2022-2023 Winter Break Writing Challenge Featured Author: Emma Halverson, "Catullus 5, A Translation"

"Catullus 5, A Translation", by Emma Halverson

Emma received her BA in linguistics from BSU in 2021, and she’s currently pursuing a master’s degree in classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She usually works with Latin from late antiquity, but makes an exception for Catullus, her favorite Roman poet.

 

Brief summary/intro by Emma: Catullus (ca. 84-54 BCE) was a Roman author of over 100 poems, including love poetry and elegy. His work is highly emotional and often playful, but also carefully refined. This poem, one of his most popular, is addressed to his mistress—the wife of a powerful Roman politician.

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Catullus 5

vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senem 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.


Let’s live, Lesbia, and let’s love,
and the rumors of stodgy old men
let’s value at one cent.
The sun can set and rise again;
but when our brief daylight dims,
we must sleep in perpetual night.
So give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred;
then another thousand, then a second hundred;
then again all the way to a thousand, then again to a hundred.
Then when we have kissed many thousands of kisses—
we’ll scramble them up, so we lose count,
and so no one can envy us,
since no one will know how many kisses we have.