Personal anthology: Anne Carson

Bane’s adaptation of the newly-discovered Sappho poem (and her earlier post about translating Horace’s Soracte ode) has made me think about both classical Greek and Latin poetry and the practice of free translation.* While thinking, I remembered Anne Carson’s adaptation of Catullus 50 in Men in the Off Hours:

Hesterno Licini Die Otiosi (Yesterday Licinius At Our Ease)

Catullus addresses Licinius with affection.

I guess around sunset we started to drink.
And lay on the floor writing lines
For songs that cold
Night smell coming in
The window I left about four went
Home.
Opened the fridge.
Closed it lay down got up.
Lay down.
Lay.
Turned.
Not morning yet.
I just want to talk to you.
Why does love happen?
So then I grew old and died and wrote this.
Be careful it’s worldsharp.

This is part of "Catullus: Carmina," a series of Catullus adaptations in Men in the Off Hours. I love the way the hyperbole in it keeps bumping up against real longing and a sadness that isn’t exactly there in the original. But when one goes back to Catullus’s poem afterward, one starts to notice the ominous quality of that final reference to Nemesis, tongue-in-cheek though the rest of the poem is. My other favorite free-translation in the sequence is "Caeli Lesbia Nostra Lesbia Illa (Our Lesbia That Lesbia)," based on #58, one of Catullus’s more disgruntled breaking-up-with-Lesbia poems:

Nuns coated with silver were not so naked
As our night interviews.
Now what plum is your tongue
In?

None of this is about staying close to the text, obviously. The goal is something different, more like riffing and improvising. (I would also quote from Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which I adore, but a friend borrowed my copy some time back and still has it.) I want to try it; it’s been too long since I translated anything.

* And also because, one chapter into the Italian version of Harry Potter, I’m already being startled by what happens to characters’ names. Harry Potter is still Harry Potter and the Dursleys are still the Dursleys, but Albus Dumbledore inexplicably becomes "Albus Silente" and Minerva McGonagall’s last name is rendered as "McGranitt." Mystifying.

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