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Catullus in the Playground

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2015

Anna Jackson
Anna Jackson*
Affiliation:
The Victoria University of Wellington
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Extract

Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry … its continual labour of reassembling what has been scattered.

John Berger.

In his manifesto Personism, Frank O'Hara celebrated his own work with the announcement: ‘the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.’ In fact, he says, he was about to write another poem when he realised he could just pick up the telephone instead. Perhaps it is lucky telephones had not been invented when Catullus was writing his poems, which also seem to belong between two persons instead of two pages.

Yet despite the address to a ‘you’ that characterises many of Catullus’ poems, readers do not, as they do when reading a letter addressed to them, typically place themselves in the position of the person addressed. Rather, readers identify with Catullus himself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antichthon , Volume 40 , 2006 , pp. 104 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 2006

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References

1 Berger, John, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos (London Writers and Readers 1984) 96–7Google Scholar.

2 Frank O'Hara, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’, written in 1959 and first published in 1961; this quotation from The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, ed. Allen, Donald (Berkeley 1995) 499 Google Scholar.

3 Wright, G.T., ‘On Translating Catullus’, Centennial Review 19 (1975) 174 Google Scholar, cited in Wiseman, T P., Catullus and his World (Cambridge 1985) 211 Google Scholar.

4 Steiner, George, Observer Review (24 October 1999)Google Scholar, quoted in Translating Words, Translating Cultures, Hardwick, Lorna (London 2000) 141 Google Scholar.

5 Maguire, Sarah, ‘Translation’, Poetry Review 94.4 (Winter 2004) 54 Google Scholar.

6 Maguire (n. 5) 60.

7 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Problem of Translation (1882), cited by Maguire (n. 5) 61.

8 Catullus for Children (Auckland 2003)Google Scholar.

9 Stead, C.K., Geographies (Auckland 1982)Google Scholar; Between (Auckland 1988)Google Scholar; Straw into Gold (Auckland 1997)Google Scholar; The Right Thing (Auckland 2000)Google Scholar; Dog (Auckland 2002)Google Scholar; and, most recently, The Red Tram (Auckland 2005)Google Scholar.

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