Poem Sixteen
translated from Catullus
I don’t like to brag and I don’t like to boast,
But speaking of mouth-fuckers, you are the toast.
Aurelius and Furius, you half-assed head cases,
You think my poems “sensitive?” Right in your faces!
It’s good for a poet himself to be moral—
But that’s not to say his own verse can’t be oral.
These poems are witty, they’re charming, they’re schtick-less,
Arousing for some, not at all for the dickless.
You think that you’ve read me and find me less butchy—
Well, who is to say what you do with your tushy?
I don’t like to brag and I don’t like to boast,
But speaking of mouth-fuckers, you are the toast!
Seth Lerer
is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego. Among his many publications are Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago, 2008), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia, revised edition 2015). A further selection of his Catullus translations will appear in the journal Arion.