The Books of Catullus

The Books of Catullus is the first full English translation to take the Roman poet at his word. Simon Smith's versions are scholarly yet eccentric, mapping theme and register to contemporary equivalents (such as poem 16, which echoes Frank O'Hara). He divides Catullus's complete verses into three 'books', the form in which it is thought the poems were originally received. 'Smith gets the all-important rhythm of Catullus, whose meters, like all else about this poet, are deceptively complex', writes Vincent Katz. 'He achieves a delicious frisson again and again by fusing the classical and the contemporary. The reader is repeatedly pleasured by unexpected felicities.' (Peter Hughes)

Gaius Valerius Catullus was born in Verona, northern Italy in 84 BCE and died in Rome in 54 BCE. Little detail about his life survives. What is known is inferred from the poems or from indirect secondary sources. He was a contemporary of Cicero and Caesar, the latter a friend of his father, and an immediate antecedent of the Augustan poets Horace, Propertius and Ovid. His surviving poems are among the finest lyric verse of ancient Rome.