Catullus's rudest poem
Friendship and poetry
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Reading from Homer, 1885
It’s the kind of shocking abuse one can only direct at one’s best mates. Catullus is writing, some time in the 50s BC, to his friends (comites in poem 11) Furius and Aurelius. Trigger warning: sexual language coming up. Catullus is using it for an artistic purpose. He’s written soppy love poems - he calls them molliculi, which I translate ‘soft and sexy’ - and his friends are evidently saying that they reveal him as unmanly. So Catullus says he’ll show them what a man he is by subjecting them to violent sex – the notorious line pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo that begins and ends the poem.
Catullus then goes on, for the first time in extant literature, to point out that the ‘I’ of a poem does not necessarily represent the poet’s own life or character. A serious poet (pius poeta - one who has a duty to his poetry) must do what his art demands and, in his case, write uninhibited poems. This poem certainly is.
I’ll fuck you in the bum and in the mouth,
you fag Aurelius, Furius you ponce!
You think that, just because the poems I write
are soft and sexy, that I’ve got no pride?
A serious poet, sure, should be restrained
in person, but his poems needn’t be.
They always have, you know, more salt and spice
when they are soft and sexy, yet risqué,
and have the power to turn their readers on –
not just the young ones, but those shaggy goats
who can no longer shake their stiff old bones.
“A thousand kisses, please!” you’ve read - and think
it somehow means that I’m less of a man?
I’ll fuck you in the bum and in the mouth!
Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi, qui me ex versiculis meis putastis, quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum. Nam castum esse decet pium poetam ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est; qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem, si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici, et quod pruriat incitare possunt, non dico pueris, sed his pilosis qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos. Vos, quod milia multa basiorum legistis, male me marem putatis? Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.
I can’t think why, but I feel that Cautullus would have been more comfortable with “up the arse” rather than “in the bum.”
Now when Miss Dunbar set me that poem in fourth week many years ago, this would have been useful. The College Latin dictionary translated the rude words into Greek and the Greek into Latin. I had to go into a tutorial with “I want to something you and something you, you something and something”. Miss D not impressed though how a teenage convent-school-educated innocent was supposed to guess was beyond me.