(Drinking vessel made ca. late sixteenth century)

Among the greatest pleasures of studying the great books is to be engaged in serious academic enquiry with the most venerable and revered of texts—the words and ideas that shaped the world as we know it—and come across dirty jokes from hundreds or thousands of years ago. It serves to reassure us that some of the loftiest minds history has known may have snickered when their friends farted. The connection drawn across unimaginable spans of time by the shared enjoyment of twelve-year-old humor is somehow more tangible than a common appreciation of aesthetics or philosophical principles.

For instance, Chaucer—writing in 1390—examined the nature of faith and divinity with unparalled insight:

The destinee, ministre general,
That executeth in the world overal
The purveiaunce that God hath seyn biforn,
So strong it is, that though the world had sworn
The contrarie of a thyng, by ye or nay,
Yet somtyme it shal fallen on a day
That falleth nat eft withinne a thousand yeere.
For certeinly, oure appetites heere,
Be it of werre, or pees, or hate, or love,
Al is this reuled by the sighte above.

But his theological insights do not incline me to want to spend a night hanging out with him in a bar. And to a certain extent, if you can’t hang out in a bar with a great mind, is that mind really worth the paper he or she is printed on? Nietzsche would have been a neurotic bore, as would Kant. But Chaucer, on the other hand (along with Virginia Wolff, William Shakespeare, and others we could name) would have been hilariously fun to drink with. How do I know? Let me set the scene.

The Pardoner, a travelling seller of indulgences, is in a group on pilgrimage to Canterbury. He has just finished telling his tale, in which he admits that his only motive in selling indulgences and pardoning sinners is the money. He doesn’t believe in what he sells, but his tale was a highly moral one about four youths seeking to confront and murder Death, when they stumble upon a pot of gold, and they all conspire and in the end murder each other over it. When at the end of his tale he asks the crowd who will pay to see his Holy Relics, the host has this to say to the Pardoner:

‘Nay, nay!’ quod he, ‘thanne have I Cristes curs!
Lat be,’ quod he, ‘it shal nat be, so theech!
Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech,
And swere it were a relyk of a seint,
Though it were with thy fundament depeint!
But, by the croys which that Seint Eleyne fond,
I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!’

Which of course translates as:

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘then I will have damnation!
Relax,’ he said, ‘it won’t be so, I beseech you.
You would make me kiss your old underwear,
and swear it was a relic of a saint,
though it was stained by your own anus!
But, by the cross that Saint Elaine found,
I wish I had your balls in my hand.
Have them cut off, and I will you help you carry them.
They shall be enshrined in a hog’s turd!’

When the Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped by my house early last Saturday morning, I wish I’d had something as clever to say to them. Instead I just smiled politely and told them that the Kingdom of Heaven sounded very nice, and that I’d like to go there some day. I promised to read their tract called “Why You Can Trust The Holy Bible,” and said I’d call if I had questions. It seemed like the easiest way to get them to leave, but it certainly was’t clever, and it didn’t make me feel like I’d really taken charge of the situation.

But Chaucer is nothing compared to Catullus, a Roman poet who lived between 84 and 54 BC, whose poetry might make Larry Flynt blush. If you blush easily, you should probably stop reading now, if you haven’t already.

Improba Carmina

I will fuck you up the ass and in the mouth,
Aurelius, you sodomized ass-licker
And Furius, you perverted cock-sucker
Who read my sensual poems and conclude
I'm too wanton. For everyone knows
It's meet and proper for a poet to be
Pure, pious, and always correct in his behavior.
But we don't expect the same of his poems.
Of mine they'll say sure, they have wit, they have charm,
They're so sexy and lewd they can
Arouse—I won't say boys, but these hairy
Men whose unstiff dicks wilt on the vine.
You who have kissed many thousands of mouths
Upper and nether, man and girl,
How dare you think me less than manly?
I will fuck you up the ass and in the mouth.

(translated by Molly Arden)

It has homoeroticism, slander, assaults on others’ virility, insights about literary criticism, and all of it older than Jesus. I used this translation because I could not find the version submitted to the St. John’s student newspaper’s first annual Dirty Poetry Contest, which I co-sponsored, in which the translator rendered “hairy men” as “hirsute studs,” which I prefer.

Fine, you can quote me on it: I prefer hirsute studs. What’s the big deal?