The Carmina Of Caius Valerius Catullus Now First Completely Englished Into Verse And Prose

The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus - Now first completely Englished into Verse and Prose, the Metrical Part by Capt. Sir Richard F. Burton, and the Prose Portion, Introduction, and Notes Explanatory and Illustrative by Leonard C. Smithers - Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 - 54 BC) was a Latin poet of the late Roman Republic who wrote in the neoteric style of poetry. His surviving works are still read widely, and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art.Catullus' poems were widely appreciated by other poets. He greatly influenced poets such as Ovid, Horace, and Virgil. After his rediscovery in the late Middle Ages, Catullus again found admirers. His explicit writing style has shocked many readers. Indeed, Catullus' work was never canonical in schools, although his body of work is still frequently read from secondary school to graduate programs across the world.Catullus wrote in many different meters including quadracasyllabic verse and elegiac trios (common in love poetry). All of his poetry shows strong and occasionally wild emotions especially in regard to Lesbia. Lesbia, known for having multiple suitors, always showed little affection towards Catullus. He also demonstrates a great sense of humour such as in Catullus 13.

The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus - Now first completely Englished into Verse and Prose, the Metrical Part by Capt.

The present translation was jointly undertaken by the late Sir Richard Burton and myself in 1890, some months before his sudden and lamented death. We had previously put into English, and privately printed, a body of verse from the Latin, and our aim was to follow it with literal and unexpurgated renderings of Catullus, Juvenal, and Ausonius, from the same tongue. Sir Richard laid great stress on the necessity of thoroughly annotating each translation from an erotic (and especially a paederastic) point of view, but subsequent circumstances caused me to abandon that intention. The Latin text of Catullus printed in this volume is that of Mueller (A.D. 1885), which Sir Richard Burton chose as the basis for our translation, and to that text I have mainly adhered. On some few occasions, however, I have slightly deviated from it, and, although I have consulted Owen and Postgate, in such cases I have usually followed Robinson Ellis. Bearing in mind my duty to the reader as well as to the author, I have aimed at producing a readable translation, and yet as literal a version (castrating no passages) as the dissimilarity in idiom of the twolanguages, Latin and English, permit; and I claim for this volume that it is the first literal and complete English translation as yet issued of Catullus. The translations into English verse which I have consulted are The Adventures of Catullus, and the History of his Amours with Lesbia (done from the French, 1707), Nott, Lamb, Fleay, (privately printed, 1864), Hart-Davies, Shaw, Cranstoun, Martin, Grant Allen, and Ellis. Of these, none has been helpful to me save Professor Robinson Ellis's Poems and Fragments of Catullus translated in the metres of the original, -a most excellent and scholarly version, to which I owe great indebtedness for many a felicitous expression

Catullus is one of the liveliest and most appealing Roman poets. His emotion, charm, and apparent spontaneity resonate with readers as strongly today as in antiquity. This sophisticated literary and historical introduction brings Catullus to life for the modern reader and presents his poetry in all its variety of emotions, subjects, and styles. Places Catullus in a social, historical, and literary context Examines Catallus's style and subjects, and provides a literary introduction to his major themes of love, social life, and politics Discusses the reception of the poems by translators and interpreters

The most famous of all love poetry, combing in the delights and the agonies of love, in a lovely translation from the original., newly edited for modern readers by the classical scholar Ruth Finnegan