[HN Gopher] Why Catullus continues to seduce us
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Why Catullus continues to seduce us
Author : frereubu
Score : 53 points
Date : 2025-04-07 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| frereubu wrote:
| https://archive.is/rqDub
| gertrunde wrote:
| 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...
| zetazzed wrote:
| Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri
| sentio 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.
| baruchthescribe wrote:
| 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.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| 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.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| 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
| chasil wrote:
| I didn't realize that the Carmina Burana was a fragment of a
| three-part work. Thanks!
| Crazy-Pills-305 wrote:
| Great insight I knew the most prominent work but the whole
| Catulli Carmina is beautiful.
| billfruit wrote:
| Daniel Mendelsohn the authour of this article, has a new
| translation of Odyssey which came out recently.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16
|
| "Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo"
|
| 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."
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| A most charming and very 90s translation of 'irrumabo' in this
| poem bequeathed to us the following result:
|
| "I'll sodomize and clintonize you,"
| tomcam wrote:
| That is a damn good professor
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
| thimkerbell wrote:
| [flagged]
| frereubu wrote:
| 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?
| pvg wrote:
| It happens on and off although LLMery might have made it
| worse. It's generally flaggable stuff: https://hn.algolia.c
| om/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| frereubu wrote:
| I do flag it when it's particularly anodyne, but I'm
| intrigued by its purpose. Why does anyone bother to do
| it?
| pvg wrote:
| Easy upvotes from people who hit the comments first
| before looking at the article, mostly.
| frereubu wrote:
| 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.
| pvg wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| We're allowed to downvote for disagreement?
| pvg wrote:
| On HN, at least, alwayshavebeen.gif
| thimkerbell wrote:
| I will leave you to your pondering, sir.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| 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.
| LoganDark wrote:
| [flagged]
| magicalhippo wrote:
| [flagged]
| wolfi1 wrote:
| miser Catulle
| MrMcCall wrote:
| [flagged]
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| > 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.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| 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.
| antonvs wrote:
| > 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.
| dang wrote:
| 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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