“average roman poet demands 3 kisses a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average roman poet demands 0 kisses per year. Gaius Valerius Catullus, who lives in Verona & demands over 3,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
26/11/21 • @galadhremmin said “idea. Save everything u chopped off [from the word count of a recent essay] and make into reverse blackout poem. Do necromancy on ur writing on necromancy,” unaware that i have incurable brainrot that makes me do these things Immediately and also makes every poem into catullus 51. h
Some real world Latin chalked up by some of my Catullus students a few years ago. They got a bit creative with their spelling of “irrumator” but if the graffiti from Pompeii have shown us anything it’s that Romans didn’t always know how to spell things either.
I’m not going to translate this one for you because I just learned, thanks to @stephenjenkins on Twitter, that there is a free PDF copy of Adams’ The Latin Sexual Vocabulary available on the Internet, so you can translate it for yourself.
tbh it’s incredible how close we came to losing almost all of catullus’ work in the middle ages, I keep thinking about how at one point it was down to one (1) manuscript of his poetry in the 13th century (besides 62 and a couple of lines here and there), and if that manuscript had been lost that would have been all we had
also just imagine for a second how differently we would have seen catullus if we only had 62. I’m losing my mind thinking about this
When the subject of wretched poetry comes up my first thought is of those slushy, inbred Victorians, who gave us some of the worst doggerel to be found in the English language. Full of pomposity, being grandiloquent without humor or irony, they seemed entirely unwilling or unable to write about anything without heaping bathos all over it: “Theirs not to make reply,/ Theirs not to reason why,/ Theirs but to do and die.” Yes, please put this schmaltz out of its misery. It’s no surprise that the artists who survived WWI quickly realized that their forebears were altogether useless when describing the horrors that they themselves had just witnessed. Burning it all down and salting the earth after was the only logical way to go. Thus, “Make it new,” became Modernism’s imperative and we’ve been following that maxim ever since … with mixed results. I lay claim to the Roman poet Catullus (84-54 B.C.) as poetic progenitor (that’s approximately 84 generations back). He’s a clean old man; though these days Catullus is chiefly remembered for a line of verse considered so obscene that a complete English translation of it wasn’t even published until the 20th century. “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,” which translates as: “I will sodomize and face-fuck you” (best opening line to one’s critics ever). That is the, “vulgar truth,” that I look for in poetry.
Not if I were made the guardian of the Cretans, not if I were borne by the flight of Pegasus, not if I were a Ladas or wing-footed Perseus, not if I were the snowy, swift team of King Rhesus; add to all this feathered feet and the ability to fly, and at the same time seek the speed of the winds which you could harness and bestow on me, Camerius: however, I would still be wearied in all the marrow of my bones and eaten away by great exhaustion from seeking you, my friend, for myself.
This is of course about Lesbia, and we have already passed the point, where that love turns bitter in poems like 58 or 75. Letting go, however, is another matter.
