[In the following excerpt from his 1979 introduction to his edition of Catullus's poetry, Martin speaks of Catullus as one whose poetry was unique in its day and notably influential in modern times. Martin adds that Catullus's observations and concerns resonate readily within the contemporary mind]

1

Near the end of the seventeenth century, John Dryden could speak of translation, with offhanded assurance, as the act of bringing the thought of one author over into the language of another. In his day, poetic thought was social in nature, as were the rhymed couplets in which it was expressed. As a result, the poet was linked in thought and expression not only to the community of the living but to the fabulae Manes as well, the fabled dead of the literary tradition, whose collective wisdom he guarded and interpreted.

Today, nearly three hundred years after Dryden, we speak of a poet's voice rather than a poet's thought, and we require that voice to be a reflection of the poet's sensibility rather than an expression of the tradition from which it emerges: our poet must deliver original, subjective truths in idiosyncratic utterances. We no longer share Dryden's sense of the wholeness of the past or of its continuity with the present: the modern poet has more in common with the archeologist in the ruins than with the curator of the museum. And, not surprisingly, we give our almost automatic assent to Robert Frost's intimidating proposition that poetry is what gets lost in the translation. As how could it not, when any voice, poetic or otherwise, shares in the evanescence of gesture?

It is the voice part of poetry that is so easily lost in translation.

2

Catullus entered Latin poetry as a voice not at all like those that the ears of his fellow citizens were used to hearing. In Rome during the first century B.C., a long-established tradition of high-minded, socially responsible, didactic verse was being challenged by a new wave from the East. Inspired by the classical postmodernism of Alexandrian poetry, a group of poets known today as the neoterics were writing poems that were playfully cerebral, sophisticated in their sensuality, and emphatically subjective. Nothing like this had happened to Latin verse before this happened to it; and so, when his first audience discovered Catullus among the neoterics, he must have been as much of a shock to his fellow citizens as the early twentieth-century modernists were to ours.

There really had been no one like Catullus writing in Latin before he came along, though he was not original in our sense of the word, which usually implies that a poet so labelled has neither read nor acknowledged the work of either his predecessors or his contemporaries. Catullus was typically neoteric in his erudition, and his voice was certainly shaped by his predecessors, the Latin and Greek poets whose works he carefully studied; nevertheless, what they had done was very different from what he would do.

One important difference, and one of the major reasons he is so attractive a poet in our time, is his way of presenting himself as one voice among other voices—highly competitive, yes, but not privileged, not central to his culture, as the epic poet believes himself to be. Whatever attention his poems get is attention that they have to put up a fight for, which is perhaps why these poems seem so active, with all their questions and answers, projections and provocations. Their author is one poet for whom solitude seems to have had little if any charm. We usually think of writing as a solitary act, but even here Catullus surprises us—in poem "50," we find him composing verses in the company of his friend, Calvus. When he is alone in these poems, his ordinary response is to issue an invitation of one kind or another. One kind invites someone to visit the poet:

Go, poem, pay a call on Caecilius,
my friend the master of erotic verses:
tell him to leave his lakefront place at Comum
& spend a little time here at Verona.…

Another kind requests an invitation from someone else:

I beg of you, my sweet, my Ipsitilla,
my darling, my sophisticated beauty,
summon me to a midday assignation.…

Although he said things that no one else would ever say, in ways that no one else could say them, he was also fascinated by the kind of things that other people were always saying, by the extraordinary range of the social registers of the collective Roman voice. Proverbs and cliches, the featureless coins of everyday speech, easily made their way into his verse: Does Dickface fornicate? The pot gathers its own potherbs. Aemilius thinks himself clever? He hasn't the brains to guide a miller's donkey. (In an age when there were millers, and the millers had donkeys, the latter would move endlessly in a circle around the millstone that ground grain into flour; who could not figure out the route would have been dumb indeed.) Does some poor nouveau attempt to put on airs by trying to mouth words as he has heard the notes pronounce them? Catullus is on hand in poem "84" to deflate such pretensions:

Arrius had to have aitches to swell his
   orations,
and threatened us all with, "hateful, hinsidious
   hach-shuns!"

In poem "53," he captures the spontaneously indecent observation of an anonymous bystander, overheard at one of the city's open-air courts while the poet's diminutive friend Calvus was orating: "Great gods, this little pecker's sure persuasive!"

