The Poems of Catullus: An Annotated Translation.

 

from Cambridge University Press

 

The Roman poet Catullus wrote just over two thousand years ago during the chaotic but culturally vibrant final decades of the Republic and his poems deal with themes of passion and grief, friendship and enmity, politics, literature, and myth.

 

These new translations, the product of a collaborative effort between a classicist and a poet, presents Catullus in an edgy and contemporary  voice with a new energy and speed.  

 

"There's  no dust on these poems,"

• Felipe Rojas Silva, Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Egyptology & Assyriology at Brown University

 

"The bawdy poet Catullus wrote in the late Roman Republic, in Latin, but he will always belong to the world at large and to the present tense - rowdy, randy, excoriating, funny, acrobatic and endlessly vernacular. He is our shameless poet of the locker-room boast and the licentious man-about-town. He sings in the gossipy, fierce voices of Eros and Id without apology, and we love him for this particular exhibition of the glory of the human spirit. Catullus is so much of the present tense that his poetry requires the fresh transfusion of re-translation on a regular basis, needs a booster shot of the vernacular to restore the rose to his cheeks. In these fine new translations, Jeffrey Thomson and Jeannine Uzzi perfectly catch the lively Catullan blend of eloquence and vulgarity. Thus, Catullus, and his poems, get to party one more time." 

• Tony Hoagland, poet and writer