Catullus 2
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Catullus 2 is one of the best-known poems by the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus. The poem is about the pet sparrow of his lover whom he calls Lesbia. He envies the sparrow when Lesbia pets it lovingly, and wishes it was him instead. The poem is written in hendecasyllabic verse.[1]
J.S. Phillimore, in Classical Philology, described the place of the poem in Catullus' oeurvre: "The charm of this poem, blurred as it is by a corrupt manuscript tradition, has made it one of the most famous in Catullus' book."[2]
As with other Catullus poems, the text is corrupt, which has led to many suggestions over the centuries that certain words be changed to better reflect what the poet may have originally written.[3]
Lines 11-13, known as "2b" have been considered by some to be a separate poem or part of a separate poem, although most modern editions consider both parts as a whole. Modern scholars (although not all) have speculated that lacunae (missing words) between lines 10 and 11 might offer a solution to the problem of a sharp change in tone and change from an address to a second person (the sparrow) to third-person forms (describing Atalanta and her lover). Other scholars, arguing for unity, have noted thematic similarities between the two sections.[4]
Contents |
[edit] Text and translation
| Line | Latin Text | English Translation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Passer, deliciae meae puellae, | Sparrow, darling of my girl, |
| 2 | quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere, | with whom she often plays, whom she holds in her lap, |
| 3 | cui primum digitum dare appetenti, | to whom she is in the habit of giving the tip of her finger as it pecks, |
| 4 | et acris solet incitare morsus, | and stir you to bite her sharply, |
| 5 | cum desiderio meo nitenti, | when she is gleaming with longing for me, |
| 6 | carum nescio quid lubet iocari, | and wants to do some unspecified fooling about, |
| 7 | et solacium sui doloris, | she can enjoy a little solace for her pain, |
| 8 | credo, ut tum gravis acquiescat ardor, | I believe, that then her heavy passion may be satisfied, |
| 9 | tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem, | to be able to play with you, like the mistress, |
| 10 | et tristis animi leuare curas... | and to raise up the sad passions of my heart... |
| 11 | tam gratum est mihi quam ferunt puellae, | is as welcome to me as they say, |
| 12 | pernici aureolum fuisse malum, | the fast girl found the golden apple, |
| 13 | quod zonam soluit diu ligitam. | which undid her girdle that had been tied for a long time. |
[edit] Connotations of the text
[edit] Lines 11-13
This refers to the myth of the girl Atalanta a beautiful princess. She was warned about the dangers of marrying, so she set a task: For if any man could beat her in a foot race, he would be able to marry her. But if the man lost he would be killed.
One day, a hero called Melanion (also known as Hippomenes), came along to woo her. Atalanta fell in love with him and while running she stopped to pick up a golden apple thrown by Melanion. (This apple had been given to him by the goddess Venus). Atalanta stopped and picked up the apple and deliberately lost the race so she could marry him.
Catullus is remarking how if he was in the sparrow's place, it would be as welcome to him as the golden apple which was Atalanta's excuse for losing the race.
[edit] Textual conjectures and changes in translation
[edit] Line 6
Instead of "to do some unspecified fooling around" one translation has rendered "carum nescio quid" as "to make some loving joke", noting that the Latin phrase is "a very idiomatic usage".[5]
[edit] Line 7
et — Many scholars have thought this word was a corruption in the text and have proposed alternatives: Ramler: ad (indicating purpose); B. Guarinus, also Zicàri (and as printed in Thompson's version): ut (also indicating purpose); Jonathan Powell: te (with other changes in line 8)[4]
[edit] Line 8
cum ... acquiescat — B. Guarinus suggested replacing these words with tum ... acquiescet, and most modern editors have agreed.[4]
[edit] Assonance
The screetch of the sparrow as the girl teases it is evoked in the Latin, and mixed in with "ah" saounds that could be interpreted as the narrator's sounds of longing: ("quicum ... quin sinu … cui primum ... appetenti ... acris ... nitenti ... iocari).[6]
The "a" sounds serve various purposes: a startled cry of pain at being bitten (appetenti); dolorous contemplation (acris); a comforting sound in solaciolum and acquiescat.[6]
[edit] History of the text
