The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus Part 1

The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus.

by Caius Valerius Catullus.

DEAR MR. SMITHERS,

By every right I ought to choose you to edit and bring out Sir Richard Burton's translation of Catullus, because you collaborated with him on this work by a correspondence of many months before he died. If I have hesitated so long as to its production, it was because his notes, which are mostly like pencilled cobwebs, strewn all over his Latin edition, were headed, "NEVER SHEW HALF-FINISHED WORK TO WOMEN OR FOOLS." The reason of this remark was, that in all his writings, his first copy, his first thought, was always the best and the most powerful. Like many a painter who will go on improving and touching up his picture till he has destroyed the likeness, and the startling realistic nature of his subject, so would Sir Richard go on weakening his first copy by improvements, and then appeal to me to say which was the best. I was almost invariably obliged, in conscience, to induce him to stick to the first thought, which had grasped the whole meaning like a flash. These notes were made in a most curious way. He used to bring his Latin Catullus down to _table d'hote_ with him, and he used to come and sit by me, but the moment he got a person on the other side, who did not interest him, he used to whisper to me, "Talk, that I may do my Catullus," and between the courses he wrote what I now give you. The public school-boy is taught that the Atys was unique in subject and metre, that it was the greatest and most remarkable poem in Latin literature, famous for the fiery vehemence of the Greek dithyramb, that it was the only specimen in Latin of the Galliambic measure, so called, because sung by the Gallae--and I suspect that the school-boy now learns that there are half a dozen others, which you can doubtless name. To _my_ mind the gems of the whole translation are the Epithalamium or Epos of the marriage of Vinia and Manlius, and the Parcae in that of Peleus and Thetis.

Sir Richard laid great stress on the following in his notes, headed "Compare with Catullus, the sweet and tender little Villanelle, by Mr.

Edmund Gosse," for the Viol and Flute--the XIX cent. with the I^{st.}

"Little mistress mine, good-bye!

I have been your sparrow true; Dig my grave, for I must die.

Waste no tear, and heave no sigh; Life should still be blithe for you, Little mistress mine, good-bye!

In your garden let me lie Underneath the pointed yew, Dig my grave, for I must die.

We have loved the quiet sky With its tender arch of blue; Little mistress mine, good-bye!

That I still may feel you nigh, In your virgin bosom, too, Dig my grave, for I must die.

Let our garden friends that fly Be the mourners, fit and few.

Little mistress mine, good-bye!

Dig my grave, for I must die."

Sir Richard seriously began his Catullus on Feb. 18th, 1890, at Hamman R'irha, in North Africa. He had finished the first rough copy on March 31st, 1890, at Trieste. He made a second copy beginning May 23rd, 1890, at Trieste, which was finished July 21st, 1890, at Zurich. He then writes a margin. "Work incomplete, but as soon as I receive Mr. Smithers' prose, I will fill in the words I now leave in stars, in order that we may not use the same expressions, and I will then make a third, fair, and complete copy." But, alas! then he was surprised by Death.

I am afraid that Sir Richard's readers may be disappointed to find that, unlike Mr. Grant Allen, there is no excursus on the origin of Tree-worship, and therefore that, perhaps, through ignorance, I have omitted something.

Sir Richard did write in the sixties and seventies on Tree-alphabets, the Ogham Runes and El Mushajjar, the Arabic Tree-alphabet,--and had theories and opinions as to its origin; but he did not, I know, connect them in any way, however remote, with Catullus. I therefore venture to think you will quite agree with me, that they have no business here, but should appear in connection with my future work, "Labours and Wisdom of Sir Richard Burton."

All these three and a half years, I have hesitated what to do, but after seeing other men's translations, his _incomplete_ work is, in my humble estimation, too good to be consigned to oblivion, so that I will no longer defer to send you a type-written copy, and to ask you to bring it through the press, supplying the Latin text, and adding thereto your own prose, which we never saw.

Yours truly,

ISABEL BURTON.

