Schoolboy filth and tender love: a classic with a twist

POETRY: The Irish Catullus or One Gentleman of VeronaEdited by Ronan Sheehan AA Farmar, 149pp, €20

GAIUS Valerius Catullus, who may have been as young as 28 when he died, is 2,000 years in the grave. He was, on the evidence of his own work, and a short reference in Suetonius, a lively lad, and then some. He left us 116 poems, a like number of fragments and perhaps the most sulphurous reputation of any European poet until Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine slouched into view.

When I was failing to learn Latin he was a schoolboy byword for filth and bad-tempered denunciations – certain to attract our attention; that he was also a tender-hearted and delicate love poet was not, then, of so much interest to us.

He has proved a surprisingly durable poet, a puer aeternus, or eternal boy, whose work continues to exert a fascination. He has also proved an irresistible temptation to generations of translators over two millennia; that he emerges each time with his original bounce and radiance undimmed is a kind of miracle.

There’s plenty of bounce and radiance in this present book, with its many contributing translators and an abundance of spleen, invective, word music, arm-chancing, insight, yearning, delight and provocation.

Ronan Sheehan had the splendid idea of a tripartite edition, the originals flanked by translations into English and Irish (plus one each from Manainnis, Gaidhlig and, I think, Ulster Scots), three columns to a page. Laid out in landscape format, allowing us flit from original to versions, the book is a treasure house of sense and sensibilities. A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed and delivered – though the absence of an index or table of contents is as infuriating as it is inexplicable.

The illustrious Pádraig Ó Snodaigh managed the Irish translations, while Pádraig Breandán Ó Laighin acted as editor, and their Catullus Gaelachof 2010 is deeply interwoven in this entire enterprise. The play between Latin, Irish and English in the book offers considerable food for thought and argument and would underpin many a useful seminar.

I see three main strands at work, all skilfully marshalled by Sheehan. The more consistently faithful translations are in the Irish language; the English versions are sometimes exact and literal, or they are variations, sometimes wild, exuberant variations, on a theme or image gleefully lifted from the Latin original.

The book is dedicated to the late Michael Hartnett, Sheehan’s earliest recruit, represented here with some characteristically faithful, lapidary and delicate work. John Banville gives us a neat and faithful version of LXXIII but manages somehow to sound his own disillusioned note in the acid, regretful music of Catullus.

The book is full of such satisfying moments. I was taken, for instance, with Biddy Jenkinson's handling of the long LXII, where she weaves the music of Cill Aodáininto the opening of a marriage hymn, and by Sheehan's equally deft and sympathetic handling of the English version of the same poem – indeed Sheehan contributes a number of thoughtful and musical translations, putting his own shoulder to the wheel in fine style.

Some well-known names have a pen in this enterprise, Thomas McCarthy, Katie Donovan, Celia de Fréine, Colm Breathnach, Michael Longley, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Derry O’Sullivan, Gabriel Rosenstock and the superb Tomás Mac Síomóin among them.

As might be expected, these veterans acquit themselves well – and sometimes surprisingly. There is a bawdy exuberance in some of the English-language versions that may raise an eyebrow or two. Longley, for instance, unleashes his inner schoolboy with relish, usefully enriching our vocabularies with a slew of filthy words in what is either Scots or Ulster Scots – in the absence of an Ulster Scots dictionary I can’t tell.

There is relish, too, in McCarthy’s “Fuck where you will but this youth is mine. / This one lad I’ll have you spare. Please”, while Ní Chuilleanáin, you just know it, thoroughly enjoys bringing not just Bette Davis but also “bacon and cabbage and tea and bread and jam” into the senior classics common room.

There is something happily transgressive about this book that appeals to me hugely. Some of the most energetic and provocative translations, mostly in English, come from names that will be, perhaps, not so well known, but these mostly younger authors more than hold their own here, indeed often contributing the most cheerfully colourful, filthy and inventively wounding riffs and invective in the book – plaudits to Mia Gallagher, Karl O’Neill, Matthew Geden , Mick Raftery and Conor Bowman, among others.

Sheehan, rightly, excoriates Queen’s University Belfast for the barbarism of its 2002 decision to close its classics department. More usefully and to the point, in this happy omnium gatherum he demonstrates that out of the past we can find new light on the present.

Catullus incarnates and demonstrates a deep truth of poetry: certain themes, situations and human types are eternally recurrent, and endure in a perpetual present tense.

In that light, and as a grace note, let me salute Peter Sirr, whose finely judged homage to Catullus, Carmina,comes at the end of this book – testament that Helicon has not stopped in its flowing, that the English of the 21st century converses more tellingly than many might imagine with the Roman Empire before Christ.

Theo Dorgan's most recent books are the prose work Time on the Ocean,New Island 2010, and the collection of poems Greek, Dedalus Press 2010