I have a probably stupid question. What is Catullus 51? All these translations seem very different to each other and when I tried looking up what I thought was original in Latin, it was nothing like any of these translations even in approximation. Is it an umbrella term for a bunch of poems? Are you purposefully translating them artistically enough that they aren't similar to the original? Am I missing something, obvious or not? I liked one of your translations a lot, and would love to know the original, but I can't find it since I don't know what it is.
there are no stupid questions. catullus 51 is catullus’ translation of sappho 31. you can read the latin text + a very literal english translation on wikisource here. the Lore for what i’m doing with it is. in 2018 a friend and i challenged ourselves to translate it every day of november, differently each time, to see what happened to like. our understanding of the poem and also of what ‘translation’ means. or could mean. i was also studying translation theory at the time and thought it would be cool to learn through experimenting. since then i have ‘translated’ it maybe 70 or 80 times? you are right in noticing that a lot of these do not look like a literal translation of the latin. um some thoughts on this:
if you translate the same poem 70+ times you will get bored and start doing strange things to it. but what strange things?
i read the translator’s invisibility by lawrence venuti and it had. an effect. part of its argument is that all translation is a series of choices, but certain choices are more often prioritised, viewed as neutral, and contribute to a culture where the role of the translator becomes invisible. because their choices are not remarked on as choices. sure this is often in the context of like. word choice. but it is also things like the choice to prioritise equivalent ‘literal’ meaning. in a homophonic translation you might choose instead to prioritise sound over everything else.
i also read catullus 51 as a poem very closely, a lot. particularly influential on me (after the first 30 or so translations) was marie elizabeth young’s chapter on it in the book translation as muse: poetic translation in catullus’s rome which has a lot generally about cultures of translation as rivalry/competition/seeking to outdo the ‘original’ author, and reads catullus 51 specifically as an appropriation of / rivalry with sappho 31, where the triangulation between catullus, sappho, and any other rival translators maps onto the triangulation of the ‘love plot’ of the poem. if you then superimpose all of this onto e.g. sappho and ‘lesbia’ and clodia who may or may not be lesbia, and catullus’ ‘translation’ of sappho/clodia into the female object of desire ‘lesbia’… well there is a lot happening in catullus 51 at that point. like there are probably at least 100 ways you could translate the poem prioritising different elements in different ways
so for most of my translations. and i do call them that because i think only referring to strictly literal translations as translations is boring and limiting and contributes to the translator’s invisibility etc. i am choosing to prioritise a slightly different reading each time. sometimes an unintuitive one sometimes a vaguely meta one, and trying make visible in the poem an awareness of its existence as a series of choices / a series of rearrangements of that triangular structure, where the translator has agency, and can use it for a variety of evil purposes. or sometimes im just having fun with a silly metrical form. like doing a cartwheel.*
and i think catullus 51 is a very good poem to try this with. because yes it’s structure is the same as the relationship between me/catullus/sappho. but it also has such canonical status that you really can do whatever to it and it would be fine. i would not do these things with, for example, an otherwise untranslated poem by an emerging contemporary poet. as much as i want to compete with catullus 51, it has 2000+ years on me! f.
but still. almost all my cat51s retain the basic ‘plot’. a lot of them have been experiments with either metre/form/pushing the idea of what a translation can be. at what point do they become original poems? at what point does cat51 become original and not just a translation of sappho 31? what do one gazillion translations say about the hierarchy in the relationship between poet and translator, ‘original’ and ‘translation’? what about if poet and translator are the same person?
also at this point in my hashtag translation theory journey i genuinely think in the face of the impossibility of a definitive translation, especially of a relatively short text. the play is to just translate it like one gazillion times. a reader can see/construct a ‘real’ translation out of the gaps and commonalities and hundred different points of emphasis. my best translation of catullus 51 is the constellation made by all of the translations at once.
translation as catasterism? is that anything?
to answer your questions very directly. catullus 51 is a specific latin poem. all of my translations approximate different aspects of it. if you scroll way back to the ones from 2018 some of them are a lot more ‘literal’. but i disagree with the idea that being literal should be the priority of translation. also catullus 51 is one of my favourite poems of all time ever, and if i didn’t translate it in a way i considered poetry i would probably blow up!
*i assume cartwheels are fun. i have never actually been able to do one
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