Daisy Dunn is fast becoming one of our most recognisable and prolific classicists: in 2019 alone, she published In The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny, Of Gods and Men: 100 Stories from Ancient Greece and Rome, and the Ladybird Expert book on Homer. Daisy won critical acclaim for her first two books – Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet and The Poems of Catullus: A New Translation – and she has written for an enormous range of publications, not limited to The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Spectator. She currently serves as the editor of ARGO, and she was kind enough to sit down with Ollie for an hour to discuss her fascination with Catullus, her upcoming projects and whether she identifies more as a town or country mouse …
OT: Ok – your first encounter with Catullus. How did this come about? And what grabbed you?
DD: I remember it really very clearly. I was at school, I was 17, and we were doing AS levels. I picked up a book of Catullus, and it was a little scary because I hadn’t read much proper poetry in Latin until then. But as we started to work our way through the sparrow poems, Poem 5, Poem 7, Poem 85, I just thought that this was so incredible; it was unlike any poetry I’d ever read before in English, and there was even a part of me that wondered whether it was poetry at all. I didn’t feel it was formal enough to be poetry somehow. It just seemed so natural. So it really challenged my preconceptions of what poetry was.
I was at a girls’ school, and all my friends were saying, ‘Gosh, does this guy ever stop moaning?’
But I thought: ‘I don’t feel that way at all about him’! I felt a huge surge of empathy for the poor man. I think when you’re 17 you understand for the first time a lot of the emotions that Catullus describes so well: he’s talking about heartbreak and unrequited love, as well as the discrepancy between the way that one person feels and the lover feels. So I think that was the perfect time for me to discover him.
OT: I could, I couldn’t agree more with that. I remember encountering it for the first time – also at AS level. I distinctly remember reading Poem 63. it was like nothing I’ve ever read in anything before: it was absolutely extraordinary. It was just so different and wild to my previous set texts, be that Cicero or Tacitus or Caesar on the druids. I really think that it was the moment that made me consider studying Classics at university.
DD: I think this is the huge advantage of looking at someone like Catullus as compared to Tacitus or other such authors. I think that 16 or 17 is so young to know what you want to do with your life, and so choose a university course. That’s why it’s so important you come across something like Catullus who inspires you.
OT: So Catullus is one of the options for the next batch of OCR A Level set texts, starting next year. In Group 3, they’re offering sort of his greatest hits: you’ve got Poems 5, 6, 7, 8 all the way through to 107. There’s also 70 in there, as well as 76 and 85. But, in Group 4, they’re focusing it seems to me on the theme of marriage:, there’s 34, 62 and all of 64, which I thought was a really interesting angle to take .
DD: That’s really interesting, because I think that, apart from 64, the marriage poems aren’t the most exciting. I’m not sure they would have grabbed me in the same way as you know, the sparrow poems or any of the Lesbia cycle, or 63. That’s one thing that really amazes me when we look at the survival of Catullus: that his poems have come down in a single manuscript aside from which just one marriage poem survived the period from antiquity into the Middle Ages. I can’t say that it’s really his greatest accomplishment, so why did that one survive?
OT: Speaking of translation, how do you translate? How do you do the nuts and bolts of translation?
DD: I was conscious that a lot of people have tackled Catullus in the past. The first thing I did was to go to the library and basically empty the shelves of every translation of Catullus that I could find. I brought home about 40 books. I thought it was important to see what other people have done with Catullus; they vary hugely, there are people who have tried to stick quite closely to the text. There are others who have transformed the poetry and translated it into their own time, their own sort of geography, their own… There are some versions which are so loose, that they don’t really bear any resemblance to the Catullus that I knew. I wanted to veer more towards the former, and reflect the Latin quite closely. I experimented a bit with metre, but the difficulty with Catullus is that he wrote in such a huge variety of metres that I found that, if I tried to replicate each, the poems just didn’t fit together as a collection; it didn’t feel fluid in the same way that his collection did in Latin.
Just as with a good music album, there has to be a certain amount of cohesion between the individual tracks.
I just felt that it was failing in trying to replicate. So I made quite a bold choice to write in free verse. I thought that I should focus on capturing the emotion and the vocabulary. That was one of the early decisions I made.
