Introduction

Hello,

I am a history and Latin student, and recently I've become very interested in comparative linguistics. My Latin capstone project is to translate the Catullan Corpus in a way that will be familiar to modern Americans. Maybe there is already a translation out there that does this better than I've been able to, but I haven't been able to find it and I have been looking for years.
Catullus is not like Virgil, Horace, or Ovid. There is something distinctly, purposefully antiestablishment and iconoclastic both stylistically and otherwise about Catullus and his movement. When Cicero, dictator of diction, called these guys "Neoteroi" or "Poetae Novi" (in Latin), he was calling them unsubstantiated, unprecedented (which is bad to a Roman). Calling them the "New Poets" meant they were odd, queer, not fit to go down in Rome's literary history.

Anyway, I'm constantly rewriting these poems. Many, as they appear on here, won't be the final version, but I think you can get a sense of where I'm going with the translation. I used to have the poems up in the original Latin as well, but I didn't see much of a point in keeping them. Not many people can read them, and besides (I'm learning) the original are different poems entirely from translations. Changing the language changes the idiom changes the poem.

Which brings me to my final point. Literal translations are good for people who want to read Catullus for historical or sociological interest. They help someone who can't read the Latin to get to know an important and talented writer. I want to try to offer you, the reader, an actual poem. These poems are still translations of the Catullus, and I think will give a great sense of how good he was, but there's also my own fingerprint on each one.

(Hopefully, reader, your hand won't tremble, hesitating to pick up my little failures.) --Catullus 14b