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"The Hard and the Soft": Catullus 60 [trans. by Susan Brind Morrow]

CatullusCatullus 60 has a sort of fairy tale beginning. Like Aslan in The Silver Chair, there is a lion on a mountaintop up in the clearest air,
and there is a monster that lives in the deep blue depths of the sea.

Catullus is setting up a vivid contrast of two living things in extreme environments. The monster is barking. It is Scylla, the giant squid, with multiple heads: the head-like swollen tips of tentacles on long stem-like arms. The giant squid on the surface of the sea makes a terrifying barking sound that can be heard miles away. This is a portrait of a living thing.

Within the deepest depths of the squid itself is the word in the next line procreavit; something has been created. 

A Grammatical Dictionary of Botanical Latin has the word Catullus uses to describe what is created, taetra, as having to do with smell: it is putrid, the softness brought on by decay and the smell of it. Although the thing is soft (setting up the expectation of comfort), it has  the repellent softness of the slime of rot. Something is rotting having to do with things in the sea, in the depths, and in psychology, because what is being described is the mind.

The word taetra at once calls to mind the softness of sea creatures rotting on the shore, and the softness of the brain itself, taken out of its shell, soft and wet and rotting. And that is what Catullus is after here.

Num te leaena montibus Libystinis
Aut Scylla latrans infima inguinum parte
Tam dura mente procreavit ac taetra
Ut supplicis vocem in novissimo casu
Contemptam haberas, ah nimis fero corde

A lion on the Libyan Mountains
or barking Scylla in its inmost part
created you-
with a mind so hard yet soft with rot
that you would have contempt
for the voice of a person in absolute crisis-
Oh you with an iron heart

This passage is eerily reminiscent of Alcman’s fragmentary passage about sleep (a passage Catullus may well have had in mind when he wrote this).

eudousin d’oreon koruphai te kai pharanges
prowones te kai xaradrai
phyla t’erpet’ osa trephei melaina gaia
theres t’oreskwoi kai genos melissan
kai knodal en benthessi porphureos halos
eudousi d’oiwnon phyla tanupterugon

The peaks and the valleys of the mountains
are asleep, the headlands and the bays
The tribes of every creeping thing
the black earth feeds:
the mountain-going beasts and race of bees
and monsters in the depths of the porphyry seas
and slender-winged birds are asleep

Iris Murdoch wrote about these mysterious lines in The Sea,The Sea, saying when is it that everything is asleep at the same time? It must mean everything is under a magic spell, at midday, frozen in the light as in Sleeping Beauty.

But that is doubtful. It is night. What both poems are really about is the presentation of vivid contrasts. Alcman begins with koruphai, roof, the mountaintop, the uppermost part, and pharanges, the Gorge, the deepest part, like pharanx, the gorge in the human body, the deep inner throat, infima inguinum parte.

(One remembers that the word for womb and stomach are the same in Greek: gaster).

The contrast is of high and low -- top and bottom -- and continues with what lives there --  theres d’oreskwoi, the mountain-going beasts, and then that wonderful line:

kai knodal en benthessi porphureos halos
the monsters in the depths of the porphyry seas.

There are wild beasts high in the mountains
And monsters deep down in the sea

It looks like Catullus is drawing on this beautiful poem with his lion on the mountaintop (like Pope’s in the fields of air) and monster implicitly in the deep, and in the depths of the monster is your mind, which has the quality of the lion, hardness, cruelty, the kind of cruelty that can tear a person apart, and the mind disinterred as the brain that has the softness of the decaying boneless sea life on the shore.

The word latrans, barking, is a word that brings up the mythic Scylla, a terrifying female monster who is dogs from the waist down but is not as terrifying as the real squid, which has been known to pull sailors off the decks of ships with its long creeping arms.

The first letters that begin each line form an acrostic: they spell something. What they spell is hard as bronze. The paradox of hard and soft is the subject of the poem: what should be soft (the heart) is hard, what should be hard (the durability of friendship) is soft.

And with this I think it is very clear that this poem is not addressed to a woman- especially with his use of the words supplicis vocem, which suggest a quality of formality having to do with help given in the public world. The poem is not about love. It is a sincerely felt expression of deep hurt written to a friend, someone Catullus trusted and thought was worthy of trust, and the trust is betrayed.

supplicis vocem the voice of someone who is begging for help at a critical moment

novissimo casu
in the ultimate crisis

The friend could be Caesar, a friend of his family, whom Catullus wrote about elsewhere. The founders of Rome were nursed by wolves, latrans, barking, the dangerous wild animal on the mountaintop, the mountain going beasts, the lion, the wolf.

Some have translated the word fero as feral- and it may have that double dimension- but I have always seen it as fero- iron. Iron, bronze, dura- hard- what could be harder than a heart that is physically soft and should have the quality of softness, of love and compassion-:

There is a trap that catches noblest spirits
That caught, they say, God when he walked
the earth

-- Translations of Catullus 60 and Alcman by Susan Brind Morrow


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Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark


from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

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