Much of the time he wrote a poetry whose strength and attractiveness derives from its openness to the life and language of the streets of Rome and Verona. To paraphrase Paolo Pasolini on Ezra Pound, Catullus' love for the purely phatic aspect of language, its function as chat, is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in classical literature. Gossip enthralls him: he is the poet as representative ear, the not-so-still center of a maelstrom of voices; why, this one will listen to stories about anyone from any source—even, as in poem "67," from a door anxious to disburden itself of a few unsavory secrets. And, of course, he will pass the stuff along to others; why on earth would he keep it to himself? A good story repaid an invitation to dinner, deflated a rival, made you appear more serious, more attractive, or more dangerous in company. Catullus is skilled at passing gossip on with a kind of disclaimer: "Gellius, what shall I tell them? Everyone's asking me why it is that you …" He presents himself as someone who knows just what everyone's saying:

What everyone says of pretentious, babbling
   asses
fits you, if anyone, putrescent Victius.…

He is wonderfully good at lining up imaginary tropes for real battles, battles in which there is no muck too messy to fling at an enemy, including the sort of messages scratched into walls about people like "RUFA THE BOLOGNESE WIFE OF MENENIUS," whose unsavory activities in the cemetery live on long after her in poem "59."

Behind the grotesque, boastful exaggerations of the obscenities, there is often—though not always—a more serious purpose, for Catullus sees himself as a moralist, an arbiter of conviviality, who must often remind others of what constitutes proper behavior in social relationships. In order to make any impression at all on the morally dense, those reminders often had to be pretty savage. Nevertheless, the street fighter rolling up his cloak into a shield does so in order to protect a curious, almost childlike innocent, who is easily (and repeatedly) disappointed because of the high expectations he has for the behavior of others. Catullus believes absolutely in some kind of moral authority apart from and above mere self-interest. That authority resides in such deities as Fides, the Roman god of Good Faith, Nemesis, the Greek god of retribution, and, ultimately, in the nameless abstractions he calls upon in poem "76," when he wishes to be delivered from the self-described sickness of his passion for Lesbia.

There, as in other poems, with unself-conscious ease Catullus could turn from the pungent obscenities of the streets, from language used in exaggeration, to the ritual pieties of religious expression, in search of another kind of language for his poems, a language whose balance and restraint will redress grievances and help to set the moral universe in order.

3

Of course, if he had been content to say only what everyone else was saying, it is very unlikely that we would be reading him today: his almost miraculous survival was surely the work of an editor who recognized and valued the uniqueness of his gift, passing it on to a long succession of readers who have had the same high regard for it. The uniqueness of any poet whom we find interesting as a person lies in the success with which he or she manages to imprint a communal poetics with the stamp of subjectivity, with what we have been calling the poet's voice.

Catullus is so often immediately accessible to the reader that we tend to think of him as simple, direct, and unaffected; these are, after all, words that are frequently used as terms of praise for a poet nowadays. Most of the time, however, they simply do not apply to Catullus, whose voice and sensibility are more accurately described as complex, duplicitous, artful, and ironic. He is almost always saying more than just one thing. Consider, for example, poem 3, his lament for the dead sparrow of his mistress, which begins with what seems a solemn invocation:

Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque
et quantum est hominum venustiorum!

Cry out lamenting, Venuses & Cupids,
and mortal men endowed with Love's
   refinement!

But how solemn can this invocation be when the very next line, "Passer mortuus est meae puellae …, "reveals the somewhat less than portentous reason behind it: "The sparrow of my ladyfriend is dead." Venuses and Cupids (the plural is meant to suggest the enormity of the poet's grief) are urgently summoned (along with the more refined among mortals) to grieve over the hardly unprecedented death of yet another avatar of the common sparrow, Passer domesticus. Does he really mean it? The short answer—there being insufficient room in this introduction for the long answer—is Yes and no, or He does and he doesn't: the playfulness of this poem, as of so many others, makes a direct, unequivocal answer impossible to give.

The main strategy of playfulness is ironic juxtaposition, as in the juxtaposition of high summons and low motive in the opening lines. But here, as elsewhere in the verse of Catullus, there are ironic juxtapositions even on the level of diction. There is, for instance, the line in which he describes the sparrow lighting out for the underworld: "qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum." Just eleven syllables: in the first six, we can hear the sparrow chirping along in the poet's own words, an understandably nervous, repetitive, obsessively rhyming little scrap of sensibility: "qui nunc it per iter." Suddenly, out of nowhere comes the second half of the line, a single, polysyllabic monstrosity that stops the bird dead in its tracks: "TENEBRICOSUM!" "It now flits off on its way, goes GLOOM-LADEN …" tries, not without losing something, to catch the effect.

