"Victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge to where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels--until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go" 
-Elizabeth Bishop, "The Fish"

Having finally polished up my Catullus 8 translation, I came up with a new idea for my response. While I am finishing up the Latin advice to myself, I am also writing a direct response to Catullus's poem from the perspective of an exasperated friend. I would empathize with that theoretical friend because it feels like I am all too often in that position myself, advising them to stop moping and get a move on with their life! "Wretched Catullus..."

I went to Fall Forum yesterday, a day-long event for Latin students from all around Georgia, and so I am even more fired-up about Latin than usual. The namesake of a year-long team I have in my AP Latin class is from a Catullus poem complaining about his friends stealing his napkins (they are very nice napkins), and I'm thinking it's about time that I turn to that one. That will be part of my project for the week.

The other part of my project uses an unintentional burst of inspiration from this past week as a springing-off point. After a tiny, family Diwali celebration, I wrote a poem that was very much about the senses, the sights and the feel of the ceremony. I will once again create a poem a day like I did a few weeks ago for my project, but this time, I will focus very much on the outward physical experience of the day and extend it back to my emotional state. I will write in the afternoons, as I am expecting a more relaxed week. I will likely do a mid-week blog post on Wednesday.

"Until the tinkling bottom had been covered with green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered with thorn pricks, our palms as sticky as Bluebeard's"
-Seamus Heaney, "Blackberry-Picking"

More than any other Catullus poem thus far in my reading, I connected with Catullus 8. I do not think we gain anything from taking the classics too seriously--they hardly took themselves seriously--but I do sometimes laugh off Catullus's impact. Some of his poems are silly and borderline childish, but 8 is not one of these. While maudlin, it struck a chord with me.

This poem's economy of expression is amazing. He conveys so much with a few words arranged in a lovely rhythm. English is considerably clunkier. I have been researching other translations, and in the process, I came across a translation by the poet Louis Zukofsky. He played with the Latin and added in literal English to fill in the cadence of the words. At first, I was insulted by how he ran roughshod over the Latin. Classicists often have this pitfall where grammar is held about everything, perhaps because grammar is what we have the most information about in regards to Latin texts. Latin is not a modern language. It is a series of ancient, fixed points that we study to align. 

Zukofsky's Latin knowledge is rudimentary, but he knows so much about poetry, and in reading his translation the second time through, I was charmed. He takes "Miser Catulle," literally "Wretched Catullus," and turns it into "Miss her, Catullus?" This fits the theme of the poem perfectly, insulting as it is to the proper structure and as much as it seems he is a clueless English speaker mangling the language. It made me think about my translation a lot. In the end, I have decided that I will still stay truer to the Latin than he did.

The line in particular that gave me the most trouble was the beautiful "quod vides perisse perditum ducas." It is impossible to convey it in English with the same slick structure. I spent nearly twenty minutes on Friday shaping and reshaping my translation. The best I have come up with so far is "that which you see to have been lost, consider to be lost" (Catullus refers to yet another woman who has left him, telling himself to recognize that she is truly gone).

I have been so caught up in reading and rereading and translating that I have not met my goal of writing my own Latin poem based off of this yet. Therefore, I will let this goal carry over into next week from where I have progressed from this week. My other poem next week will be about my parents, inspired by Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays." My aim with this poem will be to make it a little longer and more drawn-out--I want to expand my style to be able to write a poem that is more than twenty lines long.

"So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster
still debate, in Socratic unhurt, what constitutes a good life"
-Jane Hirshfield, "Termites: An Assay" 

I'm sitting right now with my dog Timber curled up over my feet and I'm trying to shape everything I feel for this little ball of fur into coherency and it's not working, it's really not. I know exactly what I want to say, but I'm unable to match the tone properly. 

The best solution to this? More puppy cuddles.

In all seriousness, though, it has been an engaging, challenging process in trying to write this poem. I have been exposed to so much love poetry of the romantic nature and while, yes, those feelings do bubble to the surface and pop in neat poetic turns of phrase, there are so many other kinds of love that make you crazy enough to want to write about them, aren't there? Still, condensing instinctual squishy feelings into orderly lines continues to be difficult.

Yesterday, trying to write this poem in class? I got halfway stuck on a sentence and nearly cried. Not because it was hard--though it was (trying to find serious poetic synonyms for fluffy-snuggly-cutie)--but because I was struck by how much I love this silly mutt. And I found myself thinking of Love That Dog by Sharon Creech, a book that entranced me as a kid without a dog who wanted one so, so badly. I said last week that I was aiming for a universally heart-string-plucking kind of poem, but now I realized who I really want to do justice to is that kid.

The poem is still dragging its feet a little bit, and I am currently switching back and forth between editing and re-editing it and typing this post. I expect I will be struck with more ideas for its improvement tomorrow morning, as that is usually how it has gone over the course of this project.

Next week, I will be getting back to Catullus! I will be translating this lovely little poem, Catullus 8, which consists of advice--to himself. To follow this up, as soon as I'm satisfied with my translation of his work, I will write one of my own, advising myself. And yes, I will attempt Latin, though of course I barely grasp poetic meter in writing and have no idea how to go about constructing it. Towards the middle of the week, I will probably consult with my mentor on that. If that proves to be too much of a mountain to climb, though, I am fine with producing something that follows the constraints of Latin prose instead, albeit with some of the freedom of structure of English (a highly hybridized animal).