Isobel Williams explains how she rigged up Switch: The Complete Catullus
Like the blooming of the malodorous corpse flower Amorphophallus titanum, my translations of Catullus were rare and unpredictable. By the year 2000 I had a handful, including these two:
70
She says she wouldn’t marry
Anyone but me
Even if God Almighty
Got down on one knee.
Her words. But what a woman
Tells a rampant lover
Scrolls out on the wind
And the swollen river.
This is not a literal translation, but close. The currents are swift but the poet isn’t changing his emotional position.
75
This is what we’ve come to, Clodia. My
Self-will has been dragged down by the beast in you and
Drowned in its own pool of meaning well.
I couldn’t bring myself to like you now
Even if you played the convent girl
Or give up loving you, no matter how
Wide you spread your legs to the whole world.
I depart from the literal meaning and import my own imagery. I use the name of Clodia for Catullus’s romantic nemesis Lesbia, who might have been the aristocratic Clodia Metelli. The original is lapidary, marmoreal. Catullus is trapped for all time like Michelangelo’s unfinished prisoners or slaves.
A chance remark in 2012 speeds up my output. A newcomer to life class glances at my rapid ink sketches of the static nude and suggests that I might enjoy drawing the dynamic performance of Japanese rope bondage. I have to ask what he is talking about but soon find myself – with the organisers’ permission – drawing at a club night called Bound in The Flying Dutchman, a fetish venue/deconsecrated pub in South London.
There I see Catullus plain. That is, I see my Catullus. People can be very proprietorial – offend anyone’s fetishised image of the poet if you dare – as his astonishing directness can make you feel you are acquainted. His elegance, petulance, learning, love/sex moods, intelligence, grieving and vitriol are mesmeric.
I have stumbled on a vector to an important aspect of Catullus: his oscillation between dominance and submission. There’s a street word for it. He is a switch – a hapless sub with Lesbia; a nervy dom (or aspiring to be) with boys and tarts; an importunate mess with pimps, love-rivals and Julius Caesar.
Japanese rope bondage – also known as shibari, Japanese for binding – can move at bewildering speed if the body is suspended. The top (rigger) binds the bottom (model, bunny) in a sequence of shapes elegant or ungainly, using bondage rope of jute or hemp, fixed ceiling hooks and rings or a portable A-frame, and bamboo suspension poles. There may be music, usually recorded (anything from Björk to Schubert’s Ave Maria). The spectacle can be earthy, entrancing, intensely personal, cathartic, not necessarily erotic. Drawing is full-tilt, half-lit, maybe squashed, with no time to look at the paper.
There is no brute, no timorous victim. Being a top is about humility. Being a bottom is about power. Amateur sporty types such as cyclists, rowers and runners could tell you about the pain. Everything is consensual.
Like poetry, the knots come with rules and ancient traditions ready to be subverted. You must learn and practise all your life. Matters of taste play their part and a peer is always ready with a critique.
The poet John Clegg wrote (https://carcanetblog.blogspot.com/2021/02/new-poetries-viii-john-clegg-on-isobel.html) that by setting Catullus in an alien world, rather than glossing over the differences between us and the late Roman Republic, I had made it easier to ‘see more of the poet, because we can see honestly the parts of him that we’re out of sympathy with’. For me, the opposite is equally true: my familiarity with the self-contained shibari world (in London, Oxford and Paris, anyway) revealed Catullus. Once I had found a context for him, complete with idiom, metaphor and codes of behaviour, I didn’t need to mention it in every poem, although a sense of bondage pervades.
Then there is another chance remark, this time at a college reunion. It leads to my creeping out from the wainscot into a two-term weekly Catullus textual criticism class at Oxford, run by Stephen Harrison and Stephen Heyworth, with Tristan Franklinos preparing to step up. I am exposed to the centuries-old quest to decipher what the author of this most corrupted of accidentally-surviving texts meant to say, once you’ve scraped away mistranscription, loss and uninformed guesswork to make room for brilliant scholarly conjecture.
I start to acknowledge some of the text’s uncertainties. For example, in Poem 56 I refer to different possible outcomes – was it a threesome or just two? Was one of them Lesbia’s brother? Poem 54 is so damaged as to be unworkable. In Poem 63, for some reason I see a herd of textual critics crashing through the thickets. In Poem 67 I sidestep the issue of whether a word in line 6 is facta (as in Mynors’s Oxford Classical Texts edition, the text I am following), ducta, factu’, tacta, pacta or uecta (from the class, years ago – there may be more offerings by now).
Finally, I write, illustrate and self-publish a book. The book is called The Supreme Court: A Guide for Bears. It is a guide to the UK Supreme Court, for bears. Don’t ask. Or please buy the book to find out.
When I have produced versions of just under half Catullus’s known output – I have no idea I will eventually complete it – I add what publishers call furniture: introduction, a Catullus timeline to the present, a short guide to shibari, an account of the class.