Other gestures of his voice are even less possible to reproduce in English. What can a translator do about the opening line of poem 12, against Marrucinus Asinius? At dinner parties, his left hand goes slipping over into his neighbor's lap: Is he just being friendly? No—a moment later, and neighbor's napkin is missing. Catullus pins him to the board with a line that forever marries his name to his left-handed proclivities:

Marrucin' Asini, manu sinistra …

There is the pattern made by the repetition of the three vowel sounds (aui/aii/aui/i a), and there is the repetition of all but two of the consonants; there is the insinuating rhyme of name and hand, Marru' and manu, not to mention the wicked repitition, like gossip being passed on in a whisper from one ear to another, of cin 7 Asini / sini; and there is the way in which they together build, in only as much time as it takes to mouth those four words, an unanswerable equation: Asinius is sinister.

4

Catullus is a poet with a wide range of experience: he not only knows life on the streets but has mastered his craft, is a well-taught student of literature and mythology, and an intimate of the rich, the powerful, and the famous. In his poetry he is unwilling to scant any aspect of that experience in favor of any other. He is capable of juxtaposing an ancient cliche with a figure drawn from the world of Roman high finance or from Alexandrian literature. Consider, for example, poem "7," a lyric for Lesbia that begins:

Quaeris quot mihi basiationes
tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque.

My Lesbia, you ask how many kisses
would be enough to satisfy, to sate me!

Lesbia has asked Catullus a straightforward question to which this poem is going to be the answer. Or is it? It may indeed be an answer, but it is anything but straightforward. The signal is given with that word basiationes, for which the English "kisses" is a woefully pale shadow. Something's already lost in translation, and the poem will lose a little more, since the whole phrase, broken between two lines, basiationes / tuae, probably sounded as odd in Latin as the corresponding English phrase, "basiations of you," would sound to us. Yes, there is such a word as "basiation," lovingly laid up in the Oxford English Dictionary, after having been used, once, by George Meredith in 1879. However, the word is perfectly useless to any sane translator, since it's obvious that Meredith got it from Catullus in the first place; translation ought to be a matter of repaying a debt rather than increasing it, and so, alas, kisses must do.

If the poem has already, in its first two lines, taken something of a leap away from the straightforward, it gets even more indirect when it answers, or appears to answer, Lesbia's question. The first part of the poet's answer is given in a poetic cliche as old as Homer or the Bible, and probably not exactly a novelty then, either:

quam magnus numerus Libyssae harenae,

as many kisses as there are grains of sand in the Libyan desert. But immediately Catullus goes on to complicate things:

… Laserpiciferis iacet Cyrenis,
oraclum lovis inter aestuosi
et Batti veteris sacrum sepulcrum.…

… near Cyrene, where silphium is gathered,
between the shrine of Jupiter the sultry
& the venerable sepulchre of Battus!

The playful self-mockery that offers us basiationes / tuae, makes Catullus also capable of ironically posing to his mistress as the modern successor of the overeducated Alexandrians. Here is one who not only knows the site of the commercial center for the trade in asafoetida but gives the coordinates of that site with a detail that translates into a literary reference: Callimachus, the pluperfect Alexandrian, to whom Catullus was especially devoted, came from Cyrene and called himself Battiades, son of Battus, the founder of the city. Not only does the poet know all of these things, but he is perfectly capable of including such details in what is sometimes taken as a simple love poem. A love poem it is, but simple it is not; and much of its complexity comes from the poet's need to join together, for the moment at least—and not without the serious qualification of irony—the disparate parts of his own experience.

5

Neither his concern nor his strategies will be unfamiliar to those who have read the English poets of the seventeenth century, especially John Donne, with whom Catullus shares the ability to conceive of a conceit whose intellectual brilliance reflects the intensity of his emotions. He does this never more perfectly than in poem "5":

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis.
Soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum,
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidire possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Lesbia, let us live only for loving,
and let us value at a single penny
all the loose flap of senile busybodies!
Suns when they set are capable of rising,
but at the setting of our own brief light
night is one sleep from which we never
   waken.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
another thousand next, another hundred,
a thousand without pause & then a hundred,
until when we have run up our thousands
we will cry bankrupt, hiding our assets
from ourselves & any who would harm us,
knowing the volume of our trade in kisses.

The poem is an invitation from the poet to his beloved to escape with him from the traditional restraints imposed upon them by Roman society (represented by the gossipmongering elders) and to live entirely for the moment, entirely for the sake of passion. (Is it a shared passion? The reader may very well wonder, for Catullus is anything but explicit here.)

