you cant even begin poems with “i will sodomise and facef uck you” anymore. because of woke .
Holy fuck
ALT
I vaguely recall discourse about the dictionary pulling it’s punches when it came to writing the definition for whatever latin verb means ‘face-fuck’ because 'to be the recipient of oral sex’ is clean and true but doesn’t come close enough to describing what the word means.
Yeah, Catullus gets censored a lot! I suspect a bit of it is just that we often get this idea of poets and poetry as… Light and fluffy?
Probably just because of what gets taught in schools. You end up getting the impression that a poems are about one of
Being sad
Walking through nature
Being sad whilst walking through nature.
Which is a slightly reductive take on a whole fucking medium.
Anyway, Catullus was less the stereotypical “upper class guy with a lot of education who loves nature and being depressed” sort of poet and is more to the “battle rapper” end of poetry.
He’s got multiple poems that are basically diss tracks. This is exactly why Poem 16 (this one) comes straight out the gate with “I AM GOING TO BUTTFUCK AND FACEFUCK YOU” (lowercase letters wouldn’t be developed for a few hundred more years, by definition everything Catullus wrote was in ALL UPPERCASE): Catullus is directing this poem at Marcus Furius Bibaculus (Bibaculus to his friends), who had an affair with Juventius: a woman Catullus had a (possibly unrequited) love for. In fact, this sort of reputation is part of what Catullus is saying. He’s like “oh, you think I’m some weak pansy faggot because I’m a poet? Let’s see how you feel after I shove my huge* manly dick up all your holes, bitch.”
Anyway the whole reason I was supposed to be replying is to talk about how Latin is an amazing language to swear in. They’ve got some very fun words like irrumo, ittumare whichmeans basically “to fuck someone’s mouth”, but in a single word. Face-fuck is really the best translation English has, and that’s two words.
Plus Latin is an infected language! He didn’t just say “face fuck”, he said the first person singular future active indicative of “face fuck”.
Irrumabo is a single word that packs all this info into its infected form. It’s not just “what” (face fucking), it’s who and when and how.
Who: me, singular. “We” are not going to face fuck you, I, personally, and going to face fuck you.
When: in the future. This is a thing that’s going to happen. Latin has multiple moods for this, the indicative, imperative, and subjunctive.
He doesn’t use the subjunctive, which’d mean “I hope I facefuck you: it’d be great if someday I get to face fuck you”.
He doesn’t use the imperative, which is for stating commands. He’s not saying “get facefucked, idiot”.
He uses the indicative. This is for stating facts. He’s saying this as just a thing that will happen. As surely as the sun will rise tomorrow… I will facefuck you.
It’s also active not passive, which means it’s not “you will be facefucked by me”. It’s active, meaning it’s “I am going to facefuck you”.
The word is also derived from the word for teats? As in, it meant something like suckling?
Catullus is saying you’re going to suck his cock like a baby feeding from their mother, and he’s going to make you do this. This is just a thing that is going to happen.
And he says that all in ONE SINGLE WORD.
Latin is a lovely language for this sort of thing.
(there’s also a lot of fascinating stuff about the second line of the poem: he calls Aurelius as pathicus, and Furius a cinaedus. These mean slightly different things! Translating them as “cocksucker” and “butt boy” is definitely one way to do it, but there’s more to say about this, but this post is already way too long)
Anyway, while “first poet to ever get his bone on” is highly inaccurate (Sappho was centuries earlier! You think a woman who was so gay she gave us two of our words for WLW didn’t BONE?), he definitely was one of the poets who most noticeably Absolutely Fucked and he made sure you knew it.
* he wouldn’t have said “huge”, this is a localization for our culture. The ancient romans thought big dicks were ugly, unrefined, and comical. (They borrowed this from the ancient greeks, incidentally)
I must know if the original Latin was also written in a dick shape
sadly not. Latin has a lot of fun tricks you can do with word order (because it’s inflected, you can move words around for emphasis) and typography, but it wasn’t penis-shaped originally.
that’s a good way to localize it to english, though. Catullus 16 is 100% a poem about how Big* Catullus’s dick is.
* metaphorically, you understand. He’s say he’s got Big Dick Energy, not a literally big dick, because that wouldn’t have worked for his culture.
ALT
