VII. After the Poet

Extract

I am not competent to evaluate translations into any language other than English, but I am told that O. Weinrich’s rendering into German verse (1960), in an edition which is both scholarly and sensitive, is outstanding.

In general the versions which have appeared since the war are free from the sort of artificiality which had dogged most earlier versions, a hangover from the Victorian age. (Catullus had his own artificiality, but that is a different story.) They are also free from expurgation and bowdlerizing, complete, frank in approach and in language, in fact authentically reflecting the original. The first of these, and one of the best, was J. Lindsay, Catullus: the Complete Poems (1948). Lindsay had made an earlier translation, but this was better. He was a vigorous Australian, an original but erratic scholar, and a minor poet of genuine merit. Other meritorious versions of the full corpus have since appeared, by F. O. Copley (1957), R. A. Swanson (1959), C. H. Sisson (1966), Peter Whigham (1966), James Michie (1969), R. Myers, and R. J. Ormsby (1972), Frederick Raphael and Kenneth McLeish (1978). Several of these translators are both scholars and men of letters, holding university posts in classics. Several are poets in their own right: Sisson once wrote: ‘I have had my eye on Catullus for years – as what poet would not who could make out even a little of the Latin?’ Several have made some reputation for translations of other authors. Jean Granarolo comments that the versions are often scholarly or, at all events, conceived for a wide popularization. I omit one version of which a reviewer said that the reader was ‘confronted with a Catullus who seems to have stepped from the pages of Finnegan’s Wake’.