A.D Hope had a next to lifelong love for the poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus, one of the greatest Roman satirists and erotic poets, whose on-again off-again love affair wth the woman he called Lesbia is one of the most memorable in classical literature. Some of Hope's first poems were translations Catallus and in his last creative decade he turned to Catallus again, producing these fine, quirky, no-holds-barred renditions as a kind of gift to himself and now - the manuscripts retreived from amongst his papers in the National Library of Australia - a parting offering to the world.
