Here’s one that I strangely got in trouble for in 1999, back at BYU.  I was assigned to translate a poem of Catullus for a class I was taking.  Catullus was a teen pop star back in Rome, a useless socialite with a dirty mouth and no social skills.  But he wrote poetry that people made copies of, and the works with the most copies survive, independent of quality.  Okay, so that being said, this was Catullus’ poem #58b, which is basically a shout-out to his friend.

Non custos si fingar ille Cretum

non si Pegaseo ferar volatu

non Ladas ego pinnipesue Perseus

non Rhesi nivease citaeque bigae

adde huc plumpipedas volatilesque

ventorumque simul require cursum

quos iunctos Cameri mihi dicares

defessus tamen omnibus medullis

et multis languaoribus peresus

essem te mihi amice quaeritando

Traditional English (what the professor was expecting):

Not if I should be molded in brass like the fabled warder of Crete,

Nor though I could soar aloft like the flying Pegasus,

Neither if I were Ladas, or the wing-footed Perseus,

Not if I had the swift snow-white team of Rhesus,

add to these the feather-footed and the winged,

and with them call for the swiftness of the winds,

though you should harness all these, Camerius, and press them into my service,

yet I should be tired out to my very marrow,

and worn away with frequent faintness,

my friend, while searching for you.

My thought, as a school teacher, was that what would make this poem inaccessible to a student wouldn’t be the Latin as much as the allusions.  A proper translation would require translating the punk-speak as well as finding correlative allusions.  So, as you’ll see below, I took the 50 foot tall statue that comes to life when needed and replaced him with the Terminator!  That being said, see below.

Man, I’ve been hunting you like The Rock on a Teletubbie, like T2 on a Pikachu;

If I had Nike Shox and you had crutches,

if I could fly like Tony-Hawk-2-on-an-XBox-with-a-Pentium4 and you were Officer Dick without cheat codes,

if I hired Morpheus and Neo to use terraserver, google, and The Matrix to find you,

if I opened-up a can of Waterboy whoop-ass on your sister every time she didn’t give you a message,

if I were Anakin, Pod Racer, and you were Princess Mario Kart,

if I were a recording industry lawyer and you were a helpless old lady,

if I were Karl Malone and you were Greg Ostertag,

and if your pager screamed my name like your mom did last night,

I still couldn’t get a hold of you.

I know, that line at the end is totally inappropriate, but so was Catullus.  Actually, it turned out the professor didn’t catch any of the references, called it “not a translation,” and made me redo it in a traditional way.  Out of indignance, I redid it, but then wrote up 5 pages of explanations of each allusion in this version.

Again, this was 1999, so much of that would have to be updated in the same way so that modern students would understand it. Your average junior high student has never heard of Greg Ostertag or the terraserver, and might take “Pentium 4″ to mean slow! (XBoxes were 733 Mhz Pentium IIIs in those days…)

Please tell me where you quote this, because I’ve had fun over the years seeing it requoted…

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