To Mickles and Mencia, with love...

What follows is an excerpt from my topics paper especially dedicated to probably the only two people who read my blog besides Colleen. Enjoy!

I bought a bottle of Itoen Ooi Ocha for my lunch before leaving for Hamamatsu to attend their annual kite festival during the Golden Week holidays. On the bus to the beach where the giant kites would fight it out, I fidgeted with the strange day glow green bottle, that is until I noticed the following haiku written on the side.

大晦日今年も地味にそば食べる
omisoka kotoshi mo jimi ni soba taberu
on New Year’s Eve: this year too I’ll eat my noodles plain

だれが来て私の心をノックして
dare ga kite watashi no kokoro o nokku shite
someone’s coming but my heart does the knocking

今急に大きな海が見たくなった
ima kyuu ni ooki na umi ga mitaku natta
now all of a sudden I got the desire to see the open sea

these three poems appear on a half liter bottle. as one might expect the two liter bottle has more poems, though the exact number varies in my experience between seven and ten. the size of the bottle does not set an absolute limit but rather a somewhat flexible upper and lower bound. statistically speaking, then, the smaller bottle is a smaller text in terms of the number of verses.

there is no real consensus among classicists if the Catullan corpus as we have it constitutes a whole book in the sense of liber, that is one whole papyrus scroll. a great deal of research has been done by papyrologists such as Birk Oddink as to what the upper and lower bounds of a papyrus scroll text would be, but the results are neither definite nor terribly enlightening for our purposes. it is partially Catullus’ fault. he refers to his own work as a libellum, the use of which diminuitive has led some to express the opinion that the “polished off book” (libellum… expolitum) of the supposed dedicatory verse in fact only comprises poems 1-60 of our corpus or some combination of that and the other shorter verses, namely those in elegiac couplets. this opinion takes libellum to be literal, “a small book,” and is largely dependent upon a reading of Cat. 1 as an entirely sincere dedicatory verse.

Cornelius, to you: for you were accustomed
to think that my trifles were really something
since then, when you alone among Italians
dared to scribe every age in three volumes
learned, by Jove, and thoroughly wrought.

If We are to believe this dedication to be sincere, We also need to assume that Catullus values qualities like doctus and laboriosus. This Catullus, this seeeeerious Catullus, this member of the same fraternal orders as the “old, learned, respectable bald heads” reveres the voluminous product of extensive historical research and desperately yearns for its approval. This Catullus has something of an inferiority complex; this Catullus defers to power; this Catullus would write a “little book.”

diminuitives are tricky things; certainly We might take them literally. there’s no reason not to. but anyone with half a brain knows they have an adjacent sense as well, a usage that indicates a degree of one’s concern for the diminished object rather than mere size. I am fairly certain no one would mistake “you poor little thing” for “you small object of limited financial means.” what then, if libellum has little or nothing to do with the size of the liber? does this Catullus really think his trifles are trivial? would docta be a little more than dogmatic, and is “laborious” more than a mere cognate? Who is this Cornelius, anyway, and why would this Catullus be using his tomes for anything besides doorstops, table props, or paperweights? The only other memorable use of the word carta in our Catullan corpus refers to them as shat on (cacata).