Penguins on Parade: Catullus!

Some Penguin Classics, as we’ve noted here at Stevereads a few times in the past, take on a life of their own as translations even when the larger currents of social understanding and the craft of translation have moved on. I was reminded of this just the other day when I encountered a slightly battered copy of the 1966 Penguin Classics translation of the poems of Catullus done by Peter Whigham.

I sighed with the happiness of encountering an old friend. I’ve been reading the Peter Whigham Catullus for half a century, sometimes impatiently, sometimes immensely satisfied, and on the day I found this battered copy I wanted the comfort – it was a freezing cold sleeting late April day in what is clearly going to be an actually endless Boston winter. I have warm and sunny memories of Whigham’s translation (I read it first in high summer on Cape Cod, and I read it again on a hot summer afternoon in Florence, and there were many other readings on sultry long summer evenings in Iowa), so I happily sank into it again.

And now, in this 2015 re-reading, I recalled some of that warmth even though Whigham’s opening comments tend to creak a bit under the weight of the intervening decades. He was a truly remarkable figure in the Penguin roster of translators, a self-taught non-academic bon vivant and elegant thinker, although even his thinking doesn’t quite always surpass the limitations of his time, as in his aside about that volatile subject of sexuality:

On many occasions, in moments of intense emotion, Catullus expresses his feelings in the guise of a woman. The fact that homosexuality was not then considered either as a vice, an aberration or a disease, as it is now, is attendant but not cardinal to the point that I wish to make, which is that there was in Catullus a strain of femininity which went deeper than ‘normal’ adherence to the bisexual conventions of his class and time.

Whigham assures us that he’s followed no one text in constructing his translation, although both he and all other Catullus translations rely on a scarcity of manuscripts; “the original codex,” he tells us, “which according to a venerable tradition was discovered wedging a wine barrel in Verona, at the end of the thirteenth century AD and was in a poor state.” And that codex itself disappeared shortly afterward, although not before a couple of copies had been made. In other words, it’s a breeding ground for possible misinterpretations, although Whigham is perfectly right about the wonderful essentials of this author:

There is immediacy and vitality and pathos and nobility. He riddles away with words, juggling them about, a dozen times in half as many lines: eyes, apples, stars, numbers and then more numbers. The primitive is sometimes surprisingly near the surface. He has made his own mirror, not of life but of himself, and in this of course he is a Romantic.

I don’t know about that Romantic reach, but it was certainly a pleasure to read again these jaunty Englished (Americanized, even – Broadway is mentioned often) versions of Catullus in all his untranslatable glory:

Your most recent acquisition, Flavius,

must be as unattractive as

(doubtless) she is unacceptable

or you would surely have told us about her.

You are wrapped up with a whore to end all whores

and ashamed to confess it.

You do not spend bachelor nights.

Your divan, reeking of Syrian unguents,

draped with bouquets & blossoms etc. proclaim it,

the pillows & bedclothes indented in several places,

a ceaseless jolting & straining of the framework

the shaky accompaniment to your sex parade.

Without more discretion your silence is pointless.

Attenuated thighs betray your preoccupation.

Whoever, whatever she is, good or bad, tells us, my friend –

Catullus will lift the two of you & your love-acts into the heavens

in the happiest of his hendecasyllables.

These Whigham poems are indeed the happiest of his hendecasyllables – even if I had to read them while wearing a scarf and mittens.