_July 11th, 1894._

FOREWORD

A scholar lively, remembered to me, that _Catullus_ translated word for word, is an anachronism, and that a literal English rendering in the nineteenth century could be true to the poet's letter, but false to his spirit. I was compelled to admit that something of this is true; but it is not the whole truth. "Consulting modern taste" means really a mere imitation, a re-cast of the ancient past in modern material. It is presenting the toga'd citizen, rough, haughty, and careless of any approbation not his own, in the costume of to-day,--boiled shirt, dove-tailed coat, black-cloth clothes, white pocket-handkerchief, and diamond ring. Moreover, of these transmogrifications we have already enough and to spare. But we have not, as far as I know, any version of Catullus which can transport the English reader from the teachings of our century to that preceding the Christian Era. As discovery is mostly my mania, I have hit upon a b.a.s.t.a.r.d-urging to indulge it, by a presenting to the public of certain cla.s.sics in the nude Roman poetry, like the Arab, and of the same date....

RICHARD F. BURTON.

_Trieste, 1890._

[The Foreword just given is an unfinished pencilling on the margin of Sir Richard's Latin text of Catullus. I reproduce below, a portion of his Foreword to a previous translation from the Latin on which we collaborated and which was issued in the summer of 1890.--L. C. S.]

A 'cute French publisher lately remarked to me that, as a rule, versions in verse are as enjoyable to the writer as they are unenjoyed by the reader, who vehemently doubts their truth and trustworthiness. These pages hold in view one object sole and simple, namely, to prove that a translation, metrical and literal, may be true and may be trustworthy.

As I told the public (Camoens: Life and Lusiads ii. 185-198), it has ever been my ambition to reverse the late Mr. Matthew Arnold's peremptory dictum:--"In a verse translation no original work is any longer recognisable." And here I may be allowed to borrow from my Supplemental Arabian Nights (Vol. vi., Appendix pp. 411-412, a book known to few and never to be reprinted) my vision of the ideal translation which should not be relegated to the Limbus of Intentions.

"My estimate of a translator's office has never been of the low level generally a.s.signed to it even in the days when Englishmen were in the habit of translating every work, interesting or important, published out of England, and of thus giving a continental and cosmopolitan flavour to their literature. We cannot at this period expect much from a 'man of letters'

who must produce a monthly volume for a pittance of 20: of him we need not speak. But the translator at his best, works, when reproducing the matter and the manner of his original, upon two distinct lines. His prime and primary object is to please his reader, edifying him and gratifying his taste; the second is to produce an honest and faithful copy, adding naught to the sense or abating aught of its especial _cachet_. He has, however, or should have, another aim wherein is displayed the acme of hermeneutic art.

Every language can profitably lend something to and take somewhat from its neighbours--an epithet, a metaphor, a naf idiom, a turn of phrase. And the translator of original mind who notes the innumerable shades of tone, manner and complexion will not neglect the frequent opportunities of enriching his mother-tongue with novel and alien ornaments which shall justly be accounted barbarisms until formally naturalized and adopted. Nor will any modern versionist relegate to a foot-note, as is the malpractice of his ba.n.a.l brotherhood, the striking and often startling phases of the foreign author's phraseology and dull the text with well-worn and commonplace English equivalents, thus doing the clean reverse of what he should do. It was this _beau ideal_ of a translator's success which made Eustache Deschamps write of his contemporary and brother bard,

_Grand Translateur, n.o.ble Geoffroy Chaucier._

Here

'The firste finder of our fair langage'

is styled 'a Socrates in philosophy, a Seneca in morals, an Angel in conduct and a great Translator,'--a seeming anti-climax which has scandalized not a little sundry inditers of 'Lives' and 'Memoirs.' The t.i.tle is no bathos: it is given simply because Chaucer _translated_ (using the term in its best and highest sense) into his pure, simple and strong English tongue with all its linguistic peculiarities, the thoughts and fancies of his foreign models, the very letter and spirit of Petrarch and Boccaccio."

For the humble literary status of translation in modern England and for the short-comings of the average English translator, public taste or rather caprice is mainly to be blamed. The "general reader," the man not in the street but the man who makes up the educated ma.s.s, greatly relishes a novelty in the way of "plot" or story or catastrophe while he has a natural dislike to novelties of style and diction, demanding a certain dilution of the unfamiliar with the familiar. Hence our translations in verse, especially when rhymed, become for the most part deflorations or excerpts, adaptations or periphrases more or less meritorious and the "translator"

was justly enough dubbed "traitor" by critics of the severer sort. And he amply deserves the injurious name when ignorance of his original's language perforce makes him pander to popular prescription.

