Catullus: Shibari Carmina

by Isobel Williams

Overview

A Telegraph Best New Poetry Books for Christmas 2021. Carcanet publishes several Catulluses: C.H. Sisson's, Len Krisak's, Simon Smith's. But Isobel Williams's Catullus: Shibari Carmina is different in kind from the earlier versions. 'Translating Catullus has been, for me, like cage fighting with two opponents,' the translator writes: 'not just A Top Poet, but the schoolgirl I was, trained to show the examiner that she knew what each word meant.' The struggle is intensified by the presence of a third element, something that made Catullus come alive, his 'tormented intelligence and romantic versatility'. 'It eventually happened at a fetish venue in South London, The Flying Dutchman – an echo of Catullus's doomed obsessive love? Someone at life class, knowing I like a drawing challenge, had told me about a Japanese rope bondage (shibari) club called Bound. I asked the management if I could draw there; on arrival I was treated like the Queen Mother. Best of all, the schoolgirl was too young to be let in.' The dynamics of shibari released Catullus from conventional constraints and delivered him to new rigours: 'I found context, metaphor and idiom for Catullus – whom one could glibly define as a bisexual switch from the late Roman Republic when such concepts were meaningless: a stern moralist who splits into an anxious bitchy dominant with the boys, a howling sub with his nemesis, the older glamorous married woman he calls Lesbia (here called Clodia, which might have been her real name).' The poet uses the terminology and forms of social media, a very contemporary idiom which is at once subjected to severe scholarship and tight syntactical discipline. All the crucial language knots are firmed up, the sense of the Latin emerges with Catullus's own laughter restored, along with the other registers of love and loss. Isobel Williams's drawings add immediacy to her versions which 'are not (for the most part) literal translations, but take an elliptical orbit around the Latin, brushing against it or defying its gravitational pull.'

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781800170742
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	05/27/2021
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Isobel Williams was educated at Woking Girls' Grammar School and Somerville College, Oxford. She blogs about live-drawing in various locations. She has held solo exhibitions in London and Oslo, written articles for publications ranging from The Amorist to International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, and given talks about her work at conferences in the UK and abroad. She wrote and illustrated The Supreme Court: a Guide for Bears in 2017 and is contributing a chapter to Design and Visualisation in Legal Education published by Routledge in 2021.

Table of Contents

1 This book belongs to 5

Introduction 7

2 Oh little beak, how Mistress loves 17

2(B) <p>[?unrelated fragment]</p> 17

3 Break, break, break, love gods and gorgeous people 18

5 Song of Snogs Open out to life and love with me 19

6 Mr Gold: 20

7 Stress-testing are we, Mistress? 21

8 In tears again, Catullus. Just get out of bed 22

11 Be prepared You two - you're my camp 23

13 We'll have an engorgement party on my sofas 24

15 Mr Blond, commending 25

16 Sweet Beware the mighty sodomite face-bandit 26

21 Mr Blond, the all-devouring 27

24 Ancestors blossom 28

30 Ah! perfido Alfenus. Stirrer, traitor, heart macerator 30

32 It's from Catullus. Pleeease, he says 31

34 Blessed Diana's girls intact 32

36 Now we turn to the Andrex annals 33

37 You boys queueing outside Berlin Berlin - 34

38 …with a murmur… my ravings… Can't go on but does 35

40 Mr Grey, what slip of the mind 36

41 Ameana, Lady Fuck-me 37

42 I'll chuck verbiage at her 38

43 And a big Veronese hello to you, lady 39

45 Septimius perched his girlfriend Acme 41

46 Sprung from shielding by a sigh on skin… 43

47 Pig. And your pig-pen friend 44

48 Let me do that 45

50 Yesterday we filled 46

51 I can't compete with the rock-god superhero 47

51 Oh go ahead with giving head to the godhead 48

52 Still here, Catullus? Why put off the lethal dose? 49

56 Oh you'll love this 50

58 Glue. Bit. Oh Caelius - 51

60 You got your manners from scavenging mountain lions? 52

63 Attis Superhighway vector Otis otorhinolaryngeal 53

68 Floorwork You write to me tearful castaway gasping 57

68(B) Eight transitions Muses, unpeg my tongue 58

70 She says she wouldn't marry 62

72 When I saw everything through gauze 63

73 They won't break your fall but they smash up everything else 64

75 This is what we've come to, Clodia 65

76 Intra-Venus What does being honest feel like? 66

77 Well, Captain Scarlet 67

79 Brother/switch 68

81 Couldn't you find a decent rigger, Juventius 69

82 Look at me, Quintius 70

83 Clodia lingers over all my faults 71

84 Haspirations, says 'Arry 72

85 Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? 73

86 And that's supposed to be beautiful - 74

87 No woman can attest that she 75

91 No, Gellius. 76

92 Clodia slanders me on oath 77

93 Trinidadian Creole by Jason Anthony Henry Caesar yuh see me 78

93 And your mother I can't be arsed to please you, Caesar 78

96 If the silent coffin space 79

99 I couldn't stop myself 80

100 Verona's hottest boys 81

101 Flight-shamed through the earthbound ports and checkpoints 82

103 Be so gracious as to 83

104 You think I cursed the woman 84

107 Breaking If the single object of hope and longing 85

109 Lockdown Our special place 86

Notes on the poems 89

The Scholars 91

Strands 94

Picture credits 99

Caution and training 100