Catullus: Shibari Carmina

By Isobel Williams

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.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: May 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800170759

Isobel Williams

Isobel Williams was educated at Woking Girls' Grammar School and Somerville College, Oxford. She blogs about live-drawing, has held solo exhibitions in London and Oslo, and has written for publications ranging from The Amorist to International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. She wrote and illustrated The Supreme Court: a Guide for Bears (2017) and Catullus: Shibari Carmina (Carcanet, 2021) and contributed a chapter to Design in Legal Education (Routledge, 2022).

Book preview

Catullus:

Shibari Carmina

ISOBEL WILLIAMS

For the riggers and the models

With thanks to Belinda Bamber for triage, to Taki Kodaira for calligraphy instruction and to Meredith McKinney for Japanese translation; Jill Ferguson and Violet Hill for Latin teaching; Tristan Franklinos, Stephen Harrison and Stephen Heyworth for tolerating a gatecrasher; the editors of Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, Poetry Salzburg Review and Stand where some of these poems were first published. A selection also featured in the Carcanet anthology New Poetries VIII.

Trinidadian Creole version of 93 © Jason Anthony Henry 2021.

Photography by Dick Makin Imaging, dmimaging.co.uk.

The Propertius epigraph is taken from S. J. Heyworth’s Oxford Classical Texts edition (2007).

libertas quoniam nulli clam restat amanti,

liber erit, uiles si quis amare uolet.

Lovers have no freedom now.

   To be free, abandon love.

Propertius II, xxiii

CATULLUS: SHIBARI CARMINA

Shibari (Japanese): binding

Carmina Catulli (Latin): poems or songs of Catullus

These hemp bondage rope characters incorporate sōsho,

Japanese cursive script, and say shibari no uta

(shibari carmina).

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1. This book belongs to

Introduction

2. Oh little beak, how Mistress loves

2(b).

[?unrelated fragment]

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

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

6. Mr Gold:

7. Stress-testing are we, Mistress?

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

11. Be prepared You two – you’re my camp

13. We’ll have an engorgement party on my sofas

15. Mr Blond, commending

16. Sweet Beware the mighty sodomite face-bandit

21. Mr Blond, the all-devouring

24. Ancestors blossom

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

32. It’s from Catullus. Pleeease, he says

34. Blessed Diana’s girls intact

36. Now we turn to the Andrex annals

37. You boys queueing outside Berlin Berlin –

38. …with a murmur… my ravings… Can’t go on but does

40. Mr Grey, what slip of the mind

41. Ameana, Lady Fuck-me

42. I’ll chuck verbiage at her

43. And a big Veronese hello to you, lady

45. Septimius perched his girlfriend Acme

46. Sprung from shielding by a sigh on skin…

47. Pig. And your pig-pen friend

48. Let me do that

50. Yesterday we filled

51. I can’t compete with the rock-god superhero

51. Oh go ahead with giving head to the godhead

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

56. Oh you’ll love this

58. Glue. Bit. Oh Caelius –

60. You got your manners from scavenging mountain lions?

63. Attis Superhighway vector Otis otorhinolaryngeal

68. Floorwork You write to me tearful castaway gasping

68(b). Eight transitions Muses, unpeg my tongue

70. She says she wouldn’t marry

72. When I saw everything through gauze

73. They won’t break your fall but they smash up everything else

75. This is what we’ve come to, Clodia

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