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demonstrates the chiastic patterning in Poem 64, where the eight scenes of the poem create a form of chiastic framing: i. The courtship of Peleus and Thetis (lines 1–31) ii. The wedding feast, Part i (lines 32–50) iii. Ariadne’s search (lines 51–116) iv. Ariadne’s lament (lines 117–202) Bridge: The Judgment of Jove (lines 203–207) v. Aegeus’ lament (lines 208–250) v i . Iacchus’ search (lines 251–265) vii. The wedding feast, Part ii (lines 266–382) viii. Conclusion (lines 383–410) The crucial moment comes at the ‘bridge’, when Jove delivers his judgment on Theseus’s neglect of Ariadne and his failure to replace his ship’s black sail with a white one, as his father asked (a signal of Theseus’s triumphant return after slaughtering the Minotaur). The poem hinges on line 205, the central line to the poem and a pivot within the three ‘books’: ‘the Heavenly Power nodded unstoppable / approval’ – a line that seems straightforwardly positive, a god granting a wish to Ariadne, but which leads to the immediate suicide of Aegeus, and a darkening of the second half of the poem and of ‘book three’. These kinds of decisions on the ordering of the poems seem more like those of an author than a later editor. They are also choices consistent with the poems’ internal logic and aesthetic, and therefore more likely authorial than editorial. In short, alternative arrangements of the poems are simply not as convincing, or as successful, as the ordering of the three books, as they have been handed down. In the present volume, the differences in metrics between these ‘books’ are shadowed by differences in syllable count, to produce a line-by-line translation. My version of the first book, in which Catullus uses a variety of metres, is the freest in its treatment of the poems’ literal meanings, physical shapes and layout. These xii . catullus
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liberties allowed me to embrace the wider importance of Catullus in modern culture; for instance, my versions of Poems 16, 25, and 48 echo lines of Frank O’Hara, whose poems change the reader’s view of New York City ‘like having Catullus change your view of the Forum in Rome’ (Allen Ginsberg). So these translations try for cultural equivalence as well as textual accuracy. They show that Catullus’s poems are in dialogue with current and recent poetries, and suggest Catullus’s important influence on the development of anglophone poetries down the centuries since the Renaissance, when Catullus was first Englished. In the second and third books this shadowing is much stricter. Here my versions hug closer to the originals line-by-line, reflecting a new astringency in the rhythm and metre as a darker, bitterer tone develops. ‘In poetry’, wrote Robert Lowell in his introduction to Imitations, speaking of what, in essence, translation must achieve, ‘tone is of course everything’. If this translation aspires to achieve one thing, it is to register the shifts of tone in the original. It became clear, in the process of working away at the translations in this volume, that a unique quality of Catullus’s ‘books’ is this shifting tone, in tonal weight, away from the lightness of the polymetrics, through the more mature ‘wedding’ poems (is there a sense here of the poet taking life more seriously?), to the darker tone of ‘book three’, darkened by the death of the poet’s brother, whose absence looms over the final book; by the poet’s resignation to the withering of his relationship with Lesbia; and later by the barbed, sometimes desperate, often violent epigrams. Hand-in-hand with the work’s metrical groupings and tonal modulations are its shifts in diction (which similarly tack and veer within a poem or a single line), its soundings of voice (in the form of nuanced raising and lowering), and its complications of syntax. These shifts, soundings and complications give the ‘books’ characteristic dimensions and unique signatures that a simple division of the poems by their metrics would not. This is why shadowing the later texts closely, line-by-line, was crucial. It allowed me to preserve the meaning of the poem at a microtextual level, to retain the complexity and sophistication of the originals. A good example is Poem 97, which has been somewhat overlooked by introduction . xiii

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demonstrates the chiastic patterning in Poem 64, where the eight scenes of the poem create a form of chiastic framing:

i. The courtship of Peleus and Thetis (lines 1–31) ii. The wedding feast, Part i (lines 32–50) iii. Ariadne’s search (lines 51–116) iv. Ariadne’s lament (lines 117–202) Bridge: The Judgment of Jove (lines 203–207) v. Aegeus’ lament (lines 208–250) v i . Iacchus’ search (lines 251–265) vii. The wedding feast, Part ii (lines 266–382) viii. Conclusion (lines 383–410) The crucial moment comes at the ‘bridge’, when Jove delivers his judgment on Theseus’s neglect of Ariadne and his failure to replace his ship’s black sail with a white one, as his father asked (a signal of Theseus’s triumphant return after slaughtering the Minotaur). The poem hinges on line 205, the central line to the poem and a pivot within the three ‘books’: ‘the Heavenly Power nodded unstoppable / approval’ – a line that seems straightforwardly positive, a god granting a wish to Ariadne, but which leads to the immediate suicide of Aegeus, and a darkening of the second half of the poem and of ‘book three’. These kinds of decisions on the ordering of the poems seem more like those of an author than a later editor. They are also choices consistent with the poems’ internal logic and aesthetic, and therefore more likely authorial than editorial. In short, alternative arrangements of the poems are simply not as convincing, or as successful, as the ordering of the three books, as they have been handed down. In the present volume, the differences in metrics between these ‘books’ are shadowed by differences in syllable count, to produce a line-by-line translation. My version of the first book, in which Catullus uses a variety of metres, is the freest in its treatment of the poems’ literal meanings, physical shapes and layout. These xii . catullus

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