But the good time which has long been coming seems now to have come. The home reader will no longer put up with the careless caricatures of cla.s.sical chefs d'oeuvre which satisfied his old-fashioned predecessor. Our youngers, in most points our seniors, now expect the translation not only to interpret the sense of the original but also, when the text lends itself to such treatment, to render it _verbatim et literatim_, nothing being increased or diminished, curtailed or expanded. Moreover, in the choicer pa.s.sages, they so far require an echo of the original music that its melody and harmony should be suggested to their mind. Welcomed also are the mannerisms of the translator's model as far as these aid in preserving, under the disguise of another dialect, the individuality of the foreigner and his peculiar costume.

That this high ideal of translation is at length becoming popular now appears in our literature. The "Villon Society," when advertizing the novels of Matteo Bandello, Bishop of Agen, justly remarks of the translator, Mr. John Payne, that his previous works have proved him to possess special qualifications for "the delicate and difficult task of transferring into his own language at once the savour and the substance, the matter and the manner of works of the highest individuality, conceived and executed in a foreign language."

In my version of hexameters and pentameters I have not shirked the metre although it is strangely out of favour in English literature while we read it and enjoy it in German. There is little valid reason for our aversion; the rhythm has been made familiar to our ears by long courses of Greek and Latin and the rarity of spondaic feet is a.s.suredly to be supplied by art and artifice.

And now it is time for farewelling my friends:--we may no longer (alas!) address them, with the ingenuous Ancient in the imperative

Vos Plaudite.

RICHARD F. BURTON.

_July, 1890._

INTRODUCTION

The present translation was jointly undertaken by the late Sir Richard Burton and myself in 1890, some months before his sudden and lamented death. We had previously put into English, and privately printed, a body of verse from the Latin, and our aim was to follow it with literal and unexpurgated renderings of Catullus, Juvenal, and Ausonius, from the same tongue. Sir Richard laid great stress on the necessity of thoroughly annotating each translation from an erotic (and especially a paederastic) point of view, but subsequent circ.u.mstances caused me to abandon that intention.

The Latin text of Catullus printed in this volume is that of Mueller (A.D.

1885), which Sir Richard Burton chose as the basis for our translation, and to that text I have mainly adhered. On some few occasions, however, I have slightly deviated from it, and, although I have consulted Owen and Postgate, in such cases I have usually followed Robinson Ellis.

Bearing in mind my duty to the reader as well as to the author, I have aimed at producing a readable translation, and yet as literal a version (castrating no pa.s.sages) as the dissimilarity in idiom of the two languages, Latin and English, permit; and I claim for this volume that it is the first literal and complete English translation as yet issued of Catullus. The translations into English verse which I have consulted are _The Adventures of Catullus, and the History of his Amours with Lesbia_ (done from the French, 1707), Nott, Lamb, Fleay, (privately printed, 1864), Hart-Davies, Shaw, Cranstoun, Martin, Grant Allen, and Ellis. Of these, none has been helpful to me save Professor Robinson Ellis's _Poems and Fragments of Catullus translated in the metres of the original_,--a most excellent and scholarly version, to which I owe great indebtedness for many a felicitous expression. I have also used Dr. Nott freely in my annotations. The only English prose translation of which I have any knowledge is the one in Bohn's edition of Catullus, and this, in addition to being bowdlerized, is in a host of pa.s.sages more a paraphrase than a literal translation.

I have not thought it needful in any case to point out my deviations from Mueller's text, and I have cleared the volume of all the load of mythological and historical notes which are usually appended to a translation of a cla.s.sic, contenting myself with referring the non-cla.s.sical reader to Bohn's edition of the poet.

Of the boldness of Sir Richard Burton's experiment of a metrical and linear translation there can be no question; and on the whole he has succeeded in proving his contention as to its possibility, though it must be confessed that it is at times at the cost of obscurity, or of inversions of sentences which certainly are compelled to lay claim to a poet's license. It must, however, be borne in mind that in a letter to me just before his death, he expressed his intention of going entirely through the work afresh, on receiving my prose, adding that it needed "a power of polishing."