THE POEMS OF CATULLUS

I thoroughly recommend Daisy Dunn's book + her biography of Catullus. This one's a keeper that will stay on my bookshelf.

Literal, solid translations, but with absolutely NO notes, which is a scandal.

Bought as a gift after a newspaper review. All great

Ms dunn your introduction was fantastic not the translation original is my love in any texts and the osculum grow bisous is a sentation

Note to Amazon: you require that I choose an option for the "plot" of this book, and this is a book of poems! Either make those options really optional in order to write a review or get rid of them. I chose "Full of Surprises," by the way.This rendition of Catullus could have used Latin in the facing pages, and I don't know why the translator sprinkled French in a couple of poems, but her version of the Roman poet's work is still much better than the ones available by Penguin and Oxford. In those, the translators opted for a genteel, do-no-harm, PG-13 rating and gave us blandness, not Catullus. Dunn, on the other hand, has gone out of her way to give us the poems of a man who was very much obsessed with amatory problems and bliss. I always want notes, and there are none here. But I liked Dunn's effort. Let's hope she inspires other translators of the classics to be less worried about propriety and political correctness and more worried with fidelity to the text and the author.

Daisy Dunn has rendered Catullus remarkably readable and direct: the vulgarity and the sublimity are rendered in plain language. That said, there seems to be a lot of interpretative work done in the translation and the original Latin is not presented for comparison. While Oxford and Penguin editions tone down the direct and over profoundly dirty references for easier reading, this sometimes renders things a bit too contemporary. This also suffers from lack of contextual notes.

If you like you poetry from Roman times, this collection is for you

not at all need it in Latin waiting for a new order this one is less than useless