We would not be understood by any means to vindicate this conduct in our Author, but barely to shew, that Obscenity, according to the Antients, was not only allowable in these sorts of Compositions, but when artfully drest up, was esteemed one of its greatest beauties.
{83} In the end, however, Crusius bared only his moral refinement,
concluding that the Latin texts should continue to be censored: Many things more might be brought to shew the allowableness of this practice among the Greeks as well as Romans; but as we think it in the highest degree criminal and offensive in itself, and of most pernicious consequence to the Readers, especially the youth of both sexes, into whose hands such pieces may happen to fall, we shall say no more on this Head.
The appearance of two complete translations of Catullus’s poetry within roughly a generation signalled a revision of the classical canon in English, the emergence of a new taste for short poems, mainly epigrams and lyrics, and especially those of an erotic nature. The cultural and social factors that made this revision possible included, not any relaxation of bourgeois moral norms, but the canonization of transparency in English poetry and poetry translation. Crusius had sounded this note early when he praised the “easy unaffected elegance and pleasantry that enlivens this Poet’s Style” (Crusius 1733:28). By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Catullus’s poetry was routinely assimilated to transparent discourse, considered to offer an especially strong effect of authorial presence, and this occasionally weakened the critics’ prudery, leading them to mitigate the coarse language they found so offensive. The work of rehabilitation was evident in Charles Abraham Elton’s Specimens of the Classic Poets (1814), a three-volume anthology of verse translations from Greek and Latin. Elton felt that Catullus’s poetry was rather thin—“pieces of gallantry or satirical epigrams, with a few poems of a more elevated cast”—but he excused this defect by assuming that “much of the poetry of Catullus appears to have been lost” (Elton 1814:I, 30–31). What recommends the extant texts is their “ease” and “simplicity”:
They, who turn with disgust from the coarse impurities that sully his pages, may be inclined to wonder, that the term of delicacy should ever have been coupled with the name of Catullus. But to many of his effusions, distinguished both by fancy and feeling, this praise is justly due. Many of his amatory trifles are quite unrivalled in the elegancy of their playfulness; and no author has excelled him in the purity and neatness of his style, the delightful ease and racy {84} simplicity of his manner, and his graceful turns of thought and happinesses of expression. Some of his pieces, which breathe the higher enthusiasm of the art, and are coloured with a singular picturesqueness of imagery, increase our regret at the manifest mutilation of his works.
In 1818, Blackwood’s published an essay that remarked on the fluency of Catullus’s verse, finding it a mirror of the poet: “This language is uniformly unlaboured. […] His versification is careless, but graceful. His feeling is weak, but always true. The poet has no inclination to appear any thing but what he is” (Blackwood’s 1818:487). The essayist then ventured to connect Catullus to a canonical English figure, suggesting that the “obscenity is seldom introduced altogether for its own sake. Like that of Swift, it is only the weapon of satire” (ibid.:488). The final verdict, however, was
that it is quite impossible to read his verses without regretting that he happened to be an idler, a man of fashion, and a debauchee. […] he might have bequeathed to posterity works fitted to inspire sentiments of virtue and morality, instead of a book, the greater part of which must for ever remain sealed to all those who have any principle of human delicacy in their composition.
The translators of the first book-length versions of Catullus, Nott and Lamb, shared the prevailing assessment of the Latin poet, but it shaped their work very differently. Nott too thought that “strength and simplicity, elegance and perspicuity mark the stile of Catullus” (Nott 1795:I, xxiii), while Lamb wrote of “the poet’s natural felicity of expression,” “the same natural tone which Catullus rarely or rather never lost” (Lamb 1821:I, xl, xlii). The most remarkable difference between the translators occurred on the question of morality: Nott sought to reproduce the pagan sexuality and physically coarse language of the Latin text, whereas Lamb minimized or just omitted them.
Nott was aware that “Those indecencies occurring so frequently in our poet, which I have constantly preserved in the original, and ventured in some way to translate, may be thought to require apology” (Nott 1795:I, x). His initial reason—to satisfy “the inquisitive scholar [who] might wish to be acquainted with the ribaldry, and gross {85} lampoon of Roman times” (ibid.)—would not be persuasive to his contemporaries, since such a reader already had access to the Latin text; perhaps the claim should be viewed less as a rationale than as a reflection of Nott’s own scholarly bent, his wish to address an academic audience. His main concern seems to have been twofold: to ward against an ethnocentric response to the Latin text and preserve its historical and cultural difference:
When an ancient classic is translated, and explained, the work may be considered as forming a link in the chain of history: history should not be falsified, we ought therefore to translate him fairly; and when he gives us the manners of his own day, however disgusting to our sensations, and repugnant to our natures they may sometimes prove, we must not endeavour to conceal, or gloss them over, through a fastidious regard to delicacy.
Nott’s sense of historical accuracy assumed a mimetic concept of translation as a representation adequate to the foreign text. In 1795, this mimetic assumption was beginning to seem dated in English poetic theory, a throwback to an older empiricism, challenged now by expressive theories of poetry and original genius.[14] And yet Nott’s adherence to a residual theoretical assumption enabled him to resist the pressure of bourgeois moral values on his translation.
In 1821, Lamb possessed a more contemporary, romantic sense of authorial authenticity that projected an expressive concept of translation as adequately communicating the foreign author’s psychological state. Catullus’s “compositions, few as they are, probably express his feelings upon every important event of his short career,” Lamb believed, and this led him to conclude that the Latin poet “seems to have been as little sullied by the grossness of the age, as was possible […] pure indeed must that mind naturally have been, which, amidst such coarseness of manners, could preserve so much expressive delicacy and elevated refinement” (Lamb 1821: I, xlii–xliii). Lamb’s expressive poetics underwrote not only his belief in the poet’s purity, both moral and stylistic, but also his advocacy of a free translation method that effected the illusion of transparency while domesticating the Latin text. Explicitly situating himself in the main tradition of fluent translation from Denham to Johnson, Lamb stated that “the natural course of translation is, first to secure its fidelity, and then to attempt the polish of elegance and freedom” (ibid.:lviii). Hence, {86} he handled the “objectionable expressions” by developing strategies of “omission and amplification,” recognizing “the necessity of making every attempt to veil and soften before entire omission could be justified,” revising on the assumption that Catullus was “a genius orignally pure, however polluted by the immorality of its era” (ibid.:lix, xli).