3 Questions with Matthew Nisinson
Matthew Nisinson (he/him) is a poet, translator, and bureaucrat living in Queens, New York, with his wife, daughter, and two cats. He has a JD and a BA in Latin. His poetry and translations have recently appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Novus Literary, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. You can find him on Instagram @lepidum_novum_libellum and Bluesky @mnisinson.
Translation Editor Brandon Blue talks with Matthew Nisinson about their work from Issue 76, available now!
In the conversation of Translation, the argument of "word for word" vs "sense for sense" is always debated. Could you tell us about your decision to not only translate the same text multiple times, but what are you seeking to unearth in this project?
Overall, my project contains versions of both “word for word” and “sense for sense” translation, but seeks to do something different than either. Across 85 versions, I explore the penumbra of the poem. Each version has its reasons, its successes and its failures. These two versions included in Hayden’s Ferry Review’s maximalism folio are among the longer versions that I’ve produced of Catullus’ couplet.*
Translating Catullus means I am necessarily engaging in a work of retranslation, and that influences my project. Retranslations necessarily depart from and build off the translations that came before. From my full manuscript, my hope is that a reader will come away with a more complicated and complicating sense of Catullus 85, of Catullus as a person, a classical figure, and a poet, and of our relationships (mine and theirs) to this 2000 year old poem that has had, and continues to have, a life of its own.
The first, “Catullus, on his 85th birthday,” plays off Catullus’ youth from the perspective of the hindsight Catullus didn’t actually get to have.** It also engages with the poem as an act of performance. Those who read my translator’s note will know that this two line poem is broken up into four pieces. This version wrestles with the particular challenge of conveying the last of those pieces. It’s a 12 line poem, and 7.5 of those lines are an attempt to convey half a line of the Latin.
The second, “[I do and don’t]” emphasizes the contrast presented in the first piece of the poem, extending that structure of contrasts to visit the flow of the Latin original, with each couplet corresponding to a piece of the Latin original. Readers who can count will say, but you said four pieces, there are five couplets. That’s true, but these align as follows:
1. Piece 1
2. Piece 2
3. Piece 3
4. But
5. Piece 4
I particularly noted a musicality and playful sensibility in translations. Can you talk about your decision to foreground these aspects in your work?
Those are certainly two of the qualities that initially drew me to Catullus’ work. While it is exquisitely composed with masterful craft, I have nevertheless always considered Catullus’ poetry to have something of the quality that contemporary Italians call sprezzatura, a casual effortlessness that makes the difficult thing he is doing look easy.
I also get a strong sense of play from Catullus. In even the angriest and saddest of his poems, I think he’s having fun. There’s a part of Catullus asking, “do you see what I did there?” In some poems he’s the butt of the joke, embarrassing himself when forced to admit he lied about his wealth (Catullus 10). And he insults Furius and Aurelius in language that still makes people blush (Catullus 16). If you’ve seen Kendrick Lamar’s smile at the camera in his Super Bowl Half-Time Show, that was a very Catullan moment. I play with Catullus, but it’s Catullus’ game I’m playing.
Is there anything you’d like to share about your translation of this poem that we don’t know?
For many, this poem is known as “Odi et amo,” or in paraphrased English, the “hate and love” poem. Those words are actually difficult to translate. We say “Odi” means “I hate” and we know what it means to hate, and we know what it means to love. And we do. Hate and love are universal. But how we do so, and how we apply them to our relationships with each other and our relationships with the world, these are tied to our time and place. We bend them to fit so much. I love a good pickle, and I love my daughter, that little pickle, and I love New York City, home to both. Are those three loves the same? Now, put another language, 4277 miles, and ~2000 years, between my loves and Catullus’. When Catullus says “amo” and we say love, are we conveying the right intensity? The right context? “Love” is an English word we have strong opinions about the meaning and use of. That confidence can steer the translator and the reader wrong.
Notes
*Consider what Anne Carson, in Nay Rather (published with Sylph Editions in 2013) calls “catastrophizing of translation”, in describing her translations of Ibykos fragment 286. These translations are amazing, and a version can be found online here “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways”.
**Catullus died young, thus, unlike many of us reading him now, he will always be young.