Arts & Letters Daily (again! you've guessed by now I set it as the home page on every browser on every machine I control) linked a review by Joy Connolly, of Peter Green's new translation of Catullus, which says something important:
Poems are not diaries … and Catullus did not dash off his metrical virtuosities in an afternoon, but this is the aesthetic of the shorter lyrics: craft masked as first-person spontaneity. If his habit of direct address invites readers to identify naively with the poem's narrator, the formalist challenge of fitting Latin into meters originally designed for Greek and the accumulation of literary references—to Sappho, Callimachus, and earlier Roman poets—draw attention to the eternally self-conscious aspect of the experience of passion, the way our strongest, most "natural" passions are shaped in part by literary art. Saying "I am in love!" or "I feel . . ." are acts of self-dramatized authenticity, as Roland Barthes observes: Catullus catches both the rawness of emotion and the theatrical quality of its expression.
That (especially at the end) might sound dangerously close to the literary theory I said I wasn't interested in. But is it so different from
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[today I'd add empathetic] acute, even obsessive, observation of how people (including the poet) live with each other in the world,
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a love for the particularities of particular poems,
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and a willingness to do real work on poem after poem.
Unfortunately, there's no indication in the quotes from the translation that Green even attempted to represent Catullus's metrical virtuosity. I recommend Charles Martin's translation.
9:13:33 PM 
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