ious works have proved him to
possess special qualifications for "the delicate and difficult task of
transferring into his own language at once the savour and the substance,
the matter and the manner of works of the highest individuality, conceived
and executed in a foreign language."

In my version of hexameters and pentameters I have not shirked the metre
although it is strangely out of favour in English literature while we read
it and enjoy it in German. There is little valid reason for our aversion;
the rhythm has been made familiar to our ears by long courses of Greek and
Latin and the rarity of spondaic feet is assuredly to be supplied by art
and artifice.

And now it is time for farewelling my friends:--we may no longer (alas!)
address them, with the ingenuous Ancient in the imperative

Vos Plaudite.

RICHARD F. BURTON.

_July, 1890._

* * * * *

INTRODUCTION

The present translation was jointly undertaken by the late Sir Richard
Burton and myself in 1890, some months before his sudden and lamented
death. We had previously put into English, and privately printed, a body of
verse from the Latin, and our aim was to follow it with literal and
unexpurgated renderings of Catullus, Juvenal, and Ausonius, from the same
tongue. Sir Richard laid great stress on the necessity of thoroughly
annotating each translation from an erotic (and especially a paederastic)
point of view, but subsequent circumstances caused me to abandon that
intention.

The Latin text of Catullus printed in this volume is that of Mueller (A.D.
1885), which Sir Richard Burton chose as the basis for our translation, and
to that text I have mainly adhered. On some few occasions, however, I have
slightly deviated from it, and, although I have consulted Owen and
Postgate, in such cases I have usually followed Robinson Ellis.

Bearing in mind my duty to the reader as well as to the author, I have
aimed at producing a readable translation, and yet as literal a version
(castrating no passages) as the dissimilarity in idiom of the two
languages, Latin and English, permit; and I claim for this volume that it
is the first literal and complete English translation as yet issued of
Catullus. The translations into English verse which I have consulted are
_The Adventures of Catullus, and the History of his Amours with Lesbia_
(done from the French, 1707), Nott, Lamb, Fleay, (privately printed, 1864),
Hart-Davies, Shaw, C