The Poets

In his poem “The Scholars” William Butler Yeats wondered what the classicists of his day—“Bald heads, forgetful of their sins, / Old, learned, respectable bald heads”—would say, “Did Catullus walk that way?” In 1919 when Yeats was writing, to be sure, scholars did still have a problem with Catullus—the same problem that had prompted George Lamb a century earlier to omit more than twenty poems from his two-volume Poems of Caius Valerius Catullus (1821) and to tone down the indecencies of others. The “sparrow” poems and even the “kiss” verses might be mentioned, but the more scurrilous and sexually explicit ones were omitted from editions, translations, and commentaries. As late as 1961 (and reprinted for the next twenty years) a standard edition for school and university use explained in the preface that “a few poems which do not lend themselves to comment in English have been omitted.”

But times have changed. Scholars today—male and female, bald or not—seem to revel in the bawdiest lines, such as Carmen 16:

As Professors Reney Myers and Robert J. Ormsby translated those opening lines in 1970:

Ten years later Professor Emerita Dorothea Wender of Wheaton College aspired to greater physical/linguistic precision:

And at the turn of the millennium David Mulroy was not to be outdone, even achieving a clever rhyme for the Wisconsin Studies in Classics series:

T. P. Wiseman's concern—that the present danger is “a too self-consciously permissive obscenity”—does not seem misplaced.

The commentaries have not lagged behind the translations. In a series designed for a general audience with little or no Latin, Charles Martin explains the two lines with an explicit matter-of-factness: