The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus | Page 3

made Eustache Deschamps write of his
contemporary and brother bard,
_Grand Translateur, noble Geoffroy Chaucier._
Here
'The firste finder of our fair langage'
is styled 'a Socrates in philosophy, a Seneca in morals, an Angel in
conduct and a great Translator,'--a seeming anti-climax which has
scandalized not a little sundry inditers of 'Lives' and 'Memoirs.' The
title is no bathos: it is given simply because Chaucer _translated_
(using the term in its best and highest sense) into his pure, simple and
strong English tongue with all its linguistic peculiarities, the thoughts
and fancies of his foreign models, the very letter and spirit of Petrarch
and Boccaccio."
For the humble literary status of translation in modern England and for
the short-comings of the average English translator, public taste or
rather caprice is mainly to be blamed. The "general reader," the man
not in the street but the man who makes up the educated mass, greatly

relishes a novelty in the way of "plot" or story or catastrophe while he
has a natural dislike to novelties of style and diction, demanding a
certain dilution of the unfamiliar with the familiar. Hence our
translations in verse, especially when rhymed, become for the most part
deflorations or excerpts, adaptations or periphrases more or less
meritorious and the "translator" was justly enough dubbed "traitor" by
critics of the severer sort. And he amply deserves the injurious name
when ignorance of his original's language perforce makes him pander
to popular prescription.
But the good time which has long been coming seems now to have
come. The home reader will no longer put up with the careless
caricatures of classical chefs d'oeuvre which satisfied his old-fashioned
predecessor. Our youngers, in most points our seniors, now expect the
translation not only to interpret the sense of the original but also, when
the text lends itself to such treatment, to render it _verbatim et
literatim_, nothing being increased or diminished, curtailed or
expanded. Moreover, in the choicer passages, they so far require an
echo of the original music that its melody and harmony should be
suggested to their mind. Welcomed also are the mannerisms of the
translator's model as far as these aid in preserving, under the disguise of
another dialect, the individuality of the foreigner and his peculiar
costume.
That this high ideal of translation is at length becoming popular now
appears in our literature. The "Villon Society," when advertizing the
novels of Matteo Bandello, Bishop of Agen, justly remarks of the
translator, Mr. John Payne, that his previous works have proved him to
possess special qualifications for "the delicate and difficult task of
transferring into his own language at once the savour and the substance,
the matter and the manner of works of the highest individuality,
conceived and executed in a foreign language."
In my version of hexameters and pentameters I have not shirked the
metre although it is strangely out of favour in English literature while
we read it and enjoy it in German. There is little valid reason for our
aversion; the rhythm has been made familiar to our ears by long

courses of Greek and Latin and the rarity of spondaic feet is assuredly
to be supplied by art and artifice.
And now it is time for farewelling my friends:--we may no longer
(alas!) address them, with the ingenuous Ancient in the imperative
Vos Plaudite.
RICHARD F. BURTON.
_July, 1890._

INTRODUCTION
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 two
languages, 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