#then we started discussing Catullus 16 and constructions of masculinity

[grison-in-space]

The trouble is that in English we have all these damn little helper words that have to go in fairly specific places, because our words don't carry the grammar bits along with themselves.

I might try:

"with a rock the br [he] shattered ain." Because the thing is, the verb is carrying its implicit subject along with it there. I really want to translate this as a dependent clause with the subject carried along to emphasize the impact, but I can't do that without more context or another sentence.

Also, "brum" is a wholly bizarre word in a Latin frame of mind.

I'm slightly more used to seeing the splitting object in the middle of the construction, not the verb itself. That's certainly a choice.

For an example of the more usual form I've seen, there's a line in the Aeneid:

Haec ubi dicta, cavum conversā cuspide montem impulit in latus

"Having said this, [Aeolus] pierced the hollow mountain in the side with his twisting spear" is a reasonably literal translation, but it doesn't get at the poetry of the syntax. The "having said this" bit is simple enough, but then it becomes:

"hollow twisting spear mountain he pierced in the side", except the mountain and the hollowness are linked together in the way the twisting spear is linked, such that you can see the spear inside the mountain in the lines of the poem.

what the fuck

saxo cere comminuit brum

what the actual fuck

[flores-et-dracones]

I’m a spanish literature student (I’m from Costa Rica) I’m studying to be a spanish teacher, and I’ve got a question, do you consider Sappho a lesbian? Cause I’m my Greek literature classes we touched that part..

The difficulty with Sappho is that we know very little about her. Of her nine books of poetry, only one poem survives in full - the rest are all lost, or survive only in fragments. However, I think many of those fragments display a clear desire for women. Take fragment 94, for example: Sappho and a female companion lament their impending separation. Sappho tells her to remember all the beautiful times they had: flowers and dances, perfumes and soft beds, on which ‘you would let loose your longing’ (trans. Carson) or ‘satisfy your desire’ (exies pothon). Some scholars argue that Sappho takes on a male persona, and thus writes from a male perspective - that is clearly not the case in this poem, as Sappho herself is named and addressed by her companion. See also fragment 96, where Sappho writes ‘but she goes back and forth remembering / gentle Atthis and in longing (imeroi - a word used of sexual desire) / she bites her tender mind’ (trans. Carson). In fragment 31 Sappho is overcome by intense passion and jealousy as she watches the woman she desires conversing with a male companion ‘he seems to me equal to gods that man / whoever he is who opposite you / sits and listens close / to your sweet speaking / and lovely laughing - oh it / puts the heart in my chest on wings / for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking / is left in me / no: tongue breaks and thin / fire is racing under skin / and in eyes no sight and drumming / fills the ears / and cold sweat holds me and shaking / grips me all, greener than grass / I am dead - or almost / I seem to me’ (trans. Carson). Centuries later, the Roman poet Catullus translated this poem into Latin, and addressed it to his lover Lesbia. Scholars like to point out that Catullus thus uses the poem as a model for heterosexual love, as if that tells us something about Sappho. It doesn’t. In the one poem that survives in full, Sappho calls upon Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual desire, to aid her in a case of unreciprocated love. Aphrodite promises that the person who now shuns her will soon pursue her. Carson translates: ‘if she flees, soon she will pursue / if she refuses gifts, rather she will give them / if she does not love, soon she will love / even unwilling’. Some scholars have pointed out that the pronoun ‘she’ is not present in the Greek, which gives us only the third person singular ending of the verbs - this means we could just as easily translate the lines ‘if he flees, soon he will pursue’ etc. This is correct. However, the participle etheloisa, ‘unwilling’ is in the feminine form, and this tells us that the love interest in question is a woman. The final example I’ll give of a poem that expresses same-sex desire is fragment 16. Most scholars accept that this poem was written from a female perspective, as it turns the typical male values of heroic warfare on its head, and proclaims the superiority of love. In it, Sappho compares her desire to that of Helen when she sailed off to Troy, and writes: ‘... reminded me now of Anaktoria / who is gone. / I would rather see her lovely step / and the motion of light on her face / than chariots of Lydians or ranks / of footsoldiers in arms’ (trans. Carson). 

This New Yorker article points out that Sappho’s personal poetry may not have been very personal at all, as it was probably performed publicly. This is likely true - most poetry from antiquity was intended for a public audience. Even the letters Ovid wrote from exile, which he addressed to individual friends, were meant for a wider readership, one that included the emperor Augustus himself (the letters were essentially a publicity campaign - Ovid was trying to win sympathy and thus pressurize Augustus into recalling him from exile). There is also a debate over whether the love interests in Sappho’s poems were real people, or entirely literary creations (this debate applies to the love poetry of Ovid, Catullus, Propertius and others too). However, I don’t think this has any real bearing on the question of Sappho’s sexuality. Even if they are literary creations, Sappho still positions and portrays herself as a woman who desires other women. The love interests of many male poets may also have been literary constructions, but no one uses this to question their sexuality, to suggest that they weren’t actually attracted to women. 

