Chasing Catullus

[helenic]

When I got home yesterday I had a much-needed evening off; sitting on the balcony with strongtrousers and a gin and tonic, reading and enjoying the warm, quiet hum of the city; wood pigeons, distant cries from the rowers on the Cam, watching the sunset. elise and cantabulous turned up and we drank Pimms and ate gorgonzola on wholegrain bread and talked and laughed for what seemed like hours, although we were all tired and I was slightly crazy with sleep deprivation.

I was reading this book which purple_pen gave me and which I hadn't previously found space to look at or thank her for. purple_pen is exceedingly lovely. (Thankyou SO MUCH, I am all heartwarmed and will treat you when we are in Rome next week!) It made my day when it turned up, and then it made it again yesterday when I was reading it and exclaiming over every other poem. I know how to read Classical poetry, and this uses the same mental tools - I always feel a bit at sea with modern poetry. I never feel like I'm getting it, so even when I like modern poetry I never feel able to say why. But I know where I stand with this, I know the language it's speaking, and it's real, and it is modern, very modern. And womanly, and powerful, and liberating. I don't know, really, I'm not making sense, so here are some of my favourite bits instead:


Feminine Ending: to Sulpicia

Midnight in Rome, summer, the year one,
and you're going home, the party's fading fast:
you've defiled aediles, procured a procurator,
got a handful of jokes past the stern new censor,
(if not amused when you declined his part).
Even the emperor, not noted for humour,
put your best up with - let's think - Tibullus:
all right, the man's a bore, a pain, a total ass,
but there could be worse ways to share a floruit:
a whole new world now, new empires to crush,
you see, you're famous, a star, fëted genius.

But empires fold, dates blur, years move on,
and you're marginalised, anthologised - just;
you've evaded Vandals, survived the Huns,
got a handful of poems past the monks and nuns,
if they still removed each Sulpicia est;
even academia, not noted for humour,
put your best down to - let's think - Tibullus:
all right, you know the score, the same old caveat:
your work can't exist, or if it does, it's trash;
just the way of the world, survival of the fittest;
you see, your name ends in 'a' and they want 'us'.

____


Chasing Catullus

It's the rule of attraction, the corruption of texts,
the way his corpus tastes of skin and sweat,
that taint of decay, scent of cheated death.

But then, I've always liked them old -
parsed hearts, lost minds, redundant souls;
just enough to get me fleshing ghosts,
giving them tongue, jumping their bones.

Yet sleep with the dead and you'll wake
with the worms - stripped down, compressed,
a little accusative, slightly stressed - to find
the code you crack, the clause that breaks,
is no longer subordinate, it's now your own.

_____


Niobe
    (2/8: 7.22AM)

(after Sophocles)

Like a cloud-burst on a Penwith day
that had to come yet still startles, shocks;
think of granite veined with pale-rose quartz,
a fret of stone where the bracken's frayed
by aching, flint-pierced, moorland streams;
the bind of ivy, the prick of gorse,
hedged in with comfrey, helleborine;
sob of rain, scar of hail, snow shrinking
to sigh, the sound of words you can't say.



I've had the urge so many times when translating to improve on it, just run with the concept and write a whole new poem. It's such a freeing idea. That line doesn't quite work in English, so you re-write it; you aren't committed to being true to (and limited by) the meaning and intent of the original, you can build on it, reference it, play games with it. It annoys me that "plagiarism" is the source of such universal hostility in this century that you can't respond to the art of others in the same way. In the ancient world and until the Renaissance to some extent, art wasn't art unless it was referential; you didn't write disconnected, unique novels trying not to reuse techniques or themes or motifs or styles which will remind the reader of someone else, you re-told myth, you referenced as many earlier writers as you could; the more the better. You were ironic, ludic, turning your predecessors upside down, quoting something in a context which undermines or questions it; re-telling things in a wry, backstabbing way, nodding to those who have influenced you and simultaneously demonstrating that you were better than them. Or you just re-used a line because it was pretty, and knowledge of the earlier context enriched and added texture to the present one.

Pretty much the only modern artform in which this is even remotely the case is popular music. New music is well-received if it references or is influenced by previous well-received music. Samples get everywhere; a stranger will remix a track you've made, taking what you've produced and running with it, creating something interconnected but new. It's like a conversation in slow motion, throwing your ideas and your experience out into the air and letting them fall and watch people catch them and change them in the light of their own ideas, adding their own experience as their truth, and throwing it back up again.