In the manuscript conventionally called "V" (and also called the "Verona codex"), from which all extant manuscripts have descended, poems 2, 2b and 3 appear to have been one unit under the title (supplied by some editor) "Fletus passeris Lesbie". This lack of division continued to the time of early printed editions until Catullus 3 was separated from the rest by Marcantonio Sabellico shortly before 1500.[4]
In 1472, the first printed edition (edito princeps) of Catullus appeared in Venice. The next year, Francesco Puteolano published the second printed edition in Parma. Puteolano stated that he made extensive corrections of the previous edition.[4]
By 1521, Alessandro Guardino wrote that he had found in an old book that there were missing words just after line 10. In 1566 Aquiles Estaço (Achilles Statius) contended that 2.11-13 did not cohere with the first 10 lines of the poem. But it was not until 1829 that the first printed edition (by the editor Karl Lachmann) showed the two parts of the poem with a lacuna in between. Lachmann's separation of 2 and 2b has been followed by many subsequent editors.[4]
The O manuscript has a critical sign (not datable) after line 10, indicating some reader separated the two parts, and a similar sign separates 2b from the next poem, Catullus 3. Yet a similar sign occurs after line 7 in Catullus 2, a spot that has been described as a "distinctly improbable point of poem-division."[4]
[edit] Themes and the debate over unity
Scholars have argued over whether or not the last three lines (2b) make up a different poem in whole or in part. Connected with this debate is another over whether there are missing words between 2 and 2b.[4]
Those arguing for unity face the problem that the poem (in the first 10-line part, at least) is a quasi-hymn in which the narrator addresses the pet sparrow. (Line 1, passer ; line 9, tecum). In the classical world, hymns traditionally address gods in the second-person. Yet in 2b the sparrow is suddenly no longer addressed and the narrator switches to third-person (he, she).[4]
This problem has sometimes been addressed with suggested changes in the corrupted text.[4]
[edit] Textual changes and unity
In 1521, Allesandro Guarino reported editorial marks in one of the source texts indicating that words were missing between 2 and 2b, and most scholars who argue for unity have said that the missing words would probably rectify the change in tone and subject matter between the two parts. But S.J. Harrison, who believes the 13 lines are unified, has nevertheless argued that "there seems to be no vital gap in content which short lacuna would supply" and if the missing words are many, then it is impossible to guess what they were and the poem must be accepted as simply broken into fragments.[4]
Unity advocates have also suggested word changes in the first part of the poem that would make the shift in tone less abrupt. For example, chainging posse for possem in line 9 ("to be able to play with you as she does and to relieve the sad cares of my mind is as pleasant to me as ..." — emphasis here added). Heyworth calls that construction convoluted and undermining of the theme that the speaker wishes he were in the position of the woman in lessening his own erotic longings by playing with the bird.[4]
Harrison suggests adopting a reading found in the second printed edition of Catullus (by Francesco Puteolano, Parma, 1473) in which the third-person phrase "Tam gratum est" is replaced by "Tam gratum es" (dropping the last letter). The change keeps the second-person hymn-like structure, and 2b becomes hymnic praise of the bird. Although "es" refers here to a masculine subject (posser, the bird), Harrison asserts that it can be "perfectly acceptable" Latin grammar.[4]
[edit] Thematic unity or disunity
The sparrow carried erotic symbolism in the Classical world and has erotic connotations in the poem. The biting it does in line 4 compares with Catullus 8, line 18 (cui labella mordebis). Some scholars have called it a phallic symbol. The bird has been connected with Aphrodite in Sappho (a poet much admired by Catullus), and Pliny remarked on the erotic connection.[4]
Birds were common love-gifts in the Classical world, and Harrison (with other scholars) speculates that the narrator gave it to the woman. This would explain the narrator's possessiveness about the sparrow and the hyperbole of the poet's lamenting for the bird in Catullus 3 (line 15).[4]
As a love gift, the bird would provide a thematic link to 2b, where the apple is a love gift. Catullus makes it one apple, providing a stronger link to the single bird, although in other versions of the Atalanta story say there were multiple apples (Ovid makes it three in Metamorphosis 10.649-80). In the same way that the apple helped Hippomenes woo Atalanta, the sparrow is meant to do the same for the narrator of the poem and the woman in it.[4]
