Rachel DeWoskin at Literary Hub:
In this moment of especially rabid book banning, my high school senior has been translating Catullus in her Advanced Track (AT) Latin class. Catullus’s poems disappeared from the Western canon for centuries (likely because medieval Christian scribes avoided copying lurid pagan texts) yet were rediscovered and reprinted in the Renaissance, and are still alive millennia later, when would-be censors are long forgotten.
Catullus’s work shows us ourselves, in all our three-dimensional goodness and terribleness, and sometimes this vision, in 2025, comes as a fun vindication. Take Catullus’ bullying and yet vulnerable poem number 15, in which he admits, “I fear you, Aurelius, and your penis.” Jealous of and threatened by Aurelius, Catullus first euphemizes, entrusting Aurelius with the care of “my boy,” then morphing into the half plea/half threat that anthropomorphizes Aurelius’s penis (imagine the joy in the classroom) should it take advantage: “Because you let it go where it pleases, as it pleases, as much as you wish. When it is out, you are ready.”
My daughter, the lucky student called upon to translate these lines aloud, chatted openly with me after school about whether it would have been too colloquial to describe Aurelius’s penis as “at the ready.”
More here.
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