Polari, often described as a secret language used by gay men, flourished in London in the first seventy years (or so) of the twentieth century. Polari is a language that is obsessed with sex, money, food, and body parts; it is full of competitive, bitchy insults and provides the perfect vehicle for racy and inventive gossip.
Polari and its milieu have a lot in common with the personal poetry of Catullus. A young man on the make in the dying days of the Roman republic, his colourful verses welcome his readers into a world of vivid anecdotes about life and love in the city, and obscene but funny over-the-top insults. Catullus’ self-consciously subversive poems flout the standards of the stuffy older generation; he writes love poems to both women and boys and willingly adopts towards these “inferiors” what looks to Roman eyes like a pose of degrading submissiveness. His poems waver between aggressive, competitive displays of his masculinity and moments of vulnerability and tenderness. The world that Catullus created in his verse has many fore-echoes of the world of Polari and its speakers, and the grimy gay scene in the London of the 50s, 60s, and early 70s.
In this talk, I perform some of my Polari versions of Catullus and set them in a wider tradition of Catullan translation. No knowledge of either Polari or Catullus will be assumed.