I also compile a small anthology of bondage imagery to show its ubiquity. For example: ‘Theresa May pleaded with Conservative MPs on Monday not to tie her hands in Brexit negotiations in Brussels, as party whips hoped they had bought off Tory rebels ahead of 48 hours of potentially knife-edge votes in the House of Commons.’ – Financial Times, 12 June 2018
More importantly for the spirit of the enterprise: ‘Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.’ – Igor Stravinsky
The book comes out, complete with bondage illustrations, in 2021. For my Zoom book launch I compile a video of readings from it, recruiting stir-crazy friends to film themselves at home. Readers include shibari performer and teacher Sophia Rose of Venus Hour, and La Quarta Corda of Nawame – bondage rigger, violinist and author of Be Kinky!, whose lockdown project is to qualify as a sex therapist.
He films Poem 36 in his Florence studio and turns out to be the best speaker of Latin poetry I have ever heard. That may wound some egos but you can see for yourself on YouTube, and you are welcome to prove me wrong as I am eternally scouting for Latin-reciting talent.
Pandemic isolation goes on. I spend too long on the internet. I get influenced. I order the Marc Jacobs Highliner Gel Eye Crayon in Peridot (shimmering green) because it suits an American comedian called Carly Aquilino whom I do not resemble. (For anyone who lands here by searching for this item – it’s discontinued. Carly, we love the Four Seasons/Rudy Giuliani video, very Catullus.)
Carly started out as a hairdresser. I drift into Poem 66 – narrated by the chatty lock of hair from blonde Queen Berenice – and set it partly in the salon, mainly in Woking (a town in south-east England) in 1966. I hope to reflect the obscurity of Callimachus’s learned, allusion-packed original (which Catullus was translating), harking back to a mythic past. Everyone I name in the run of the heavily footnoted poem (Dusty Springfield, Mandy Rice-Davies…) is blond/e and dead.
I wonder where Catullus’s easy poems are. I have to try to capture the charm of Poem 4 about the gallant little Greek yacht in retirement; to confront my exasperation with Catullus’s jealous whingeing about Gellius; to touch the playground nastiness and grown-up loves and mourning of a poet who was dead, or unproductive, by about 30.
My complete versions, including those in the earlier book, are published in one volume: Switch: The Complete Catullus (Carcanet Classics, 2023).
It includes more pictures, more furniture: I have compiled a ‘who shagged whom in Catullus’ chart – a tricky business as we usually have only Catullus’s word for anything, but the chart is there, ready to be disagreed with. And I make another patchwork video, complete with La Quarta Corda’s performance of Poem 10.
The book includes a poem I wrote after I misread the publisher’s working title for the complete book as The Lager Catullus. Yes, I thought, that’s him all right, watching his football team lose.
His team being Hellas Verona. This led to a wonderful discovery, too late for me as I’d finished my book. But if you want to listen to this Veronese boy Catullus – really hear him – and if, like me, you aren’t going to be on the testosterone-powered terraces following Hellas Verona at home and away, read A Season With Verona by Tim Parks.
The intensity of the bellicose fans, their flares of love and hate, volcanic swearing and insults, fierce dialect, singing and chanting, the urgent need to pee, drink or smoke, rumblings about corruption, inbred hostility to the other city-state teams (except, inexplicably, Fiorentina) – these are truly Catullan.
Hellas Verona won something in 1985 and haven’t got over it. Now their defiant underdog game is about avoiding relegation. They have to defer to majestic teams such as Roma, bloated by costly international stars. Catullus left Verona and mixed with the cultured elite in Rome, but was not out of the top drawer as Lesbia was. Fear of relegation haunts his work.
Despite this stylistic hint, no transfer of the complete Catullus into English that I am aware of has captured the whole variety of his range, nor do I claim to do so. In a passage of Poem 7, the emotion and irretrievable archaism make me resort to bondage terms in Japanese. Reactions range from ‘she’s lost it’ to ‘best I’ve seen by a mile’. As I said, people’s personal Catulluses vary.
And they change. Mine does, anyway. The book is a screenshot of what I was thinking at the time. It is not a definitive statement.
I might have completed Catullus even without Covid-era confinement. I was on a trajectory. But, hand on heart, I would never have translated Callimachus, whose influence on Catullus was profound. Epigrams, anyone?
Isobel Williams blogs about live-drawing and has held solo exhibitions in London and Oslo. Her poems have been published in PN Review, the TLS and elsewhere, and she has written for publications ranging from The Amorist to International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. She wrote and illustrated The Supreme Court: A Guide for Bears (2017), Catullus: Shibari Carmina (Carcanet, 2021), Switch: The Complete Catullus (Carcanet Classics, 2023) and a chapter in Design in Legal Education (Routledge, 2022). She is contributing to Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices (Bloomsbury, 2025). She belongs to the Ancient World Breakfast Club in West London.
DISCLAIMER: the views expressed in these articles are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Classics for All.