Why Catullus continues to seduce us | Hacker News Reader

Why Catullus continues to seduce us

newyorker.com

70 pointsfrereubu34 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16

"Pēdīcābo ego vōs et irrumābō"

I had a college Latin teacher who asked us to translate this one. The professor was very clear that we should translate it in the spirit it was written, which is to say, vulgar.

I offered the following translation of the first line:

"I will fuck you up the ass, and jam my cock down your throat."

The professor then said, "Excellent. Tonally perfect. Now let us never speak of it again."

A most charming and very 90s translation of 'irrumabo' in this poem bequeathed to us the following result:

"I'll sodomize and clintonize you,"

That is a damn good professor

I think when I was around 12-13 or so, a new Latin teacher (fairly young - not long out of university) had our class reading Catullus.

I'm sure you can imagine the reaction of a roomful of teenage boys reading Latin poetry that iirc involved quite a lot of masturbation...

Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris. Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why I should do this, perhaps you may ask... I know not, but I feel it done to me, and I am wracked.

Written after he broke up with Lesbia. Yes it is very sad that I can instantly recall this after fifty odd years. Perhaps Latin really does train your brain and memory.

I remember it by heart too, from 38 years ago. Plus most of "O Sirmio, gem of islands and peninsulas, every one of which Neptune, in his dual role, supports in the liquid lakes and vast seas...".

That was thanks to a mid winter Catullus test that got delayed several times due to flu circulating in our year 11 class. By the time everyone was finally back in school, we'd revised it something like 5 times and knew all the set poems off by heart.

In that regard I want to point to Catulli Carmina by Carl Orff[1]. I can really recommend it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catulli_Carmina

I didn't realize that the Carmina Burana was a fragment of a three-part work. Thanks!

Great insight I knew the most prominent work but the whole Catulli Carmina is beautiful.

Daniel Mendelsohn the authour of this article, has a new translation of Odyssey which came out recently.

Mendelsohn is a national treasure and easily one of the finest living Anglophone essayists. I remember little from the coverage of the manhunt for Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother but I vividly remember the powerful piece Mendelsohn wrote about its outcome: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/unburied-tamerla...

When I read the headline, the first thing that came to mind was "Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo".

If you are curious what it sounds like

https://youtu.be/cLOh9byyl1k?feature=shared

[stub for offtopicness]

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I feel like I've started to see lots of weirdly anodyne comments like this on HN recently, with a kind of pointless summary of all or part of the article. Has this always happened and my LLM spider-sense is tingling too much, or are they written by real people whose purpose I don't get?

It happens on and off although LLMery might have made it worse. It's generally flaggable stuff: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I do flag it when it's particularly anodyne, but I'm intrigued by its purpose. Why does anyone bother to do it?

Easy upvotes from people who hit the comments first before looking at the article, mostly.

But do they really get upvoted for such pointless comments? I'd be really interested to see the numbers. I suppose it could be cargo culting, where they see others do it and think it must work, even if it doesn't.

I imagine some of them do since it's seen as a 'convenience' for the reader who might upvote the comment (and the article itself, if it's something they're interested in). And yes I think it does have some kind of social element - people do it in other places and it drifts back into HN. There's a whole bunch of such folklore some of which gets naturally misapplied to HN, 'don't downvote for disagreement' probably being the most famous-while-inaccurate.

We're allowed to downvote for disagreement?

On HN, at least, alwayshavebeen.gif

I will leave you to your pondering, sir.

Dang, how do I delete my comment? My hope that it'd be informative to HN readers that weren't interested in going crude seems to have been in vain.

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miser Catulle

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> Our multidimensional beings are being assailed by at least three or four other intelligent agents that are able to pose as our own thoughts and feelings.

Contrary opinion - no they're not, get a hold of yourself.

In the confession of The Golden State Killer, he said that he would feel a force enter his being and do the raping and murdering. He also said that when he got older he was strong enough to resist it.

A lot of people lob ad homs at me and call me names and deny what I say here, but not a single one of you can explain our tragic human situation.

We can engineer fantastic buildings, create astounding works of art, perform the most incredible feats on the soccer pitch, and yet racism, poverty, cruelty, child porn and sexual abuse, oppression, and hatred remains rampant.

From my perspective of compassion, without asking anything from anyone here, I explain our situation to boos and unhelpful naysayers.

I am quite ahold of myself, my family loves me and I am at peace and happy. Yesterday my antics on the soccer pitch made my family laugh until they ached. We are poor but have our sustenance and live within our Creator's love.

As Eugene Parker said, "Well, we'll see who falls flat." The Parker Solar Probe is now orbiting the sun, doing its science, a marvel of engineering. And an evil, hateful bastard put a bullet in the servant of love Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s head 57 years ago, simply because he claimed that Black folks were human beings.

The truth is undefeatable, though we can be killed by the hateful fools of this world. I stand with compassion and truth.

> In the confession of The Golden State Killer, he said that he would feel a force enter his being and do the raping and murdering.

In a modern mental health context, we generally call this mental illness.

Does describing it as some "other intelligent agent" have any meaningful explanatory power? People similarly talk about devils and angels, but such talk hasn't led to effective ways of dealing with such issues.

> not a single one of you can explain our tragic human situation.

We're evolved animals, and far from perfectly rational. Do you see some mystery needing explanation? The existence of good and bad impulses and behavior is hardly some sort of mystery.

We've banned this account for posting too many offtopic, low quality comments and ignoring our request to stop.

This is not what HN is for.

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