Badmouthing City

William Fitzgerald

• The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition translated by Peter Green
  California, 339 pp, £15.95, September 2005, ISBN 0 520 24264 5

Peter Green’s splendid new translation of Catullus makes quite a substantial volume: more than three hundred pages in all, with an introduction, parallel text in Latin and English, notes, glossary and index. Such treatment doesn’t feel quite right for this ‘new witty booklet, all fresh-polished with abrasive’, as Catullus describes the book he dedicates to Cornelius Nepos in poem 1. The standard Latin text of Catullus’ works (which may or may not include this ‘witty booklet’) is one of the slimmest volumes in the Oxford Classical Texts series, and yet this diminutive collection of ‘trifles’, as Catullus calls them, has generated enough commentary to fill a small library. But for all his deprecation of the ‘booklet’, Catullus ends his dedication by praying that it may ‘outlast at least one generation’. Two thousand years later we are opening yet another translation to see how Catullus’ uniquely elusive and enticing voice survives. The news is good. This is a translation that sounds like Catullus, ‘all fresh-polished’ but abrasive too.