The translator of any metrical poetry faces the question of what to do about meter; however, several factors exacerbate the difficulty for the would-be translator of Latin verse into modern English. Modern English poetry tends to shy away from formal metrical patterns, ‘‘effectively leaving only free verse to the translator, and leaving that in such a deadened form it often lacks even the ghost of some regular meter lurking behind the arras’’ (Willett 2001: 221). It is therefore difficult for a modern translator to use intricate or regular meters without giving the resulting poem an aura of archaism.
But even if a translator chooses to use strict meter, exact equivalency with Latin meters is not a simple matter; English meter is stress-based, but Latin meter was quantitative. Latin meter, that is, was built around the alternation of long and short syllables, not ofstressed and unstressed ones (though stress accent, and its counterplay against the rhythm of syllabic length, was also an important element of Latin verse).5 In addition, Latin meter was very regular; while substitution (i. e., replacing a long syllable by two short ones) was allowed in some metrical situations, Latin poetry had nothing corresponding to modern ‘‘free verse.’’ Modern English speakers, therefore, are faced with a doubly foreign system in Latin (and for that matter Greek) poetry; both the quantitative basis of Latin meter and its extreme regularity are unfamiliar.
Catullus uses 11 different meters: Phalaecean hendecasyllabics, choliambics, Sapphic stanzas, glyconic stanzas, priapeans, the greater asclepiad, iambic trimeter, iambic tetrameter catalectic, galliambics, dactylic hexameter, and elegiac couplets. All of these meters were originally Greek and some of them probably had never been used in Latin before Catullus; the hendecasyllable, which Gaisser calls ‘‘the Catullan meter par excellence’ apparently had formerly been quite rare even in Greek (Gaisser 1993: 4). By choosing to use Greek meters, Catullus marks his debt to the Alexandrians and lays out an important aspect of his poetic program (see Gaisser 2001: xvii; Thomson 1997: 19-20); to ignore his metrics, therefore, is to ignore a central part of his achievement.
A translator who hopes to convey some sense of Catullus’ metrics has two choices: to use native English meters, which are fundamentally different from Latin meters, on the assumption that there is some sort of equivalency of‘‘feel’’ or ‘‘mood’’ between the two systems; or to try to replicate Catullan metrical patterns in English. Catullus' earliest translators favored the first of these approaches; it does not seem to have occurred to poets such as Raleigh or Campion to try to translate Catullus into anything but ‘‘natural’’ English meters, which usually meant iambics. So, for instance, Campion turns the hendecasyllables of poem 5 into iambic pentameter:
My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love;
And though the sager sort our deeds reprove,
Let us not weigh them: heaven’s great lamps do dive Into their west, and straight again revive;
But, soon as once set is our little light,
Then must we sleep one ever-during night.
(Campion n. d.: 8)
But however pleasant this is to the English-speaker’s ear, it in no way replicates or even suggests the hendecasyllables of the original; furthermore, the use of rhymed couplets implies a connection between pairs of lines that is entirely absent in Catullus’ poem.
The other possible approach is to try to replicate the metrical patterns of Latin in English. However, this, too, runs the risk of fundamental distortion. It is certainly possible to create stress-accent patterns in English that correspond to the quantitative patterns of Latin, but such meters do not come easily or naturally to English, and English readers are not trained to ‘‘hear’’ them. It is a very rare translator who can write English equivalents of Catullan meter that do not sound forced, and in which the meter emerges from the natural pronunciation of the lines.6 Tennyson did about as well as can be done with his jeu d’esprit ‘‘Hendecasyllables’’:
O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,
Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem All composed in a metre of Catullus.
(Ricks 1989: 616)
For those who can ‘‘hear’’ Catullus’ Latin hendecasyllables in their mind’s ear, Tennyson’s feat is impressive; but for a reader who did not already know the Latin meter, I question the extent to which even Tennyson’s poem would convey it.
Considering the profound differences between Latin and English metrics, it is not surprising that the metrical strategies adopted by recent translators of Catullus have varied widely and radically. In the mid-twentieth century, the fashion seemed to be to ignore meter, despite its importance in Catullus’ poetic practice; so Copley’s translation (1957 [1964 rpt.]) makes no attempt at any metrical patterns at all, either Latin-based or native, and as recently as 1974, Sesar followed the same method. Neither Copley nor Sesar mentions his choice to eschew meter in his introduction; apparently they both assume that this choice needs no justification, and that for twentieth-century readers, personal lyric automatically implies a completely free style. A corollary of this choice, of course, is that it foregrounds content to the complete diminution of form; at the very least, this choice implies that the form of Catullus’ poems is incidental rather than essential.
More recently, however, the pendulum has swung back in the direction of translations that, if they do not actually attempt to reproduce Latin quantitative meters in English stress-meters, at the very least try to suggest the original meters. Two of Catullus’ most recent translators, Mulroy and Green, both include careful and thoughtful descriptions and justifications of their own metrical practices (Mulroy 2002: xxxiii-xxxix; Green 2005: 27-32). Green aims for, and comes very close to achieving, a true recapitulation of Catullan meters in English, while Mulroy says that he has ‘‘attempted to capture the general effect of such rhythm in a way that is perceptible to English speakers’’ (Mulroy 2002: xxxiv). Which system is more effective is, of course, largely a matter of the reader’s taste.7
World History