Nevertheless the premise of the poem is that such an escape is indeed possible, and Catullus is wonderfully persuasive here: his voice caresses the Latin, plays with it as who had ever had the wit to do before him? When he wants to illustrate the brevity of life and the longlastingness of death, he takes advantage of the similarity in sound of the Latin words for light and night, lux and nox. (Here, perhaps, is one of the rare cases where a little something is actually gained in translation, since the rhyme in English is more exact than in Latin.) The lux goes out at the end of the fifth line, and nox begins at the very beginning of the sixth, which sets that monosyllable in poignant opposition to the polysyllabic words that tell us what it really represents:

nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Catullus here takes brilliant advantage of the elision that occurs in Latin verse when an unstressed vowel ends a word coming before a word that begins with a vowel, as between perpetua and una; the last vowel of the first word is omitted, and so the line would actually have been pronounced as:

nox est perpetu una dormienda

joining perpetua, "forever," and una "one," into a single cry, a lament for the unending sleep of death.

Nevertheless, against this blissful vision of erotic liberation from the moral restraints imposed by society, the poet sets a very distinctive countermovement, beginning in the third line, where he does not tell us that the rumors generated by the old men are worthless but rather tells us (with a curiously odd precision) that they are not worth an as the Roman equivalent of our penny. This is not remarkable in itself, but then, when he asks Lesbia for kisses, he does so by alternating demands for a thousand kisses (mille) with demands for a hundred (centum) in a way that would have inevitably reminded his audience of fingers shuttling across the columns of an abacus, busily toting up sums in some Roman counting house:

da mi basia mille            deinde centum,
   dein mille altera   dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille      deinde centum,

What is he up to here? In his edition of Catullus, Kenneth Quinn suggests that "da mi + name of article + quantity was perhaps the formula for placing an order with a merchant (hence basia mille, not mille basia). We are invited perhaps to imagine the kisses stacked in rows (like sacks of grain, say) as the quantities specified are delivered—and then jumbled up into a single pile." Kisses delivered like sacks of grain, then, with someone keeping track of the deliveries on an abacus. If Quinn's suggestion seems bizarre, it is only because we have simplified Catullus for too long John Donne, addressing his mistress as "[M]y America, my new found land," would have had no problem with the conceit. Quinn is—no pun intended—right on the money here, for when Catullus finishes his sums, he proposes to throw them into confusion, so that no one will ever know the total. But the word he uses, conturbare, is according to C. J. Fordyce, "a technical term for fraudulent bankruptcy with concealment of assets." Such language in a love poem must have seemed as curious to his audience as, say, a poem in which a love affair is compared to a leveraged buy-out would be to us.

Nevertheless, the language is indisputably there. Catullus did not allow this theme to enter the poem by accident, and its effect on the poem is to contradict the ostensible message of the poet to his mistress: a poem which at first seems to defy calculation, to throw calculation to the winds, is in fact inextricably bound to the very instrument of calculation, the abacus. And, finally, what are we to make of that word conturbare? Does it not convey the disturbing intimation that somewhere down the road, emotional ruin, a bankruptcy of the spirit, is lying in wait for the optimistic lover?

6

Immensely popular for a few centuries after his death, Catullus' work disappeared almost completely in the early Middle Ages; it survived only because of the discovery of a manuscript of his poems at Verona about the year 1300. (Were it not for that manuscript, we would have only poem "62," which was preserved independently.) Poetic influence is very often indirect: Dante Alighieri does not mention Catullus or his poems, though in Sirmione there is a castle, once the property of Dante's great friend Can Grande della Scala, which Dante is said to have visited. Had he walked a mile or so to the end of the peninsula, he could have sat in the ruins of the villa known today as le grotte di Catullo. There he might have recited to himself parts of the Commedia, which, like many of the poems Catullus wrote, is written in lines of eleven syllables: Dante inherited and shaped a line which Catullus before him had inherited from the poets of Alexandria; after demonstrating its usefulness, Catullus passed it on to other Latin poets, whose work and influence survived into Dante's time. The Italian poets of Dante's age were of great interest to the poets of the English Renaissance, and so the line of eleven syllables (shortened to ten) became one of the continental sources of the ever dependable, ever renewable workhorse of English poetry, the iambic pentameter line: Catullus enters English poetry already lost in translation.

In a more explicit way, Catullus appears on the English scene at the beginning of its Renaissance, in an enormous, sprawly, mock-serious elegy inspired by his two sparrow poems: John Skelton's The Boke of Phyllyp Sparrowe. After Skelton, virtually every important poet of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who read Latin knew Catullus, but his influence was subterranean enough to make him something of "a poet's poet."

