Obscenity

The chapter by Ancona and Hallett in this volume on teaching Catullus in the secondary school curriculum says most of what should be considered at the college level, except that parents, administrators, and the outside community need not be feared as a source of possible interference. There was a time when the use of rude vernacular language by Catullus was thought unsuitable for any classroom discussion. E. T. Merrill’s 1893 commentary, which was widely used in colleges until very recently and is still kept in print by no less a publisher than Harvard, condemned c. 97 as ‘‘exceedingly coarse.’’ Like c. 16, which is actually about poetry, the offending poem received even less than the skimpy annotation that Merrill was willing to expend on any poem of Catullus. Today, obscenity is good for business in the entertainment industry and is something like a mark of authenticity in the representation of talk. For example, we know from the release of all sorts of White House transcripts that formerly offensive language has for at least a generation been commonly used by presidents and their associates in the Oval Office. In academia, students with access to a good lexicon and modern annotation will not need to have the dirty parts explained in a way that could possibly embarrass or require the repetition of words that could offend delicate ears. What does bear classroom discussion is why such language is good or bad rhetoric.

It is worth noting that futuo, which with its compounds appears seven times in Catullus, can be correctly translated by only one English verb, which has no synonyms that are not slang and is one of the oldest and most frequently employed verbs in English. When the publisher of The Student’s Catullus (Garrison 2004) asked politely whether it was absolutely necessary to use the f-word (they are in the middle of the Bible Belt and had never printed the word before), they gracefully agreed when told there is only one transitive verb in English with the same meaning. They had just published a book about the experience of American soldiers in Vietnam without once (they told me) using the offending expression - a remarkable accomplishment.