I love the intertextuality and intratextuality in Balmer's poetry. The way she uses rhyme against Latin meter. The way she constructs her relationship with the text and its author and their relationship with the text. The too-clever-for-their-own-good puns. The reciprocity not only between her translation and the original, but between her translations and her own poems, within each poem, between ancient spark and modern flame, using juxtaposition to cast new layers of meaning on the pieces around it. The book is arranged chronologically but it's as if each poem expands from within, making ripples that spread throughout your reading of the book in a wholly non-linear way. And the way she brings her experience to the texts, how she writes about bereavement, not only finding meaning in the ancient texts but the means, within the framework they offer her, to say the unsayable, to confront and express things which would otherwise have remained amorphous.

Comments

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

The Sulpicia poem is bloody brilliant :) Thank you for sharing.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

It's SO CLEVER. Every time I re-read it I pick up on another thing she's doing. When I first read it I had to re-read it about four times until I pulled together all the threads I'd sensed but not worked out on the first reading. And I'm sure there's a lot in there I haven't got yet.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

I've added it (obviously) to the List - it's a long way down, obviously, but sounds like it would be a brilliant read, especially if everything needs as much unpacking and cross-referencing as that.

I am smutty so the third, fourth and fifth lines are particularly brilliant :)

[libellum.livejournal.com]

"Declined his part"!!!! I can't believe I missed that one. Thankyou! :D

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

You missed it??? Dude, those were the lines I had you snerking at from the first read-through! ;)

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Seconded. Absolutely wonderful.

[oakwonder.livejournal.com]

Balmer's Sappho is invigorating: of all the Sappho translations I've read, hers is perhaps the closest (not that anyone can be close in this case) to something like the spirit of the original. Another is Bliss Carman, who simply made up long Sappho poems, and got the spirit very much right. I don't know Balmer's Catullus but what you've quoted is lovely. How you want Catullus to be.

It is shocking how over-reaction rules now: plagiarism this and abuse that. Plagiarism should be for copying long swathes out, out of laziness and unimaginativeness: not for celebration and reference.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Have you read Anne Carson's Sappho? I gave that to oxfordgirl for Christmas and didn't do more than flick through it but I'd heard excellent things about it. I'd be intrigued to see how they compare.

I'm not actually sure that many Of Chasing Catullus are translations of Catullus poems. She translates bits of Propertius (via Ezra Pound), Cavafy, Catullus 64.254-64 (via Titian and Auerbach), Euripides, Ovid, Claudian, Sophocles, Plato, Virgil and Homer. I don't know if the Catullus reference in the title is making another, more thematic, point, or whether she incorporates Catulluan references throughout which I haven't noticed yet. Or whether it was just that book followed up her Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate? Who can tell.

Believe me, I'm anti-plagiarism. But I've been accused of plagiarism when I was referencing before - especially online, even when I cited my inspiration, even if it was nothing more than, at times, a bit of code. People are very jumpy about "intellectual property" on the internet these days. It takes half the pleasure out of enjoying something if you can't then carry bits of it with you, you have to leave it undisturbed and contained and finite.

[purple-pen.livejournal.com]

Ooh, glad you got it safely! I had quite forgotten about sending it to you, actually. Of course, the choice was yours, since I found it on your wish-list. But I'm very glad it was such a good one!

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Did you? I know I had her Poems of Love and Hate listed but I'd forgotten about this one. Hurrah! Surprises all round! I'll bring it with me on Tuesday and you can have a look if you like :D

Do we have more organising to do, by the way? I don't have much time to think about it before I leave the country but I can try to make time to sort anything that needs doing...

[purple-pen.livejournal.com]

I don't think so, but I'm still in Bristol at the moment, so am not really in the right place to check. The most important thing for me is that you remind the hotel people that another person will be showing up on Thursday night, so that they don't get confused and refuse to let me into your room when I arrive. It would be handy if you let me know your room number once you know it, too, so that I know which one to go into when I get there.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

I disagree wildly with your characterisation of modern literature, but you have a thesis to write (and um, so do I), so we shouldn't argue it now!

[fumi-gation.livejournal.com]

Stolen for my LJ...after reading so many dry and boring 1A set texts this year, it does re-affirm my faith, a little, in good poetry :)

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

These have made my day. Thank you.

They're fantastic even when half the classicist in-jokes are going over your head.

[sinsense.livejournal.com]

This is just a comment to say that I've friended you, based on interest and friends in common. (I usually like to be told, since I'm a featherhead and rarely keep track of these things.)