The assumptions of Catullus’ society about gender and sexuality are not the assumptions of our own society; the problems this raises for the translator are illustrated forcefully by poem 16:
Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi, qui me ex uersiculis meis putastis, quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.
Nam castum esse decet pium poetam ipsum, uersiculos nihil necesse est; qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem, si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici, et quod pruriat incitare possunt, non dico pueris, sed his pilosis qui duros nequeunt mouere lumbos. uos, quod milia multa basiorum legistis, male me marem putatis? pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo.
This poem, which gives us Catullus’ most significant statement about the relationship between the author and his work, is a veritable minefield for the translator. The most obvious difficulty is with rendering the obscenities of lines 1,2, and 14; however, even leaving these lines aside for the moment, the rest of this poem is filled with key words, some of them drawing on Roman morality in general, some on Roman assumptions about sexuality, and some on the Catullan (and neoteric) poetic program. The terms mollis, pudicus, pius, castus, sal, lepor, mas are all problematic in translation:
[You] think, based on my verses - which are rather soft (mollis) - that I am insufficiently decent (pudicus). For it is proper that the dutiful (pius) poet be chaste (castus), but there’s no need at all that his little verses be so, which, after all, have salt (sal) and charm ( lepor) if they are rather mollis and scarcely pudicus, and are able to incite what itches - I don’t mean in boys, but in those hairy men who can’t move their hard groins.10 You, because you’ve read about many thousand kisses, think that I am a bad male (male marem)? Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo.
“A translation aims to produce a new text that matters to one community the way another text matters to another’’ (Appiah 1993: 425); to make poem 16 thus “matter’’ in translation, every one of the Latin words I have quoted above would require a whole discourse, a whole apparatus of editorial notes. Such a discussion is beyond my scope here; let us focus in on the most obvious problem of this poem, the obscene threats with which it opens and closes.
What do these lines mean? Martin offers what he calls “a prose paraphrase, far from adequate in its brio, but sufficiently explicit: 'I will rape the pair of you as each of you prefers it: you rectally, anal-receptive Furius, and you orally, oral-receptive Aurelius’ ’’ (Martin 1992: 60). This does, indeed, convey some sense of the lexical meaning of the words pedicare, irrumare, pathicus, and cinaedus, though as we shall see Martin’s treatment of pathicus and cinaedus are not quite accurate, and he also elides the fact that Catullus threatens both men with both forms of assault. What this prose paraphrase does not do is to convey any sense of poetry; nor, for that matter, does it convey the cultural assumptions behind Catullus’ insults. As Williams has said:
Here we run into the basic difficulty confronting both the translator and the ethnographer: how to describe one culture in another’s language. On the one hand, it has often been noted that Latin has no words identical in meaning to ‘‘homosexual’’ or ‘‘heterosexual’’... On the other hand, many of the terms that Romans did use are untranslatable: stuprum and pudicitia are far more specific than ‘‘debauchery’’ and “chastity,’’ and cinaedus is not the same as ‘‘faggot’’ (C. A. Williams 1999: 6).
Martin’s prose paraphrase does not translate Catullus’ culture into terms that are comprehensible to the modern English-speaking reader. All four of the terms used in the first two lines of poem 16 - pedicare, irrumare, cinaedus, and pathicus - align themselves quite strictly with Roman views of masculinity and its proper constitution; the translator’s difficulty lies in the fact that these words do not ‘‘map’’ onto the assumptions about sexuality, sexual invective, and gender roles that inform modern British and American culture, and thus modern English language.
Since English does not have precise equivalents for these four words, the translator must either give an excruciatingly literal rendition (as Martin does), which is in effect more a commentary upon the poem than a translation of it, or must try to find some modern register of obscene insult that parallels, or is the ‘‘equivalent of,’’ the Catullan insult. Here, however, the difference between Roman and modern views of what masculinity is becomes crucial. As Williams fully demonstrates, for the Roman male the act of penetrating another male was an assertion of masculinity; the act of being penetrated was an admission of non-masculine status (C. A. Williams 1999). But modern English slang terms that use references to male homosexuality as insults by no means correspond exactly to the Latin terms. Pathicus is, at least, easy to define; it ‘‘denotes a male who is anally penetrated’’ (C. A. Williams 1999: 175).11 Cinaedus is far more difficult to define precisely, since it refers to a whole category of non - or anti-masculine behaviors; the cinaedus was ‘‘a man who failed to be fully masculine, whose effeminacy showed itself in such symptoms as feminine clothing and mannerisms and a lascivious and oversexed demeanor’’ (C. A. Williams 1999: 178). The cinaedus' effeminacy could manifest itself in a desire to be penetrated, but was by no means limited to such activities; indeed, a cinaedus could engage in sex with women (C. A. Williams 1999: 177-8). Clearly, ‘‘queen,’’ ‘‘faggot,’’ and so on are by no means exact equivalents of pathicus and cinaedus; still less do we have any terms with which one male can, by threatening another male with oral penetration, assert his own hypermasculinity. But this is the sense of irrumare, the term in these lines that seems to cause translators the most trouble.
