Calvus's Saturnalia Prank
(Catullus Poem 14, translated by Josephine Balmer)
If I didn't love you, sweet teasing Calvus,
far more than my own eyes, then for today's gift
I'd hate you with the hate of Vatinius;
for what have I said or done to deserve it
that you're killing me now with all these poets?
May the gods frown down on whichever client
settled accounts with this roll of miscreants
(unless, as I suspect, it's that school-master
Sulla, writing off debts by setting these texts,
then I bear no hate, have no complaint to make:
at least your hard work receives due recompense).
God, here's as cursed a verse as one might expect –
a book, I know, you sent to your Catullus
to finish him off, to floor and to bore us
on Saturnalia, our day for pleasure.
No, not so fast, you can't escape, my false friend,
for if this long night of torment ever ends
I'm off to the bookshops to buy Caesius,
Aquinus and Suffenus, all poison pens,
to pay you back in full for your own torture.
Until then, goodbye, farewell, it's time to quit:
let those bad feet limp away, lines and couplets,
disease of the age, unreadable poets.
N.B. The Roman festival of Saturnalia began on 17th December, a day on which jokes were played and gifts were given, and is thought to be the origin of our own custom of Christmas gift-giving. Here, Catullus receives a joke-present of a collection of bad poetry from his friend the renowned lawyer, Licinius Calvus, which Catullus pretends to assume, as a wilful tease, must have been sent to Calvus by one of his criminal clients in payment. Catullus then vows to repay Calvus’s gift in full.
Josephine Balmer is a poet and classical translator. Her translations of Sappho have been continuously in print since 1984 and in 1989 were shortlisted for the inaugural US Lambda Literary Awards. In 2018, they were reissued in an expanded edition to include newly-discovered fragments (Bloodaxe Books). Her recent collection, The Paths of Survival (Shearsman), was shortlisted for the 2017 London Hellenic Prize. Other works include Letting Go (Agenda Editions, 2017), The Word for Sorrow (Salt, 2007), Chasing Catullus (Bloodaxe, 2004), Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate (Bloodaxe, 2004) and Classical Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 1996). She has also published a study of classical translation and versioning, Piecing Together the Fragments (OUP, 2013).