Oh my god

Textkit Community Open Board
1

Horace
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Translations/Horace.html

Catullus
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Translations/Catullus.html

This professor has an interesting take on how they should be translated

Don’t read if you are offended by swearing and vulgarities.

2

I once took a Catullus class at BYU, and that was always a running joke, whether Catullus at BYU was an oxymoron. I had a neat translation from that class that I should post.

3

please do :slight_smile:

4

I’d like to see Emma hand in such a translation :laughing:

5

Here was my most outside-the-box translation of Catullus. I decided that what would make Catullus often inaccessible to a class was its myth-centricity. Catullus often used allusions without introducing them, so in the spirit of the 1995 “MTV-style” Romeo & Juliet, I’ve translated the allusions also. So pegasus became a flying Tony Hawk; the giant robot became The Terminator. So it is rather literal, line for line and trying to maintain a lot of the slang-style and climactic anaphora, but the professor didn’t understand my translating allusion for allusion enough to appreciate it… :wink: She made me rewrite it and turn in a more traditional translation. Thus I present:



Catullus 58b, for a 2001 junior high student

Man, I’ve been hunting you like The Rock on a Teletubbie, like T2 on a Pikachu;

If I had Nike Shox and you had crutches,

if I could fly like Tony-Hawk-2-on-an-XBox-with-a-Pentium4 and you were Officer D ick without cheat codes,

if I hired Morpheus and Neo to use terraserver, google, and The Matrix to find you,

if I opened-up a can of Waterboy whoop-a ss on your sister every time she didn’t give you a message,

if I were Anakin, Pod Racer, and you were Princess Mario Kart,

if I were a recording industry lawyer and you were a helpless old lady,

if I were Karl Malone and you were Greg Ostertag,

and if your pager screamed my name like your mom did last night,

I still couldn’t get a hold of you.



If anyone’s interested in figuring out each allusion, the full paper had pages of footnotes, which I could email you personally. And if you use this in any way (show this to your class, etc), let me know, just 'cause I’d like to know.