Catullus 16
I will fuck you up the ass and then the mouth,
Furius the catamite, and pederast Aurelius:
you both who think, because my poems are salty,
that I possess your equal lack of shame:
for it's proper for a poet to be moral,
no way essential for it in his poems.
If they are sensitive and a little shameless,
in point of fact, these works have wit and charm,
and can excite an urge, and not in youngsters:
but in hirsute old men whose hard ons fail.
Because you've read my countless lyric kisses,
you think of me as lesser as a man?
Bottom Aurelius and your fuckboy Furius,
I will shove it in your mouth and up your bum.
Catullus 97
You gods, I swear I don't know which is which,
whether I sniff Aemilius' mouth or anus:
the one not clean or dirtier than the other-
in truth the asshole may be preferable.
At least it has no teeth, the mouth has teeth moreover
a half-yard long, with gums like a shit wagon,
and an odour which the slack cunt of a mule
in heat may have, a-piss in heat of summer.
He regards himself a stud, tups many a lady,
yet is not passed to the donkey's grinding-mill;
and if a girl touch him, would we not think her ready
to lick a hangman's ass, with diarrhoea ill?
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Now this alone is worthy of the nobel prize for literature.
I only wish I'd written them. That second poem is a comic masterpiece.
You should check out the Persian poet Adunis, he was running for the 2016 Nobel Lit prize, much more deserving of it than the songwriter who got it.
Will do. Just sorted an error in one of the lines out. Reads less well now, but more accurate.
Accuracy over scannability, Iain? I...I'm shocked.
Oh, it scans okay. I've actually just tightened it up a bit now too.
Tightened?
I took the word 'made' out before 'diarrhoea' in the last line of 97, and reversed a few words where the order I had them in made for an inelegant metric flow.
Greatly improved. Oh, and next time you go in get rid of the "o" in diarrhea--unless of course the "o" is significant.
Always love my Catullus in the original, and this is closer to my sense of the original.*
Matthew - It's UK spelling. I'd considered 'dystentery', but the word I went for is more comical.
Daniel - Thanks. Two lines in 16 (5 and 6) I've actually left virtually unchanged from another translation I found online, but there was no way I could vary them regarding accuracy.