Catullus and Lesbia Translated in Women’s Historical Novels

Theodorakopoulos, Elena

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199673926.003.0020

Classics in the Modern World 2013

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199673926.003.0020

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Catullus and Lesbia Translated in Women’s Historical Novels

Elena Theodorakopoulos¹

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“… 9 Analysing the reception of homoeroticism in the illustrated editions would require the addition of Art Historical methods to understand each edition's visual language. To take a more recent example, Theodorakopoulos (2014) effectively used feminist methodology to examine Catullus in historical novels such as Benita Kane Jaro's novel The Key (1988) and Helen Dunmore's Counting the Stars (2008); a queer studies approach would elucidate both novelists’ engagement with homoeroticism.…”

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Shameful Kisses: A History of the Reception – and Rejection – of Homoeroticism in Catullus

Lewis¹,

Robertson²

2021

Antichthon

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The history of Catullus’ reception has been one of exclusion as much as inclusion. Since the seventeenth century, many Anglophone writers have used Catullus as inspiration for their translations, poetic adaptations, and novels. A great deal of these works occluded the role that male homoeroticism played in the Latin poems, especially by omitting Catullus’ male love object, Juventius. Writers have employed various techniques to deal with Catullus’ ‘problematic’ pagan mores: choosing to ignore the suite of poems associated with homoeroticism (for example, Wilder 1948); bowdlerising homoerotic language (such as Nott 1795, Cranstoun 1867, and Macnaghten 1899); and performing ‘gender swaps’ to portray male-male relationships as male-female (a technique employed to memorable effect by de La Chapelle in 1680, and later by Lamb in 1821). Excision of whole poems or bowdlerisation of obscene terms was also often used to deal with Catullus’ depictions of male-on-male sexual violence, a topic regularly entwined with the gentler homoerotic content. This article surveys, analyses, and explains this aspect of Catullus’ reception in English from 1659–1915.

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“… 115 See Balmer (2012) 266 on how few women engaged with Catullus until the late twentieth century. On later women's responses, see Balmer (2014) Chapter 9, Theodorakopoulos (2012) and (2014), Wasdin (2017), and Lewis (2018). …”

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confidence: 99%

Shameful Kisses: A History of the Reception – and Rejection – of Homoeroticism in Catullus

Lewis¹,

Robertson²

2021

Antichthon

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Saviana Stănescu’s Barbarian women: the Empire Writes Back to Ovid

Ranger¹

2015

Classical Receptions Journal

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In this article I discuss the classical receptions of Romanian playwright Saviana Stănescu and particularly her continued engagement with the works of Ovid, tracking the feminist methodology which links her varied work. While Ovid's self-definition against the 'barbarian others' he encounters in Tomis is crucial to an understanding of the exile poetry, in a postcolonial world the ideologicallyloaded nature of the term barbarus must be recognized, and its use and replication in modern translations and receptions interrogated. With an astute critical awareness and a committed engagement with politics, Stănescu's classical receptions draw out the damaging real-world consequences for a people labelled 'barbarians'. Her work offers a defence of the reviled Black Sea inhabitants of Ovid's exilic poems by providing a critique of the colonial representations of the 'barbarians' therein, and exposing the power mechanisms of ancient and contemporary imperialism alike. ARTICLE I dreamt I was back in Rome […] We need to make our empire grow. We need to have everyone speak Latin. The language of culture and civilisation […] But Caesar, I whispered, I am not a soldier, I'm a poet. Nonsense […] The Barbarians must learnLatin. You are the only one who can teach them. We'll help you. The soldiers will be there with you to fight, to kill, to conquer, to extract the gold from those Barbarian lands, to get their riches as you will enrich their spirit. It's just a fair trade.1 My title is taken from The Empire Writes Back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin: 1989), a title which references Salman Rushdie's 1982 article for The Times, 'The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance', itself an allusion to George Lucas' 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back. I would like to thank Elena Theodorakopoulos for her help with the preparation of this article, and my two anonymous reviewers for their advice and suggestions.

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The undead past in Kathy Acker’sBlood and Guts in High School

Wasdin¹

2016

Classical Receptions Journal

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Catullus and Lesbia Translated in Women’s Historical Novels

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Shameful Kisses: A History of the Reception – and Rejection – of Homoeroticism in Catullus

Shameful Kisses: A History of the Reception – and Rejection – of Homoeroticism in Catullus

Saviana Stănescu’s Barbarian women: the Empire Writes Back to Ovid

The undead past in Kathy Acker’sBlood and Guts in High School

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