The wildest Latin poet returns (and this time without censorship)

BarcelonaAlthough the older poets are often "an inexhaustible source of profound reflections and valuable thoughts," the younger poets take a different tack. "They don't usually believe much in sacredness or human institutions," they are attracted to "passionate feelings, such as deep and irreconcilable loves or hatreds," and "have little or no idea whether they will one day become classics or whether their writings will serve as a model for future generations." These are the initial considerations that are made. Jaume Juan Castelló, translator and professor at the Department of Latin Philology at the University of Barcelona, about Catullus, one of the wildest Latin authors, who has just presented a new Catalan version ofThe poems in Adesiara.

Born in Verona in 87 BC and died in Rome around 58 BC, when he was around 30 years old, Gai Valeri Catul has managed to go down in history thanks to a direct, fiery, and eternally youthful voice. "He left written in Western memory the most famous kisses in all of literature," Castelló continues, "the most moving laments, imitated by posterity, of a betrayed woman abandoned by her lover, or the rudest insults directed at the first person who stands in front of him." Of the 116 poems that have survived by the author, one of those that has raised the most dust and has been the subject of multiple censorships has been the sixteenth. It begins like this, in the new translation: "I'll fuck you up the ass, and even up the throat, / a pair of sucking faggots, Aurelio / and Furi. Since my verses are a bit lascivious, you call me indecent. / A poet, without a doubt, must be modest, / but his don't have to be.

"In a Spanish translation, the translator Joan Petit replaced the first two lines of the poem with '"I will give you a taste of my manhood." – Castelló remembers – This is not an insult, it is a corny". Petit teamed up with Josep Vergés for the first Catalan translation of Catul, published in 1928 in the Bernat Metge Foundation"The criterion for this collection was always to avoid profanity and scatology," says Adesiara's editor, Jordi Raventós. "The problem is that in some cases we may have acted with excessive caution." Castellón, which three years ago presented a splendid translation of the Epigrams of Martial, still remembers the many omissions from the Bernat Metge edition of Martial. "Why should they translate him, if of the 1,500 poems he wrote, more than 150 are about sex and quite dirty?" he asks. The answer is probably that they wanted to translate him because he was a Roman poet of Hispanic origin.

Lascivious, love-filled, and caustic verses

Antoni Seva revised and retranslated the first Catalan version for Bernat Metge in 1990, which later appeared in Quaderns Crema (Poems, 1999). Catullus's sixteenth poem, presented in prose, had already gained some of the forcefulness with which readers can now read it: "I'll fuck you up the ass, I, and up the mouth, sissy Aurelius and cousin Furi, you who, for my verses, because they are a bit lascivious," I'.

Catul has at least three other Catalan versions: that of Jordi Parramon for Edicions 62 (Complete poems, 1999), that of Eduard Sanahuja Yll for AdiA (51 poems, 2024) and the one that Jaume Juan Castelló made, together with Josep Ignasi Ciruelo, for Edhasa (Poems, 1982). "When we at Edhasa later asked to reissue it, we said no, because important changes had to be made," Castelló recalls. "In 2020, Josep Ignasi died as a result of Covid and I decided to get back to it. I took it as a madness that might end up tearing me apart." The book has now been published by Adesiara in a version that, in addition to being strictly faithful to the original, respects all the Latin metrical feet.

"Some of Catullus's best-known poems are those he dedicates to Lesbia, his great love," explains the translator. "They mark the peak of personal exaltation and the highest degree of poetic expression." "Let's live, my Lebia, and make love, / for the hypocritical murmurs of the old men, / not even all together, are worth a sad ace!" begins poem 5. He doesn't ask another beloved, Ipsitila, for love, but rather to stay at home with him so he can make "new nails in a row." The most caustic side of the poet appears in poems like 94: "He's going whoring, Verga! What are you saying? A verga, whores? / Quite true! As they say: «The vegetables, in the garden.» Between attacks, criticisms and obscene proposals, Catullus occasionally softens and dedicates emotional verses to his girlfriend's dead sparrow: "Cursed, hateful darkness / of the Orc, devour all that is beautiful! / That was, from a jester, the sparrow you have taken! / What a joke! Yours, / the tearful eyes of my girl blush."