Elizabeth Vandiver

Compared to other Roman poets, Catullus came late to English translation.1 Although the Voss edition of 1684 made the Catullan corpus easily available in England, the first complete English translation appeared only in 1795 (Gaisser 2001: xxviii-xxxii).2 Various poets had produced translations of individual poems even before Voss's edition; for instance, Sidney, Campion, Jonson, and Crashaw all translated at least one or two poems, and Lovelace translated 13 (Gaisser 2001: 4-17, 26). However, many of these early versions were free adaptations rather than actual translations.

The tendency to adaptation was undoubtedly caused, in part, by the fact that the first English poets who turned their attention to Catullus were not coming to him fresh, so to speak; their reception of Catullus was deeply influenced by continental imitations and adaptations. Catullus ‘‘arrived in England surrounded by generations of European. . . literary and scholarly interpretation and there was no possibility for English readers and poets to have an unmediated encounter with him'' (Gaisser 2001: xxix). The familiarity of some of the short poems' themes made those poems (particularly ones about Lesbia) seem easily available for adaptation; however, the idea of translating the entire corpus was another matter. The sheer variety of Catullus' poems, both in form and in content, his unabashed use of obscenity, and the Alexandrianism of the long poems apparently discouraged translation (see Gaisser 2001: xxxii-xxxiv).

These aspects of Catullus remained problematic for translators throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are no less so today, although the last several decades have seen a steady stream of new translations of Catullus.3 The precise focus of the difficulties changes - so, for instance, Catullus' obscenity poses a different challenge for the translator in the twenty-first century than it did in the nineteenth century. The modern-day translator has to grapple with rendering the precise register of the obscenity, while her nineteenth-century predecessor was far more likely to omit or to bowdlerize beyond recognition. But the complexity of rendering Catullus' many tones into English remains unchanged.

Some of these problems are inherent in translation itself, some are caused by the nature of the Latin language and its differences from English, and some are specific to this particular poet. This chapter discusses these difficulties and different translators’ strategies for meeting them. I will begin with a brief discussion of the project of translation in general and the pitfalls of poetic translation in particular. I will then discuss problems of translating Latin into English and specific difficulties that Catullus’ own poetics pose for translators.