Yet the narrator explicitly compares his own pleasure in the sparrow's antics with Atalanta's pleasure in the apple, which mixes up the correspondence between the two gifts. Harrison believes there is still a strong enough correspondence in these images to show a thematic unity and asserts that Catullus' frequent "transgendered" adoption of active and passive roles in romance, shown in his other poems, reveals a pattern that is repeated here.[4]
Advocates for the two-poem theory have often said that the first 10 lines of the poem, opening with the woman playing with the bird and closing with the narrator's wish to do so, forms a thematic whole "which is both formally and psychologically satisfying." Similar "closing wishes" can be seen in poems 1, 28, and 38. The poem's climax would be the desire to play with the sparrow, which is not fulfilled. (With the addition of 2b the climax is the expression of affection for the bird).[4]
Harrison believes 2b provides a suitable closure for the poem in that (1) Classical poems sometimes end in implicit references to myth (Catullus 51.13-15; Horace Odes 2.5.21-4); (2) Catullus' poems often end in extended comparisons (Catullus 11, 17, 25), and Catullus 65 ends with a simile using an apple. Horace also closes poems that way (Odes 3.5.53-6; 3.20.15-16); (3) The idea of unloosing Atalanta's girdle is connected to marriage, an event that Massimo Fusillo has called a "strong closure force", and is used in Moschus' Europa, in Greek novels and in New Comedy; nonmarital sexual consummation also closes some of the poet's other poems (Catullus 56.5-7; 59.5).[4]
[edit] Influence on later poetry
This and the following Poem 3 (about the death of Lesbia's sparrow) influenced a whole tradition of later poems about lovers' pets, for example Ovid's elegy on the death of his mistress Corinna's parrot (Amores 2.6.).[7] Martial's epigram (Book I number CIX) on a lap dog specifically refers to Poem Catullus 2 ("Issa est passere nequior Catulli", "Issa [the dog] is naughtier than Catullus's sparrow"). After the rediscovery of Catullus's works, Poems 2 and 3 continued to exert an influence, most notably perhaps on John Skelton's long poem Phyllyp Sparrow (?1505).[8] Edna St. Vincent Millay also refers to Catullus 2 and 3 in her poem, Passer Mortuus Est:
- DEATH devours all lovely things;
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness,–presently
Every bed is narrow.[9]
[edit] References
- ^ Catullus: the Poems ed. with commentary by Kenneth Quinn (St. Martin's Press, 2nd ed., 1973) p.91.
- ^ [1]JSTOR Web site presentation of the first page of: Phillimore, J.S., "Passer: Catull. Carm. ii" in Classical Philology, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Apr., 1910), pp. 217-219 (as cited at JSTOR Web site), accessed February 10, 2007
- ^ [2] HTML page version of "Notes on the text, interpretation, and translation problems of Catullus", by S.J. Harrison and S.J. Heyworth, from an Oxford University Web site, accessed February 10, 2007
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s [3] S.J. Harrison Web page at Oxford University, has a link to WordPad document of "Sparrows and Apples: The Unity of Catullus 2", by S.J. Harrison; according to this Web page, the article appeared in in Scripta Classica Israelica, accessed February 10, 2007
- ^ [4]MaClay School class Web page, accessed February 10, 2007
- ^ a b [5]Web page titled "Program II by Raymond M. Koehler" at Able Media Web site, accessed February 11, 2007
- ^ Catullus: the Poems ed. with commentary by Kenneth Quinn, St. Martin's Press (2nd ed., 1973) p.96.
- ^ John Skelton The Complete English Poems ed. John Scattergood (Penguin, 1983)
- ^ Edna St. Vincent Millay, Second April (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921)
[edit] External links
[edit] Translations
- Catullus 2- For a translation of Catullus 2.
- Catullus 2 For another loose translation of Catullus 2.
- Catullus 2b The translation of lines 11-13
- [6]Another translation
- [7] A translation at Cipher Journal Web site (scroll down)
- [8] Rick Snyder's loose translation in jubilat (2003)
[edit] Other
- "Notes on the text, interpretation, and translation problems of Catullus", by S.J. Harrison and S.J. Heyworth, from an Oxford University Web site:
- [9] As HTML page
- [users.ox.ac.uk/~sjh/documents/catconj.doc] As WordPad file
- [10] Page explaining the relationship of the sounds of the poem to its meaning and a link to a recording of the poem sung in Latin
- [11] Text with translation notes
- [12] Page with a link to WordPad document of "Sparrows and Apples: The Unity of Catullus 2", by S.J. Harrison, an article in Scripta Classica Israelica (scroll down to "Articles in Journals" No. 60)