I tackled the poems not from beginning to end, but I started with poem 64, because I was coming to the translations after having written the first draft of my book about Catullus. By the process of researching and writing that book, my opinion of what some of these poems were trying to say really changed. I was working on the chapter about 64 at that time, so I naturally translated it; then, as I was looking through some of my earlier chapters, I thought, ‘Okay, this would be a good time for me to try and look at the dedication poem, Poem 1’. So I dipped in and out. I think that, with a lot of poetry translation, the process is more editing than translating. I find the translation process itself fairly straightforward, but I would edit each draft so rigorously that I often ended up with a completely different poem to the one I’d actually started with.
OT: It sounds like an odd question to ask someone who’s produced an entire translation of Catullus – but do you see yourself as a translator?
DD: I certainly wouldn’t call myself a translator: I call myself a classicist and a writer. The fact that I produced this translation was really just a natural step in the process of writing a book about the poet. There are some brilliant classical translators out there. A.E. Stallings, for example, has done some fantastic translations of Hesiod, for example, recently.
I wanted to write first and foremost, but I think that when you’re working on a classical book it would be wrong to fall back on other people’s translations: it almost feels, I hate to say, lazy. If I had written my book on Catullus and used the translations of other people, that would have felt wrong to me, because I feel you have a highly personal relationship with the text you’re engaging with.
It makes sense to work through what that poem is trying to say to you; part of doing that involves translation itself. So when I was working on the letters of Pliny, for example, I similarly sat down to read all of these letters in Latin and put many of them into English.
OT: Throughout your book, you treat Catullus’ poems as the voice of a single persona, which stands in opposition to a lot of academic debate about Ovid, for example, and the danger of using classical poetry as a sort of autobiography. How did you come to this decision? Was it just necessary, given the lack of objective biography that we have?
DD: I was very conscious, when I sat down and started drafting, that it would be absolute madness in the world of academia to write a book like this. I was very familiar with all of the arguments about personae, about Lesbia being nothing more than a literary construct and what have you. I’ve never tried to pretend that Catullus’ libellus offers a faithful account of his life. But I knew that I was also writing a book for the general reader who wouldn’t necessarily have heard of Catullus or had any other reason to read his poetry. I needed to bring Catullus and his world to life. I believe that it’s by reading the poems very closely that you come to be close to characters about whom we otherwise know, very, very little. I wanted to take a leap of faith and buy into the poems and enter their world as a means of getting close to the man. My book is a life of Catullus ‘in the words of the poet’. But actually, through writing it, I came to feel that the emotion of the poems couldn’t have derived in a vacuum or in fiction; I thought that there must be some basis in reality. I felt that, whether the events themselves are true or not, the emotion did ring very true.
OT: One of the great strengths of the book is that at times, it is almost like a novel: the moments when Catullus is strolling up Palatine Hill or when he’s meeting Clodia for the first time. Suddenly, you feel far more involved in the real Roman world. Given that novelistic tendency, and the fantastic (re)surgence of feminist retellings of classical myth, I was wondering, whether Clodia herself would be an apt figure for a feminist retelling, and whether you might be the person to do it, quite frankly?
DD: It’s a lovely idea. I am a huge fan of Clodia, and I think you’re absolutely right. When you look at a lot of the female figures that other writers are picking up and re-examining, they’re often ones who’ve been maligned in the original texts, or have been pushed to one side, or denigrated for no other reason than their being women. Clearly, Clodia meets those criteria. A lot of her reputation rests on Cicero’s dark accounts of her in the courtroom, and the horrible snide remarks he makes about her being a prostitute, and a very cheap prostitute at that. Then there are Catullus’ descriptions of her after their affair, which are similarly denigrating. She’s clearly a lot more complex than these portrayals suggest. I think that she would definitely be someone to revisit. What form would that take? I’m not sure, but I think that you could certainly have a lot of fun with her.
OT: I’ll tweet it out and see what happens. Moving on: I read In the Shadow of Vesuvius over the weekend, and it was just a treasure trove of amazing things. One of the last things I re-read was the section about oysters, and that really lovely detail that, if oysters are in a darker place, they’re going to be sadder, and therefore not look for food, which is incredibly cute. I said this to a couple of friends, and one of them replied, ‘this is peak Pliny’. I think that the Plinys are often seen as translation-fodder, as authors obsessed with trivia, and as dull drudges. So I’m intrigued why you moved away from Catullus, arguably the most emotional, charismatic Latin poet, and then go to his polar opposite in the Plinys.