One reason for this was that Callus had gotten off to such a late start. The manuscript that surfaced in Verona was found before Gutenberg's useful invention, and so it took considerable time before its poems could be copied and gotten into circulation in Europe, and of course, even longer for them to find their way to England. Moreover, those poems appeared without the centuries of interpretive commentary that had led to the canonization of poets like Virgil and Horace. In the meanwhile, the neoteric tradition had been lost, and its assumptions were no longer intelligible. As a result, some of the poems, such as poem "64," were very difficult to deal with. Since there were no other poems like this one, the question, What kind of a poem is this? was impossible to answer.

The poet's reception was also slowed down by English prudishness in the face of Catullan licentiousness. In the eyes of the guardians of public morality from the 1600s through the 1800s, the morals of classical authors (with the exceptions of Virgil and Horace) were frequently thought to be unfit to set before children. But our poet was really the worst offender: as Byron's Donna Inez hendecasyllabically opined, "Catullus scarcely has a decent poem." This did not mean that he could not be read, only that hypocrisy made pleasure pay for the privilege, as Byron shows us in his description of the classical education of the young Don Juan:

Juan was taught from out the best edition,
  Expurgated by learned men, who place,
Judiciously, from out the schoolboy's vision,
  The grosser part; but, fearful to deface
Too much their modest bard by this omission,
  And, pitying sore his mutilated case,
They only add them in an appendix,
Which saves, in fact, the trouble of an index;

For there we have them all "at one fell swoop,"
 Instead of being scattered through the
   pages;
They stand forth, marshalled in a handsome
   troop,
  To meet the ingenuous youth of future
   ages.…

The ingenuous youth of our age might well be disappointed: one recent edition of the poems of Catullus intended for the edification of young scholars not only left out a fourth of the poems, but omitted an appendix as well.

7

Catullus is perhaps the only Latin poet of the classical period to have had an important influence on modern poetry in English, and it is not unreasonable to regard Ezra Pound as the modern discoverer of Catullus, at least for poets writing in English, since he did so much to encourage the young modernists to read and translate the Latin poet.

As George Steiner has pointed out, however, Pound's judgement had been formed by the poets and translators of the nineteenth century. It was, in fact, J. W. Mackail, eminent man of letters (O.M., M.A., LL.D., F.B.A.), in his standard text, Latin Literature (1895), who first saw in Catullus what the modems were later to see, praising his "hard clear verse" and the "dear and almost terrible simplicity that puts Catullus in a place by himself among the Latin poets. Where others labour in the ore of thought and gradually forge it out into sustained expression, he sees with a single glance, and does not strike a second time." A high regard for simplicity is certainly not the virtue I would choose to stress for readers of Catullus, but Mackail's appreciation does have a hard, clear, modern ring to it.

And Ezra Pound, himself searching for hardness and clarity in verse, found it in Catullus, whom he read with close attention during the years when he was one of the inventers of free verse. Pound was fascinated by the way in which Catullus had transformed the matter and meter of Sappho in his poem "51"; and, setting out from some rather wooden imitations of that poem, he very quickly learned how to write a poem in Sapphics that sounded as though it were vers libre:

Golden rose the house, in the portal I saw
thee, a marvel, carven in subtle stuff, a
portent. Life died down in the lamp and
   flickered,
caught at the wonder.

The traditional Sapphic line breaks after the fifth or sixth syllable, and is, to a large extent, end-stopped. "Apparuit" sounds like free verse because Pound has enjambed the lines and paused within them at unpredictable places. What I have said about the first stanza of this poem is true of the rest of it. After mastering the Sapphic stanza, Pound fragmented it to create "The Return," a poem in which Sapphics really do meet free verse:

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

Little of the Catullan influence manages to make its way into Pound's later work, but it is clear that the influence was extraordinarily important to him in his formative years. Pound seems to be paying homage to it in Canto III, where he lovingly evokes the beauty of Sirmione in the passage beginning "Gods float in the azure air," and which concludes with two lines that are a commentary on the first tableau of 'Poem 64':

And in the water, the almond-white swimmers,
The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple.…

Catullus was an influence not only on the formation of free verse in our time, but on the development of traditional verse as well. Robert Frost was a lifelong admirer of Catullus, and you can hear the influence of Catullan hendecasyllabics on Frost's iambic pentameter, which often admits an eleventh syllable to the line. Frost wrote a poem, "For Once, Then, Something," in which he imitated Catullan hendecasyllablic meter in a way that gives us, for once, then, a clear sound of the measure part of the poet's voice:

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike,
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud
   puffs.

It is not at all accidental, I think, that the two poets who have made the greatest use of Catullus in our time and our language saw in him a source of renewal.