squirt correctly spelt obscene graffiti
All over your façade
Because the girl who broke away from my hold –
Loved with more love
Than other women will reap,
The one I had such brutal fights to keep –
Is your house dominant.
They all want her, the cream of the alphas and –
Harder for me to bear – the bottom feeders
Especially you, lord of the hairy-arsed,
All the way from Saragossa’s
Plague-zone of randy fluffy bunnies –
Señor Egnatius, raised to foreign nobility
By your clogged beard and glaring expat teeth
Scrubbed with vintage Spanish urine.
The poet puts down his tools and goes for a pee.
Can’t go on but does
Can’t be borne but must be
Down and the weight bears down
Each day each hour Cornificius
Bad for your Catullus
But have you written the least
The tiniest scrap to calm me?
Feel my rage. Is this all your love means?
Whisper me a consolation please
Sadder than Housman’s trembling tears
I can’t compete with the rock-god superhero
God’s begging him to take the shiniest halo
That man intent on you
Ogling provoking
Your sexy laughter I’m muted
My nerves torn out with hooks
Because when I see you Clodia I
Fumble for a line and
<Find a lacuna>
Mouth crammed with earth
Limbs hot and clumsy with longing
High tide pounding my skull
Trashed headlights and a windscreen
Crazed to opacity
Idling Catullus it stalls your intention
And maidens call it love-in-idleness
Without a plan you’re restless and distracted
Idle coasting toppled kings and golden
Cities in legends
Oh just go ahead with giving head to the godhead
God help us he outdogs the gods of dogging
Monopolising you with his cheap tactics
Paying attention
Making you laugh and my receptors go haywire
Because one look at you Mistress and
I can’t even form a polite request
For semenawa
My tongue dries cold blue tied to bamboo
Slung body hurts in tight jute knots
Rope burns and bare skin flinches from hot wax drips
Techno rattles my brain
Stinging eyes
Submit to the blindfold and and
Wanking, Orlando. It’s unproductive.
Wanking makes you fretful and distracted.
Legendary kings and shiny cities,
Lost to wanking
Oh you’ll love this
Bloody hilarious
Cato yes no really
Don’t go
Too funny
So I take some G
Sneak into the dungeon
On my own
Find a kid
Pounding some girl
I don’t bother to ask
(So slap my wrist
It’s a stupid rule anyway)
And make him the meat in the sandwich
Look, am I boring you or something
I bored him with this skewer lol
OK you can read it another way
It’s dark and I’m dead
There was no girl
Just Mistress’s boy slave
Beating time to thoughts of her as we do
Oh Christ look have some of this
Of course I can handle it
Oh Caelius –
Mistress, Herself, her Worship, our own Lady of the
Labia, the one the poet loved
More than himself and all the rest –
Now downloadable dogging in urban areas
And choking on locally elected members
You got your manners from scavenging mountain lions?
Or self-aborted from Scylla’s horror-cave
To agitate the howling dogs lodged there?
Is that why you despise the beggar’s
Plea of urgent need?
Your heat, your heart of a bitch.
This is what we’ve come to, Clodia. My
Self-will has been dragged down by the beast in you and
Drowned in its own pool of meaning well.
I couldn’t bring myself to like you now
Even if you played the convent girl
Or give up loving you, no matter how
Wide you spread your legs to the whole world.
Flight-shamed through the earthbound ports and checkpoints
I’m here, my brother, for this bleak ceremony,
To help you fathom death’s or love’s assembly
And offer useless words to wordless ashes.
I wasn’t strong enough to keep hold of you.
Now I’ll never find the missing piece
Here are the conventional sad tokens
For the old rituals that told us so.
Take them sea-splashed with a brother’s tears
And for ever like the tide, my brother,
I come to claim you and to let you go
*
ISOBEL WILLIAMS blogs about drawing and started live-drawing (depicting things as they happen) in 2011 when she was asked to draw under the A40 where it flies over Portobello Road. Other subjects have included Occupy camps and squats, performers preparing for the Notting Hill carnival, courtrooms, and Japanese rope bondage (shibari) performances and workshops in London, Oxford and Paris. Worlds collided for her when the Naked Rambler entered the dock at Winchester Crown Court.
In 2015 she drew the progress of The Violet Crab, Than Hussein Clark’s cabaret-themed exhibition at the David Roberts Art Foundation in London. She has held solo exhibitions in London and Oslo, written articles, e.g. for International Journal for the Semiotics of Law and The Amorist, and given talks at law and humanities conferences in the UK and abroad.
She has had poems published in magazines, including PN Review and Poetry Salzburg Review, and been a runner-up in competitions, including Stand and the TLS.
She wrote and illustrated The Supreme Court: a Guide for Bears in 2017 and is contributing a chapter to Design and Visualisation in Legal Education: Access to the Law, published by Routledge in 2021. Catullus: Shibari Carmina is forthcoming from Carcanet in 2021.