There is some evidence which may suggest Sappho also desired men. There is a tradition that she died when she threw herself into the sea, having been overcome with love for a boatman called Phaon (Ovid includes a letter from Sappho to Phaon in his Heroides), and in later Greek and Roman writing - especially Greek comedy - Sappho is portrayed as a sex-hungry predator of men. However, Phaon seems to have been a largely literary creation, and the portrayal of Sappho in comedy is not a reliable source, especially considering the strong misogynistic tendency in male-authored comedy to portray women as whores with insatiable (always hetero)sexual appetites (see this Eidolon article for a good discussion of this issue). More suggestive are the few fragments that seem to have been addressed to men (these are far fewer than the fragments involving women). Carson translates fragment 138 thus: ‘stand to face me beloved / and open out the grace of your eyes’. The word translated as ‘beloved’ is philos, with a masculine ending, indicating that the person in question is a man. Philos can be used for lovers, family members, or friends, but eye contact is strongly associated with sexual desire in Greek thought, suggesting that Sappho is addressing a male lover here. We also have fragment 121, in which Sappho (or a literary persona adopted by her) rejects love/marriage with a younger man. Carson translates: ‘but if you love us / choose a younger bed / for I cannot bear / to live with you when I am the older one’. Here again philos is in the masculine form. Finally, we have fragment 102, which Carson translates as ‘sweet mother, I cannot work the loom / I am broken with longing for a boy (paidos) by slender Aphrodite’. However, the word paidos is technically gender neutral - the more proper translation would be child or youth - thus this fragment could just as easily be an expression of longing for a girl. 

To sum up: Sappho’s poetry expresses desire for women, and in one or two instances, desire for men. Thus she was likely a lesbian, but possibly bisexual. I know the ancient Greeks didn’t conceptualize sexuality the same way we do, that they didn’t think in terms of lesbian/gay/bisexual. I am well aware of that. I am also well aware that many of my fellow classicists get upset when we use these terms to refer to figures from the ancient world, and start throwing around the word anachronism. And while it is of course important to understand and bear in mind these differences between the modern and ancient world, I find the insistence that we avoid using modern terms like ‘lesbian’ entirely unhelpful. We are reading these poems in the 21st century. In many of the poems, Sappho portrays herself as a woman who desires other women. If we can’t use the term ‘lesbian’, what term can we use? I see it more as a convenient use of language rather than a gross anachronism. 

I would love to hear what conclusions your class reached. 

p.s. in addition to the two articles linked above, you might also be interested in this piece from @theatticoneighth 

[grison-in-space]

One of my favorite teaching moments was the time that one of the students in my class (a Classics double major that had long since forgotten that anyone else in Genetics Lab might have humanities interests) snapped the opening lines to another student out in the middle of a play argument. I gasped at him, the other student demanded to know what the first had said, I provided my own translation ("I'll rape you in the ass and mouth, cockslut Aurelius and ass-hungry Marcus") and formally made the point that we do not say shit like this unless we expect to stand by our words when someone unexpectedly understands them. Then we got into a brief argument about whether irrumare is better translated as "to skullfuck" or "to rape one's face" and a much longer discussion about the way that toxic masculinity relates to homosexuality and prescriptive sexual behavior.

For the record, what aetherograph is referring to is actually the Roman verb irrumare itself. It is a violent word, and while all the folks above are right that Romans and Greeks alike had a lot of moral panic surrounding men being the receiving partner of penetrative sex, irrumare is specifically more threatening and insulting than, say, pedicare: you're specifically muting the person and potentially blocking their airways here, making them even more vulnerable. It also implies very strongly that the penetrating person is controlling the movement: this is not a verb that can be translated synonymously to "blowing" a person, for example. The word means to forcibly fuck a person's mouth, an act so degrading that it is beyond imagination that an upstanding man would or could tolerate it without being forced.

These are Bad Words to a Roman, and I think translations should incorporate that as well as trying to convey the violence of the words. I really don't like translations that try to downplay the extent to which Catullus 16 is a very, very vivid rape threat in response to (inferred) loss of masculine status on account of spending too much time and attention with female lovers. I think there is a tendency to be delighted by profanity and obscenity themselves in the hallowed halls of literature, and certainly this is one hell of an ancient Italian poetic tradition that continues well into the modern day. But I also think that obscenity and poetry both exist to turn strong feelings into meaning, and I think Catullus' poetry is most powerful and effective when we stop thinking about how naughtily he was saying something and start thinking about what exactly he was saying as he did it.

Catullus certainly is one of the Roman poets that fucked, but Catullus 16 is not a romantic poem but a violent one. (This isn't that uncommon for Catullus, who writes vividly about sex, emotion, and violence as recurring themes and can be almost as aggressive to women as to men. One of his other famous ones, Catullus 11, involves him feeling spurned by a lover and declaring that his friends Furius and Aurelius should go tell her that he says he hopes she's happy with all her many suitors, her three hundred lovers, none of which she truly touches despite the rupture of their thighs; another (Catullus 58) has him complaining that his lover whom he was so attached to is off lying in the back alleys fucking all the "grandsons of Remus," AKA any Roman who shows up and hikes up his tunic.) He was also very capable of mushy sweetness! But the anger is always there lurking beneath the surface.

He was a complicated guy. His poetry is constructed in careful layers of meaning around astonishingly raw emotions, glittering and artistic to behold. He was absolutely a man of his own time and place, which makes him translator catnip. But that time and place was Imperial Rome, and translators ought to work to communicate exactly what sort of place Rome could be, too.

you cant even begin poems with "i will sodomise and facef uck you" anymore. because of woke .