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Latin Lover
A new translation brings life to Catullus.
by J.E. Lendon
2/25/2006 12:03:00 AM, Volume 011, Issue 24
The Poems of Catullus
translated by Peter Green
California, 360 pp., $24.95
CATULLUS, BEST BELOVED of the Latin poets, is happy to have found a friend in Peter Green. Acclaimed as a belle-lettrist, justly celebrated as an English stylist, a seasoned translator of ancient poetry, and an eminent ancient historian, Green also brings to Catullus a passionate sympathy for the poet of love and hate.
When Peter Green was a youthful soldier, he served, persistent rumor insists, as the model for the irresistible Guy Perron in Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown. In his late thirties Green published a historical novel called The Sword of Pleasure, and in his fifties, a translation of Ovid's erotic poems. Nearing seventy, after many desiccating years as a professor of classics in Texas, he nevertheless brought forth The Laughter of Aphrodite, a fictionalized life of Sappho. But Green is a familiar of Mars as well as Venus, a fierce and witty controversialist, a reviewer of lively renown: His knockabout battle in print with Victor Davis Hanson over the future of classical scholarship in America was savored even by the most jaded connoisseurs of classicists' invective.
Green's edition of Catullus is bilingual--Latin on the left and English on the right--with a pointed introduction before and plump notes behind: The admirer without Latin and the classical scholar both get their due and never feel each other's elbows. The translations do not censor Catullus' language--as late as 1961, 32 of the little more than a hundred surviving poems were still considered too ...
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