Volume 8, Number 5 · March 23, 1967
Getting Close to Catullus
By D.S. Carne-Ross
The Poems of Catullus
translated with an Introduction by Peter Whigham
Penguin, 246 pp., $1.25
It would be easier to determine how far the decline of classical culture had gone if everyone would agree to be candid. The evidence of criticism and the better literary conversation (in America, hardly in England) suggests that Homer and the tragedians stand rather high at present. Yet the translations in which many of their admirers read them leave one wondering what exactly it is they admire. The Iliad that emerges in the best-known modern version is a work perhaps not quite so well written as Aurora Leigh. The worst Jacobean tragedy is surely far better reading than the best Greek tragedy in the Chicago series.
Review, 2214 words
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