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Title: A dreadful example of censorship in translation
Review: Catullus is known for two things: the first being that his poems are one of the first unedited bits of poetry given to new latin students, and the second being his overt eroticism coupled with his savage wit.Whigham seems to have no qualms at all about changing entire lines of the poems to soften the dirty bits, even in the works lasting no more than twenty lines. Even worse, if there's no way to clean up a line in translation, he simply leaves it untranslated. Take this example from poem 16:You read of those thousand kisses.You deduced an effeminacy there.You were wrong. Sodomites. Furius & Aurelius.Pedicabo et irrumabo vos.While I'll admit, that last line's difficult to translate into English without using slang usually confined only to gay porn, the translator doesn't even have the stomach to attempt it. In my humble opinion, anyone willing to translate everything EXCEPT for the dirty bits has no business translating at all.
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