DD: It was quite a change! After finishing the Catullus book, I wanted to tackle another classical figure or two through biography. I’ve always been interested in the eruption of Vesuvius and I’d been thinking about doing a book somehow based around that event. It’s useful for me to pinpoint places or events or times that are going to be familiar to people before they’ve actually started reading the book.
Vesuvius is naturally interesting. There are two letters that Pliny the Younger wrote about the death of his uncle and his own experience of the eruption. I’d read these at school and thought how exciting they were. I’d since read handfuls of his letters at university, but I didn’t really have a picture of him as a man. I thought of him as someone that you turn to to back things up.
You’ll find that people are similarly always quoting bits from his uncle’s Natural History. The texts of both Plinys tend to be used for references rather than explored in depth themselves. I also thought it strange that the Plinys hadn’t really been looked at together, even though they were uncle and nephew, and then adopted-father and adopted-son. I started rereading the letters, and looking at the Natural History as well, and I saw that an interesting story could be told between a life woven around these two men and Rome during the period of the eruption. I saw the two characters more as vehicles towards painting a portrait of Rome at that time.
OT: We teach a brief section of Pliny the Younger at GCSE at the moment: we teach the story of Regulus, and his legacy hunting, which is pretty fun and a goldmine for rhetorical devices. Was there a particular chunk of either Pliny the Elder or Younger that you found particularly gripping?
DD: I was really intrigued by Pliny’s descriptions of his wife. When you’re reading the Plinys, you are often conscious of the fact that his was a very male world. It’s quite rare that you come across a woman who is characterised in much depth. Calpurnia remains in the background for the most part, but I like the letters where Pliny’s describing her in quite passionate terms; his concern for her when she becomes very ill is very touching. She has a miscarriage, and what really comes to the fore is his sensitivity if not his tact. That’s the side of Pliny that you completely forget when you’re focusing on his obsequious letters to Trajan, or these very long descriptions of his villas.
If you look at Pliny in the letters where he’s talking about his wife and how, when he’s away, she sleeps with copies of his books beside her, you get a very different portrait of the man.
When you’re writing as a biographer, that’s the kind of thing you really have to emphasise and to draw out. It offers a contrast – another side to the man who is otherwise very, very professional, ambitious, eager, egomaniac.
OT: Moving away from Pliny, can you tell us a little bit about your work for Argo? Where do you see it going in the next few years?
DD: So I’ve edited Argo for the last five or six years. It came about because the Hellenic Society wanted to create a new publication that would be suitable for a more general readership. It was nicely advertised as something that covered Greece, not just in the ancient world, but in the modern world, as well. It’s two copies a year, which doesn’t sound very much, but somehow, every week, I’m doing something for Argo. It’s work that carries on throughout the year.
In our most recent issue, we’ve introduced a books round-up, so that we can include notes on a lot more books that are published with some connection to Greece. I’m looking to grow it more in that direction, on the literary side, while maintaining a real combination of contributors. I like the fact that we have people from the academic world, people who are journalists, people who are travel-writers, people who are novelists, all writing for us. I really like that combination of different voices. Everyone approaches their articles with their own experience and background in mind, so I think, rather than fixating too much on a ‘house style’, I steer the ship in such a way as to keep a diversity of styles.
OT: Right – time for some quick-fire questions! First up – Latin or Greek?
DD: Latin!
OT: Elegy or epic… or history?
DD: Elegy!
OT: Town mouse or country mouse?
DD: Country mouse (because I love Virgil’s Eclogues).
OT: Like me. ‘Troy’ [the Brad Pitt vehicle] or ‘Alexander’ [the Colin Farrell epic]?
DD: Probably ‘Troy’ – it came out when I was seventeen and was very exciting!
OT: Favourite myth?
DD: Jason and the Argonauts and their mission to steal the Golden Fleece.
OT: One final question: what upcoming projects are you working upon?
DD: I have two books lined up. One will be Pandora’s Revenge, a new history of the ancient world through the women who inhabited it; the other will be Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford between the Wars.
OT: Daisy Dunn, thank you for your time.
