Catullus 101

Anne Carson, your latest book, Knox, is a kind of grief project, an epitaph for your brother who died in 2000.

You structure the work by translating word by word a poem by Catullus, a Roman poet who lived in the first century BC.

Tell me a bit about the poem, the context for it, like how Catullus came to it.

He wrote it because he had a brother.

We don't know much about his brother, but his brother died in the Troad in Asia Minor, and he, Catullus, traveled from Italy to Asia Minor to bury him, stand at the grave, and then wrote the elegy some time around then in honor of his brother.

And that's near Troy?

Yeah, there was a Roman settlement on the site of what they thought was the ancient Troy, the province.

Could you read your translation of poem 101 by Catullus?