Song of a Reformed Headhunter

In Number 15, Catullus begs Aurelius not to touch his boyfriend, for It's you that scare me, you and your great whanger, a standing threat to boys both good and naughty. Look, wag the damn thing where and how you fancy, all you've a mind to out there, cocked and ready-- just leave him out of it, make one exception! The plea then turns into a threat. Should "ill-will or mindless madness" drive Aurelius to practice "low tricks" on Catullus, he will feel his retaliation, feet spread and strapped, back-passage widely gaping, reamed all its length with radishes and mullets! Ouch! Roman adult masculinity: okay to fuck, but not to be fucked; even mindless madness is subject to the discipline of an iron will. The unstressed syllable at the end of every line gives the line a falling rhythm (as opposed to the strong rising rhythm in English verse), which seems to add to the urbane tone.

I don't have Boland with me today, and so started reading Peter Green's translation of Catullus ( The Poems of Catallus , University of California Press). I can't say I am not glad to take a break from feminist earnestness and turn to masculinist machismo. In Number 5, written in hendecasyllables, the speaker asks Lesbia to love him, and to value scandal, gossip, old men's strictures at "no more than a farthing!" Suns can rise and set "ad infinitum," but, once their "brief life's quenched," humans have only "one unending night" to sleep through. The numerical tropes, familiar, even cliched, set up these following marvelous lines: Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then a thousand more, a second hundred, then yet another thousand then a hundred-- The lines have a winsome spontaneity in the swing from thousand to hundred, and then back to thousand, only to push off to another hundred. The numbers are repeated with nice v...