His pronunciation was a little dicey, but pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo is indeed the first line of Catullus 16.
I'm guessing the translation Mr. O'Monocle gave was not!
No, he was right on.
[edited for linguistics]
Basically, the opening and closing line of Catullus 16 has stymied translators for centuries. My favorite version is from a fellow grad student at Yale: "I'll fuck you up the ass and make you blow me," which gets bonus points for iambic pentameter. But note that the first half of the sentence requires a prepositional phrase and the second a subject-object switch-off, where in Latin they're two compact active verbs. "Sodomize" and "facefuck" are at least short, technically accurate, and both in the right grammatical voice, but they don't catch the connotations. The root of irrumo is ruma, "breast"; pedico (hilariously translated by Lewis and Short's 1879 A Latin Dictionary as "to practice unnatural vice") is probably a loanword derived from the Greek παιδικά, "boyfriend, boytoy." Contextually, irrumatio is a punishment inflicted by the god Priapus on wrongdoers. Sexual passivity is for boys, humiliating for adult men. Latin is very specific about its sexual vocabulary in ways that English can't necessarily reproduce, or at least not without a lot more wordage. (And it only gets worse with the poem's second line.)
Anyway, it was a brilliant piece of Latin to throw into this episode of The Daily Show, because Catullus 16 is the poet's word-bending, role-bending riposte to the dangers of generalizing an artist from his work: it is alleged that because Catullus' poems are delicate little things (versiculis meis . . . quod sunt molliculi), their author is (male marem) the same, but any critic with doubts about the poet's manhood is about to receive an up close and personal demonstration of his mistake; all constructed so as to demonstrate both Catullus' slinky versatility with language and his decisive domination in its field. (This is sort of the world's most surface summary, but I have no idea how much you want to hear about four-letter Latin lyric poetry.) So Bernie Goldberg criticizes Jon Stewart for his pretensions to edginess, his on-air crudity whose enthusiastic reception only shows up the unsophistication of his audience, only for a tea-drinking, monocle-wearing, comically effete member of the audience to voice his support for Stewart in a fashion that is both genuinely sophisticated and really crude. It was perfect.
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I foresee a sudden spike in the popularity of Latin lyric.
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I'm guessing the translation Mr. O'Monocle gave was not!
(I once briefly dated a Russian psychology student whose dating-site handle was "Catullus", after her favourite poet!)
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His pronunciation was a little dicey, but pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo is indeed the first line of Catullus 16.
I'm guessing the translation Mr. O'Monocle gave was not!
No, he was right on.
[edited for linguistics]
Basically, the opening and closing line of Catullus 16 has stymied translators for centuries. My favorite version is from a fellow grad student at Yale: "I'll fuck you up the ass and make you blow me," which gets bonus points for iambic pentameter. But note that the first half of the sentence requires a prepositional phrase and the second a subject-object switch-off, where in Latin they're two compact active verbs. "Sodomize" and "facefuck" are at least short, technically accurate, and both in the right grammatical voice, but they don't catch the connotations. The root of irrumo is ruma, "breast"; pedico (hilariously translated by Lewis and Short's 1879 A Latin Dictionary as "to practice unnatural vice") is probably a loanword derived from the Greek παιδικά, "boyfriend, boytoy." Contextually, irrumatio is a punishment inflicted by the god Priapus on wrongdoers. Sexual passivity is for boys, humiliating for adult men. Latin is very specific about its sexual vocabulary in ways that English can't necessarily reproduce, or at least not without a lot more wordage. (And it only gets worse with the poem's second line.)
Anyway, it was a brilliant piece of Latin to throw into this episode of The Daily Show, because Catullus 16 is the poet's word-bending, role-bending riposte to the dangers of generalizing an artist from his work: it is alleged that because Catullus' poems are delicate little things (versiculis meis . . . quod sunt molliculi), their author is (male marem) the same, but any critic with doubts about the poet's manhood is about to receive an up close and personal demonstration of his mistake; all constructed so as to demonstrate both Catullus' slinky versatility with language and his decisive domination in its field. (This is sort of the world's most surface summary, but I have no idea how much you want to hear about four-letter Latin lyric poetry.) So Bernie Goldberg criticizes Jon Stewart for his pretensions to edginess, his on-air crudity whose enthusiastic reception only shows up the unsophistication of his audience, only for a tea-drinking, monocle-wearing, comically effete member of the audience to voice his support for Stewart in a fashion that is both genuinely sophisticated and really crude. It was perfect.
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