New Zealand poet and fiction writer Anna Jackson recently commented on my post about C. K. Stead's adaptations of Catullus and Horace; Jackson herself has a book (published in 2003) called Catullus for Children. Her comments are posted at the Auckland University Press website:
Anna explains, "In this collection I try to bring texts and emotions across generations and across time. The sequence 'Catullus for children' that gives the collection its title is perhaps rather an unlikely project to have embarked on, given that Catullus is a poet of such adult themes. But love and enmity are themes of high importance for children as well, and the excessive statements typical of Catullus, as well as the overwrought style of imagery I have borrowed from Renaissance translations of Catullus, seem to express very well the heightened emotions of a schoolchild."
The poet Catullus himself was a kind of "futurist" of his age - one of a school known as "the poets of the new". In the "Envoi" that introduces his book of poems he hopes that they will be read for many generations into the future. Anna wants the children she is writing her versions for to take them into their own future, where she hopes they will do more with them than she ever could. Most of all, she hopes, they will pass them on, into a future she can only dream of, with the blurred eyes of what is nearly already the past.
They also give a couple of poems; for more, see "Best New Zealand Poets 2003"; there's also a review in the Feb. 2004 NZ Poetry Society newsletter, p. 6 (pdf; html); Terry Locke posts the text of Jackson's adaptation of Catullus 22:
There's this boy Rufus
in your class and he is so cool,|
everyone wants to play with him.
But half the time,
he is writing poetry,
not just on scraps of paper
but in handmade books
all bound together
with bits of leather
and ribbon. Ribbon!
Everyone wants to play with him,
but he is writing poetry.
And the poems are so bad,
a new entrant could do better.
But he is never happy,
unless he is writing poetry.
And you should see him then,
the sun shines on him,
his eyes go all cloudy,
his ears are all deaf,
he chews pencils into shreds,
stares through walls,
through the teacher,
and when he writes,
his hand whirls across the page
like a swarm of locusts,
he breathes in great gusts
of air, his hair
flops over the page,
he's like some sort of god!
Who cares about the poetry,
you all want to be poets.
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