Catullus

He's a classist and he writes about ancient history.

And sometimes like we just had a debate about Anne Carson, you know, just like the freedom of her translations where she fully, fully, fully let's go of the original, you know? And so in a Catullus translation, she'll be like, and then he got up and went to the fridge,

you know? So

really like complete.

And on these pages are pictures of her brother, and the pictures are done very well, so they have a three-dimensional effect.

Objects, she's also translating a Catullus poem that was an elegy for his brother 2,000 years ago.

And all of this comes together in these little fragments, and as you slowly go through it, and it doesn't take a long time to go through it.

You could hurry it and get through it in an hour and a half.

And it's very moving.

But you can have you get to the end of this.

She has the translation of the Catullus.

She has the story of her brother.

But one way or another, the majority voted to acquit Clodius.

When the acquittal happens, one of the famous august people at the inquest, a guy named Catullus, turned to the jurors and said, why did you ask for a guard? Were you afraid of having your bribe stolen from you? Cicero wrote his friend Atticus explaining what he thinks had

happened.

Inside of a couple of days, with a single slave, an ex-gladiator at that, for go-between, Crassus settled the whole business.

It's one of those dyads that seems to be indeed very present in the cultural history of the West.

You know, you can think of Ovid, you can think of Catullus, Italian still novel.

The idea of love is connected with a truly horrific imaginary of a heart broken being eaten, you know, a chest being passed through by an arrow.

And it's no coincidence, I suspect, that most of the, you know, a good number of, you know, depictions of passionate arrows have this kind of undertone of the horrifying.

And for him to write that having come through abuse and To me, shows a triumphant resilience in Machiavelli and that he can enjoy and embrace his sexuality despite having just experienced that terrible period.

But he's writing it in the style of classical Ovid and Catullus.

And this is something that you're expected to do.

You're expected to demonstrate your skills as a Latinist.

Right.

Which reminds me of the famous Catullus poem, Odeta Mo Quirid Faciam, right? I feel it happening, he says, and I'm tortured.

Yes.

Excrucior.

And in the Paris Review interview, this is before Knox is published, the interviewer describes having seen the book that she made as a kind of posthumous gift to her brother.

He describes this being this white book filled with all this stuff about Catullus and old family photographs that have been cut up.

And I sort of realised with a jolt that that became the published book Knox later, but it was the first one of her books that had that intensely collage-ish format.

And it made me totally change my thinking on that book, rather than thinking, well, here's this high-end avant-garde art project, here's this tangible physical object she made, originally only one of, as a gift for someone who couldn't possibly receive it.

And it was that her deeply personal way of grappling with that grief was to make this kind of collage of her own writing and of Catullus's poetry and of ancient etymology and family photographs and having it all cut up together to assemble this kind of document of her grief.

It made me think of that bit in The Wasteland where T.S. Eliot talks about these fragments shored against ruin.

And so much of her writing, I think, is doing that.