The Translator’s Invisibility

Nott’s translation deviated from English literary and moral values in several ways. Not only did he choose to include the Latin text and translate the sexual references, but his choices (“unnatural lust,” “posterior,” “breech”) render the Latin quite closely (“cinaede,” “culo,” “natis”), refusing the traditional free method and thus minimizing the risk of euphemism and expurgation. Nott’s translation is equally un-English in being no more than intermittently fluent. The text opens with a false rhyme (“first” / “lust”). The twelve-syllable line, a departure from the pentameter standard, is metrically irregular and rather cumbersome, handled effectively only in the second couplet. And the syntax is elliptical, inverted, or convoluted in fully half of the lines.

Nott’s violations against moral and stylistic propriety are also apparent when his translations are juxtaposed to Lamb’s. Both translated Catullus’s apology for his love poetry, but their treatments of the opening lines are significantly different:

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.

I’ll treat you as ’tis meet, I swear,
Notorious pathics as ye are!
Aurelius, Furius! who arraign
And judge me by my wanton strain.

(Nott 1795:I, 51)

And dare ye, Profligates, arraign
The ardour of my sprightly strain,
And e’en myself asperse?

(Lamb 1821:I, 35)

{88} Neither version went as far as the Latin text in specifying the nature of the sexual acts: Catullus’s “pedicabo” and “irrumabo” indicate anal and oral intercourse. But Nott’s “pathics” was obviously much closer to the Latin than Lamb’s “profligates.” The word “pathics” was a term of abuse used since the seventeenth century to mean “a man or boy upon whom sodomy is practised; a catamite” (OED). Hence, its abusiveness (even if homophobic by late twentieth-century standards) conveyed Catullus’s Roman assumption that a male who submitted to anal and oral intercourse—whether willingly or not—was humiliated whereas, “the penetrator himself was neither demeaned nor disgraced” (Wiseman 1985:11). Lamb’s choice of “profligates” effectively expurgated the Latin text, but his bourgeois sense of propriety was so intense that he felt compelled to mention the expurgation in a footnote, where he also sought to excuse the coarseness of Catullus’s language: it was seen as expressing the intensity of his hurt feelings:

This poem is a very free imitation of the original, which could not be tolerated if translated literally. Pezay says, this poem being addressed by Catullus to his two great friends, should be looked upon “comme une petite gaité.” The tone is rather of serious indignation at the comments on his poems; and he may have been the more exasperated at such treatment from those whom he had considered his friends and defenders.

The sacred bard, to Muses dear,
Himself should pass a chaste career.

This assertion of the purity of character which a loose poet should and may preserve has been brought forward both by Ovid, Martial, and Ausonius, in their own defence.

(Lamb 1821:II, 141)

Lamb’s version was a paragon, not just of propriety, but of fluency too. Nott used another false rhyme (“swear” / “ye are”) and created a somewhat ungainly movement from one couplet to the next, abruptly shifting from declarative statement to epithet to apostrophe. Lamb evidently borrowed Nott’s one true rhyme in the passage, but he put it to much more elegant use by making the syntax more continuous and varying the meter more subtly.

There is perhaps no better illustration of the translators’ different methods than their versions of Carmen V, the object of innumerable English translations and imitations since the sixteenth century: