The Poems of Catullus

Jeannine Diddle Uzzi is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of Children in the Visual Arts of Imperial Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Other publications include 'The power of parenthood: women and children in official Roman art' in Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy (2007) and 'The age of consent: children and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome' in The Archaeology of Children: Interdisciplinary Approaches (2013). Jeffrey Thomson is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maine, Farmington. He is the author of four books of poems, including Birdwatching in Wartime, winner of both the 2010 Maine Book Award and the 2011 ASLE Award in Environmental Creative Writing, and Renovation. In 2012 he was the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen's University Belfast and in 2015 he will be the Hodgson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University and the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

• Introduction; The poems; Notes.

'The bawdy poet Catullus wrote in the late Roman Republic, in Latin, but he will always belong to the world at large and to the present tense - rowdy, randy, excoriating, funny, acrobatic and endlessly vernacular. He is our shameless poet of the locker-room boast and the licentious man-about-town. He sings in the gossipy, fierce voices of Eros and Id without apology, and we love him for this particular exhibition of the glory of the human spirit. Catullus is so much of the present tense that his poetry requires the fresh transfusion of re-translation on a regular basis, needs a booster shot of the vernacular to restore the rose to his cheeks. In these fine new translations, Jeffrey Thomson and Jeannine Uzzi perfectly catch the lively Catullan blend of eloquence and vulgarity. Thus, Catullus, and his poems, get to party one more time.' Tony Hoagland, poet and writer