from Poems

CATULLUS

Recently, my friends have been indulging their lust for schadenfreude by telling me that the Latin language has grown unhip. How can this be? When people speak coarsely of the “dead” languages, I inquire, “Dead for whom?” Almost invariably they respond, “For everybody.”

It is a sad state of affairs. With the demise of Latin, lost will be the poignancy of Augustine’s plaintive cries for God’s mercy; forgotten will be the singular nobility of Virgil’s hexameter (his readers turned to swine by the Circe of modernity); erased will be the majesty of Cicero, whose rhetoric was considered so supreme that throughout the Renaissance many speakers would not use a word if it did not appear in the Ciceronian corpus, believing that if it was unnecessary to Cicero it was unnecessary to language in general.

But of these crimes, perhaps the greatest will be the fading of Catullus, whose two-thousand-year-old bawdy and satiric lyrics are some of history’s wittiest barbs. If Latin is truly to die, much laughter will die with it.

XV

To you, Aurelius, I give you both my self and my young love,
and ask but one a small favor:
That if, in the depths of your heart, you have ever wished
The object of your desire to remain pure and unspoiled,
Then you’ll protect my boy from lechery;
I speak not of the public—I don’t fear those milling about the
squares,
Entirely occupied in their own affairs;
It’s you who scares me: you and your penis,
That menace to children both good and bad.
Use it wherever you wish, given whatever chance,
Excepting only my young friend. This, my modest request.
But should your wicked impulses or evil mind
Impel you, blackguard, to commit a crime
Of treachery against my person,
Ah, then you’ll rue your miserable fate;
You’ll have your legs bound
And your backdoor rammed with fish and radishes!

LXIX

Do not wonder, Rufus, why no woman
Wants to place her soft thighs under you,
Even when you give her rare fabrics
Or precious stones of perfect translucence.
Your problem is an unfortunate rumor
That you tend a mean goat in the armpit’s valley,
Who scares all the women away.
No mystery: It’s a nasty beast
No girl would want to sleep with.
So either kill off this scourge of the nostril,
Or stop wondering why they all run away.

XCVII

I had thought (so help me gods!) that it made no difference
Whether I smelled Amelius’ mouth or asshole;
The one being no cleaner, the other no filthier.
But, in fact, his asshole is cleaner, and much preferable:
It has no teeth. The mouth has teeth a foot and a half long
And gums like an old wagon car. When it opens
It’s like the cunt of a heatstruck donkey pissing.
And yet he fucks quite a bit and thinks himself a playboy—
Is he not afraid of any retribution?
But the women who touch him,
Would they not lick the asscrack of a hangman?

—translated by Jack Murnighan