The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus
1894
The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus
1894
Translated by Richard Francis, Sir Burton
Catullus wrote what may be the most personal poetry in Western literature. In these 116 poems, he drags his readers into the wreckage of his love affair with the married Lesbia: the jealousy, the longing, the bitter betrayal, the obsessive return to every wound. He writes about sex with an honesty that shocked Rome and has lost none of its power to unsettle. He writes about friendship with a ferocity that bleeds into cruelty. These are not polished meditations on love; they are dispatches from the inside of obsession. The collection opens with poems to Lesbia's pet sparrow, playful and tender, then pivots to savagely funny attacks on political figures, and arrives finally at Poem 101, a grief so raw it has outlived two millennia. Len Krisak's translations capture this range: the obsessive lover, the poet who writes with a knife, the man who cannot stop feeling too much. Catullus left a mark on every poet who followed him, from Ovid to the present. If you want poetry that burns, that refuses to be safe, that shows you the inside of a man who could not help but tell the truth, this is it.
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“Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.””
— Gaius Valerius Catullus
“You think I'm a sissy?I will sodomize you and face-fuck you.””
— Gaius Valerius Catullus
“Odi et amo; quare fortasse requiris, nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. (my translation: I hate and I love, you ask why I do this, I do not know, but I feel and I am tormented)””
— Gaius Valerius Catullus
“In perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. (Forever and ever, brother, hail and farewell.)””
— Gaius Valerius Catullus
“Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis! soles occidere et redire possunt; nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum, deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum; dein, cum milia multa fecerimus, conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, aut ne quis malus invidere possit cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.””
— Gaius Valerius Catullus
“We should live, my Lesbia, and loveAnd value all the talk of stricterOld men at a single penny.Suns can set and rise again;For us, once our brief light has set,There's one unending night for sleeping.Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,Then another thousand, then a second hundred,Then still another thousand, then a hundred;Then, when we've made many thousands,We'll muddle them so as not to knowOr lest some villain overlook usKnowing the total of our kisses.(Translated by Guy Lee)””
— Gaius Valerius Catullus
“soles occidere et redire possunt: nobis cum semel occidit breuis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. ””
— Gaius Valerius Catullus
“I hate & love. And if you should ask how I do both,I couldn't say; but I feel it , and it shivers me.””
— Gaius Valerius Catullus
“Some lioness whelped you on a mountain rockIn Libya, or else you're Scylla's childWhose womb's all barking dogs, for only a wildBeast with the nature of a beast could mockA desperate man making a last appealDown on his knees. Bitch heart too hard to feel!””
— Gaius Valerius Catullus
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Catullus, Gaius Valerius. The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-carmina-of-caius-valerius-catullus-468a260e-cf23-47da-a635-633fc663e657.Catullus, G. V. (1894). The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-carmina-of-caius-valerius-catullus-468a260e-cf23-47da-a635-633fc663e657Catullus, Gaius Valerius. The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-carmina-of-caius-valerius-catullus-468a260e-cf23-47da-a635-633fc663e657.
