Reading Catullus in a college Latin course, Daniel Mendelsohn came across an unfamiliar word: irrumator, which the poet used to describe a provincial governor for whom he had worked. “You may render that word as ‘bastard,’ ” his professor said, a little too loudly.

 

Reading Catullus in a college Latin course, Daniel Mendelsohn came across an unfamiliar word: irrumator, which the poet used to describe a provincial governor for whom he had worked. “You may render that word as ‘bastard,’ ” his professor said, a little too loudly. That evening, Mendelsohn looked up the word. The verb inrumō—the root of irrumator—means “to give suck, abuse obscenely.” “I grinned, thinking I had a pretty good idea of what Catullus was calling the governor,” Mendelsohn writes.

“Just how you can call your boss a skullfucker and still maintain a reputation for refined erudition and literary sophistication was a question that stumped me,” he continues. “As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one.” On the one hand, Catullus was an impetuous, often swaggering young writer whose sometimes brash, sometimes tender personality vividly emerges from the hundred-odd poems that have come down to us. On the other, he was a refined littérateur celebrated for his delicacy and wit, who peppered even his occasional verse with elaborate word games and abstruse allusions. Catullus’s extraordinary range, the naked intensity of his emotions, and his dazzling variety of tones made him a poet admired and imitated by others; the many registers of his verse have proved an irresistible challenge for translators. Mendelsohn writes about Catullus’s enduring appeal.