A bit of an eyesore of a book, but useful

books:

	• The Student's Catullus (Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture) Daniel H. Garrison, Gaius Valerius Catullus University of Oklahoma Press, 2004 - 234 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Flawed...

Garrison's book is not the soundest text for people reading Catullus in Latin. For one thing, the book does a disservice in "titling" every poem in the collection with an English one-liner...this goes a long way towards influencing the reader before s/he even reads the Latin. Second, there is no critical apparatus with the Latin text...and with a poet like Catullus, for whom textual issues are more than marginally important, this is a lamentable loss...even beginning Latin students can be sophisticated enough not to think that the text of an author was handed down by Jupiter on golden tablets...or in this case, in a forest green paperback. Fordyce's 1961 Oxford commentary remains standard for the poems he covers (and contrary to popular lore he did not leave the others out out of a sense of Puritanism but rather because the Oxford Press at the time thought the book would sell to a larger market with the obscene poems omitted)...there is also Merrill, still in print (he has every poem)...and for more accomplished Latinists, we now have Thomson's big 1997 volume. If you can find it, Kenneth Quinn's 1970 commentary on the whole corpus is also worth a close look...

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A very helpful book

I am a T.A. for a course in Catullus, and I find this book to be very helpful. Included in this volume are the complete extant works of Catullus, a Catulluan vocabulary (crucial because some of Catullus' more colorful vocabulary does not appear in all dictionaries), a brief and informative commentary, a list of people to whom Catullus makes reference, a review of Catullus' meters, and a glossary of terms and their definitions. This book is extremely helpful and is ideal for a student reading Catullus for the first time or a more experienced Latin reader who is attempting to read Catullus' corpus as quickly as possible.

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The perfect edition for students

This handy edition is perfect for the casual reader of Latin. Garrison's extensive notes answer most questions a reader is likely to have concerning the grammer and they also provide a considerable amount of relevent mythology. The book also contains a complete vocabulary which I have found invaluable. This is not a scholarly edition, but provides everything for the non-scholar.

3rd ed - excellent

The third edition to Garrison's Catullus is an improvement from the last edition. A minor revision includes updated bibliography concerning textual tradition. But the big improvement is the reformatting of the book's type-face. It is now set in Minion Pro which is easier to read, in my opinion, than Times New Roman. In other words, it is beautifully laid out to present a good book overall. Other things: still remaining are the commentary and vocabulary in the back of the book.

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A bit of an eyesore of a book, but useful

Daniel H. Garrison's THE STUDENT'S CATULLUS, published by University of Oklahoma press, contains all 113 poems of the standard collection which are belived to be authentic, including the fragmentary poems. Garrison provides an introduction and notes for the individual poems, as well as four appendices on various matters ("People", "Meters", "[Poetic] Terms", and "Poetic Usage") and a complete vocabulary. In his notes, Garrison often directs the student towards the meaning without giving it away as such, preserving the comedic impact of much of the shorter poems. While no scholar could deny the obscenity of much of Catullus' poetry, Garrison sometimes shows a shyness in his notes which I found odd. I used THE STUDENT'S CATULLUS for a semester-long course at Loyola University Chicago, and thought that it served my needs well.

If there is one big downside to the book, it is the typesetting. The Latin text is fine, but the notes and commentary are all done in hideous double-columns and a typeface smaller than the Latin. This is one of the least professional-looking academic books I've come across in a while. Still, that doesn't stop the content from being useful, so THE STUDENT'S CATULLUS is worth seeking out.

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reviews: page 1, 2

In this third edition, thoroughly revised, Daniel H. Garrison makes these famous poems more accessible than ever to students of Latin. A standard college textbook as well as a comprehensive reference, the book includes a brief introduction about the poet's life and the character of his poems, a fresh recension of all 113 poems, and a commentary in English on each poem, explaining difficult points of Latin, features of Catullus' artistry, and background information. The notes to each poem also illuminate the meaning of Catullus' language, with explanations of word choice, word order, sound effects, and meter. Additional aids to the reader are a Who's Who of the most important people in Catullus' poems, an introduction to Catullan meters, a glossary of literary terms used in the commentary, a complete Latin-English Catullan vocabulary, and six maps.

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