English lacks a single word meaning ‘‘to penetrate orally.’’12 Irrumabo thus defies exact lexical transference into English, since we are dealing not just with a missing term but with an entirely different way of conceptualizing the act in question; English speakers tend to assume that in an act of oral sex, the owner of the mouth is the agent and the owner of the genitals the passive recipient. As Fitzgerald says, ‘‘In English the action, even when degrading to the person who performs it, is all on the side of the fellator’’ (1995: 65). This difference in the way the act of oral penetration is viewed seems to exercise an astonishing limiting force on the imagination of some translators, so much so that at times they even mistake who is the penetrating party in irrumabo - for instance, Sisson renders irrumabo as ‘‘I’ll... suck your pricks’’ (1967: 35) - or omit the second threat entirely (Myers and Ormsby 1970: 23). Green uses the noun ‘‘sucks,’’ as do Raphael and McLeish, but here again the English slang term seems to imply that the speaker will fellate, not orally rape, the recipient of the insult (Green 2005: 63; Raphael and McLeish 1979: 37).13 Lee’s ‘‘stuff your gobs’’ is probably very effective for British readers, but it is meaningless to Americans (1990:19); Balmer’s ‘‘get stuffed’’ does not specify that the mouth is the target and also elides the first-person singular of Catullus’ threat (2004: 57). Mulroy’s ‘‘rape you front and back'' makes sense to readers who know the term irrumabo,
But I am uncertain whether a reader encountering this poem for the first time in Mulroy’s translation would understand that the ‘‘front’’ in question was the mouth (2002: 15).
This may seem like overanalysis of a few obscene terms, but the obscenity here is not incidental or unimportant. By threatening Furius and Aurelius with direct and vivid displays of his masculinity, Catullus is making a statement about the nature of poetry and its relationship to its author; and by intertwining these obscene threats with concepts of traditional Roman morality such as pudicitia and pietas, he is situating both his poetry and his own masculinity in a much larger (and more complex) context. Indeed, he is stressing the deeply paradoxical nature of this connection; he claims the virtues of pietas and castitudo for himself at the same time that, as Selden says, he threatens those who have questioned his pietas with stuprum, a ‘‘forcible violation... [which] was by no stretch of the imagination compatible with either pietas or castitudo” (Selden 1992: 478; on stuprum, see J. N. Adams 1982: 200-1; C. A. Williams 1999: 96-124).
We cannot, therefore, simply elide the obscenity out of this poem or render it as a generalized, non-specific threat, as Copley notoriously does with his translation ‘‘Nuts to you, boys, nuts and go to hell’’ (1957 [1964 rpt.]: 19); here I must disagree with Green’s statement that ‘‘the first and last lines... are surely no more than a baroque extension of the kind of threat typified in English by the phrase, ‘Fuck you,’ without any suggestion of actual sexual intercourse’’ (Green 2005: 218). Certainly, Catullus is not anticipating a genuine physical encounter with Furius and Aurelius; and certainly, obscene threats in any language do not usually carry any assumption of actual sexual assault. But poem 16 - whose main point is the exact relationship between the erotic encounters described in poetry and the actual masculinity of the poet - works directly against the ‘‘normal’’ assumption that sexual terms are mere generalized threats by drawing direct and specific attention to the precise sexual and physical content of those terms. (See Wray 2001: 185; Selden 1992: 477-89.) Catullus asks us - forces us? - to pay attention not only to the tenor of these threats but also to their vehicle; the basic physical meaning, if I may put it this way, thrusts itself upon us. We are not to take Catullus ‘‘literally’’ - there was no need for Furius and Aurelius to lock their doors at night. And yet we are to take him ‘‘literally’’ - the acts described prove his masculine status, especially in comparison with the feminized status of the addressees Furius and Aurelius, and by implication of every reader: ‘‘The pair of slurs that the lyric levels against its addressees... are not simply gratuitous insults, but accurately describe the reader's submission - not to the poet's person, but - to the personified pressure of his text’’ (Selden 1992: 488). Catullus here uses words as acts with which to prove his masculinity; those words are both descriptive and performative, in that the words themselves now perform the same assertion of masculinity that their literal meaning describes.14
From this brief discussion, it is very clear the translator is faced with a formidable difficulty; the exact register of the obscene insults is crucial to the entire sense of poem 16, and yet there is no direct way to render these terms in English. One can use technical terms that are unlikely to be familiar to most readers (so Goold gives ‘‘catamite’’ for pathicus, 1983: 52); or one can use generalized insults such as Mulroy’s ‘‘queer’’ for pathicus and ‘‘nymphomaniac’’ for cinaedus (2002: 15), or Green’s ‘‘queen’’ and ‘‘faggot’’ (2005: 63). Either way, the Roman cultural assumptions fail to come through and thus the point of the poem, Catullus’ forceful assertion of his own penetrative masculinity, is lost.
In this instance, specificity that does not provide lexical fidelity is perhaps the best choice. Balmer renders pathicus as ‘‘prick-sucker’’ and cinaedus as ‘‘dick-lover’’ (2004: 57); while the first of these changes the practice in question15 and the second is completely non-specific, still they perhaps come closer than other English possibilities to conveying the contemptuous tone and register of Catullus’ insults against Aurelius and Furius. But these choices reinforce the same shift between active and passive that we observed with translators’ attempts at irrumabo; Catullus is not, in fact, casting Aurelius as a fellator. We are left, then, with the uncomfortable conclusion that English translation simply cannot render one of Catullus’ most important statements of his own poetic credo; here, more than the poetry is lost in translation.
World History
