The Poems and Fragments of Catullus

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Title: The Poems and Fragments of Catullus
Author: Catullus
Translator: Robinson Ellis
Release Date: July 19, 2006 [EBook #18867]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE
POEMS AND FRAGMENTS
OF
CATULLUS,
TRANSLATED IN THE METRES OF THE ORIGINAL
BY
ROBINSON ELLIS,
FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD,
PROFESSOR
OF LATIN IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.

LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1871.
LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS,
WHITEFRIARS.
TO ALFRED TENNYSON.
[Transcriber's note: The preface uses macrons and breves above some
letters to indicate stresses. I have rendered the letters with breve inside
parenthesis (like th(i)s) and the letters with macron inside square
brackets (like th[i]s).]
PREFACE.
The idea of translating Catullus in the original metres adopted by the
poet himself was suggested to me many years ago by the admirable,
though, in England, insufficiently known, version of Theodor Heyse
(Berlin, 1855). My first attempts were modelled upon him, and were so
unsuccessful that I dropt the idea for some time altogether. In 1868, the
year following the publication of my larger critical edition[A] of
Catullus, I again took up the experiment, and translated into English
glyconics the first Hymenaeal, _Collis o Heliconici_. Tennyson's
Alcaics and Hendecasyllables had appeared in the interval, and had
suggested to me the new principle on which I was to go to work. It was
not sufficient to reproduce the ancient metres, unless the ancient
quantity was reproduced also. Almost all the modern writers of
classical metre had contented themselves with making an accented
syllable long, an unaccented short; the most familiar specimens of
hexameter, Longfellow's _Evangeline_ and Clough's _Bothie of
Tober-na-Vuolich_ and _Amours de Voyage_ were written on this
principle, and, as a rule, stopped there. They almost invariably
disregarded position, perhaps the most important element of quantity.
In the first line of _Evangeline_--
_This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,_
there are no less than five violations of position, to say nothing of the
shortening of a syllable so distinctly long as the _i_ in _primeval_. Mr.

Swinburne, in his Sapphics and Hendecasyllables, while writing on a
manifestly artistic conception of those metres, and, in my judgment,
proving their possibility for modern purposes by the superior
rhythmical effect which a classically trained ear enabled him to make in
handling them, neglects position as a rule, though his nice sense of
metre leads him at times to observe it, and uniformly rejects any
approach to the harsh combinations indulged in by other writers. The
nearest approach to quantitative hexameters with which I am
acquainted in modern English writers is the _Andromeda_ of Mr.
Kingsley, a poem which has produced little effect, but is interesting as
a step to what may fairly be called a new development of the metre. For
the experiments of the Elizabethan writers, Sir Philip Sidney and others,
by that strange perversity which so often dominates literature, were as
decidedly unsuccessful from an accentual, as the modern experiments
from a quantitative point of view. Sir Philip Sidney has given in his
_Arcadia_ specimens of hexameters, elegiacs, sapphics, asclepiads,
anacreontics, hendecasyllables. The following elegiacs will serve as a
sample.
_Unto a caitif wretch, whom long affliction holdeth,
And now fully
believ's help to bee quite perished;
Grant yet, grant yet a look, to the
last moment of his anguish, O you (alas so I finde) caus of his onely
ruine:
Dread not awhit (O goodly cruel) that pitie may enter
Into
thy heart by the sight of this Epistle I send:
And so refuse to behold
of these strange wounds the recitall, Lest it might m' allure home to
thyself to return._
In these the classical laws of position are most carefully observed;
every dactyl ending in a consonant is followed by a word beginning
with a vowel or _h_--_affl[i]ct(i)(o)n holdeth_, _mom[e]nt (o)f h(i)s
anguish_, _ca[u]se (o)f h(i)s onely_; _affliction wasteth_, _moment of
his dolour_, _cause of his dreary_, would have been as impossible to
Sir Philip Sidney as _mo[e]r(o)r t(e)nebat_, _mom[e]nt(a) p(e)r curae_,
_ca[u]s(a) v(e)l sola_ in a Latin writer of hexameters. Similarly where
the dactyl is incided after the second syllable, the third syllable
beginning a new word, the utmost care is taken that that word shall
begin not only with a syllable essentially short, but, when the second

syllable ends in a consonant, with a vowel: _[o]f th(i)s (e)pistle_, but
not _[o]f th(i)s