Listen to the recording or see the transcript below to learn about the assignment.
Content Warning: this poetry contains sexual and violent language
Hi, I’m Toni. I’m an undergraduate student at St Andrews doing a degree in Classics and Comparative Literature. For this summer I’ve made an art assignment for people interested in poetry. You will get a chance to translate some ancient poetry into your own language, in a way that reflects your own experiences of personhood and social interactions.
Over the past months of the pandemic you maybe had to redefine how you perceive yourself, how you are perceived by an audience – be it friends, family, your cat, yourself, or whoever you spent these months with – and how you communicate this, both in your daily experiences of interacting with yourself and others as well as in artwork and literature.
In this art project, I want to invite you to join me in the process of re-learning how this conversation works and how we can be vulnerable without feeling unsafe. The idea is to pay close attention to the way you interact with different speakers in the poems of the ancient Roman poet Catullus and to translate these relationships into your own world. Let’s re-invent our own voices and create a gallery, a safe-space for our Catullan identities after all these months of isolation.
The idea for this collaborative art project was born during a research project on gender performance in Catullus’ poetry. Inspired by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay On Camp, I wanted to look into the ways gender stereotypes and ideas of campness might play out in Catullus’ poetry. If you’re interested, you can look into Sontag’s essay as part of your art creation, but you don’t have to. First, let me introduce you to Catullus.
Catullus was writing in the middle of the 1st century BCE, in late Republican Rome. Already during this time, he was widely known and read. Once upon a time, Catullus was considered by modern readers as a charming minor love poet, but that was because they only read a handful of his poems. Readers both ancient and modern who had access to the whole of Catullus have been at once fascinated and shocked by the explicit violence in his poems and also the sometimes graphic descriptions of sex with both male and female partners.
The two most famous addressees of his poems are the lovers, known to us as Lesbia and Juventius who both feature in the selection of poems for this assignment.
Now let’s look at some of the poems I have shared with you. Poem 5 and 48 are examples of Catullus’ beautiful love poems. Poem 5 is addressed to a woman, whom he calls Lesbia – while poem 48 addresses a boy named Juventius. Poems 15 and 16, on the other hand, are violent and seem to have nothing in common with the delicacy of 5 and 48. They mention Aurelius and Furius who were almost certainly friends of Catullus. OK, so now we know to whom these poems are addressed, but what are they about? Poems 5 and 48 are more straight forward, so I’ll let you explore those on your own. But 15 and 16 are trickier… They seem to have some relationship with poem 5 and 48, don’t they?
In poem 16, Catullus, or the Catullan persona, seems to be responding to criticism about his kiss poems. I don’t want to influence the way you read these poems, but I would just ask you to think hard about whether or not these poems are driven by rage? Are the poems threats of actual bodily violence? And then the next question: How do these two poems influence the way you read the poems 5 and 48?
Finally I have also chosen to give you lines 49-73 from poem 63, which is one of Catullus’ longer poems. Poem 63 describes the story of Attis, an Athenian youth, who joins the cult of the goddess Cybele. The initiation ritual includes castration. The lines I’ve given you are Attis’ soliloquy from when they wake up the morning after their entrance to the cult of Cybele. I am using the singular they pronoun for Attis because after making a dramatic statement at the moment of castration, when Attis turns from a he to a she, the Latin in fact switches back and forth between feminine and masculine endings, while some of the Latin adjectives describing Attis have endings that could be either. This is something that makes the poem famously tricky to translate – and for me, this is an important part of the poem’s fascinating spell.
All of these poems deal with love, sexuality, identity and gender performance in all sorts of ways. The aim of this project is to visualise the relationships between speakers and addressees in each poem.
I want to move away from a heavy history of readership that tries to capture the lyric essence of a single Catullan persona that exists uniformly throughout his work. Instead, let’s look at the variety of voices featured in the poems and how they interact with each other.
Now, this is where you come in: your task is to read through the poems and pick one or two (or as many as you’d like), and imagine yourself into the poem.
Once you’ve read through them for the first time, you might want to think about who is talking? and who is listening? How many people are involved in the conversation and who is facing whom? Take some time to think about your own position in this conversation: whom can you see and who can see you – are you involved in the conversation or just watching and listening? Read the poems again and think about words or phrases that stand out to you or stick in your mind. Can you imagine the characters – how do they talk, dress, and gesticulate? And most importantly: what do they say to you and to each other?
Now translate the poem or poems you have chosen into your own voice, your own world, your own time. This translation doesn’t have to be a poem – it could be a comic strip, an image, a dance movement, a painting… Whatever new thing you make out of your close creative wrestling with the ancient poem. When you’re done, I’d love it if you could share it with us. If you write something, for example, you could record it like I’ve done here, or you could do it as a video, or an image – whatever suits you and your creative practice best and, of course, what you feel most comfortable with.
Before letting you loose into your own Catullan universes, let me just say one more thing: You may be excited about experiencing life again as it used to be before the pandemic. But you may also be a little bit intimidated for a variety of reasons and that’s perfectly fine – we cannot just forget or unthink all these thoughts and feelings of the past months of the pandemic. I think that’s just a part of moving back or rather forward into this new reality. But there’s something we can do: we can support each other. Let’s help each other in this challenge of redefining how we want to perform our own identities and how we want to share relationships by starting a conversation in which we all feel comfortable. Let’s create a safe space for all our voices and identities.
If you would like to be part of this, please send me your submissions to [email protected]. Please also let me know if you are happy with your content to be shared with our community as a blog post on this website and on our social media. I look forward to building this space with you.