Sherry Chandler

Catullus 41–C*nni indelicias

From a master of snark and vituperation:

Ameana puella defututa
tota milia me decem poposcit,
ista turpiculo puella naso,
decoctoris amica Formiani.
propinqui, quibus est puella curae,
amicos medicosque convocate:
non est sana puella, nec rogare
qualis sit solet aes imaginosum.

Ameana, girly dripping with seed,
demanded of me a whole ten thousand!
Yon slut just there with a cackfoul nose
bint of the cooked-dry Formian.
O relatives, those to whom the girl is in charge
call up friends and medics:
she’s neither sane nor ever asks
her mirror-bronze what her image may seem.

Formiani=Marmurra=Mentulla according to the scholars and sages; he was one of Caesar’s generals. Ameana was supposed to rival Catullus’ Lesbia in beauty, and he loosed a couple of barbs her way.

decoctoris=cooked dry=bankrupt.

Defututa derives from futuere, the L. F-word; this F-word pertains to the outpouring of semen, apparently derived from the 4th PP of fundere, to pour out. Sir Richard Burton, the great British explorer and translator of the erotic, proposed that the English language needed the verb to futter as a less violent alternative to f*ck, which derives from concepts of piercing, striking and attack, but I suppose our culture was too aggressive to adopt it.

Iste has a strong pejorative sense to it and was much used in the Roman theater, if I recall my more arcane points of grammar.

Cunnus refers to the bit of female anatomy whose root Indo-European word also gives us quean and queen. Horace used the term albi cunni, “unsunburnt c*nts”, in his first book of Satires; his patron suggested that if he wished to keep the favor of Augustus he should avoid such indelicacies in future.

I have Bowdlerized this post so that the web site where a certain literary symposium is taking place may deign to allow it to pass their naughty word filter. A symposium, by the way, was a drinking party to the Greeks, who invented them.

1. Catullus 43-a Pretty Picture
2. Catullus 74– Mr. Grundy
3. Joy Bale Boone Symposium
4. Catullus 13-promises, promises
5. Catullus 85

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