Gaius Valerius Catullus

From Wikiquote

(Redirected from Catullus)
Jump to: navigation, search
Let us live and love, my Lesbia...
and value at a penny all the talk of crabbed old men.

Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BC) was a Roman poet, the dominant figure among the New Poets (neoterici) of the 1st century BC.

Contents

[edit] Sourced

[edit] Carmina

  • Ye Cupids, droop each little head,
    Nor let your wings with joy be spread:
    My Lesbia’s favourite bird is dead,
    Whom dearer than her eyes she loved.
    • III, l. 1-4
  • Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus...
    soles occidere et redire possunt:
    nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
    nox est perpetua una dormienda.
    • Let us live and love, my Lesbia...
      and value at a penny all the talk of crabbed old men.
      Suns may set and rise again:
      for us, when our brief light has set,
      there's the sleep of perpetual night.
    • Alternate translation: My sweetest Lesbia let us live and love,
      And though the sager sort our deeds reprove,
      Let us not weigh them: Heav’n’s great lamps do dive
      Into their west, and straight again revive,
      But soon as once set is our little light,
      Then must we sleep one ever-during night.
      Trans. by Thomas Campion (1601)
    • V, l. 1-7
  • Give me a thousand kisses, and then a hundred,
    Then another thousand, then a second hundred,
    And then yet another thousand, then a hundred.
    • V, l. 7-9
  • Per caputque pedesque.
    • Over head and heels.
    • XX
  • Sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti
    in vente et rapida scribere oportet aqua
    • What a woman says to a passionate lover
      should be written in the wind and the running water.
    • LXX, l. 3-4
  • Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
    nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
    • I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do it?
      I don't know, but I feel it happening and am tortured.
    • LXXXV
  • Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
    • And forever, brother, hail and farewell.
    • CI, l. 10
  • Si quicquam cupido optantique optigit umquam
    insperanti, hoc est gratum animo proprie.
    • If anything has happened to one who ever yearned and wished
      but never hoped, that is a rare pleasure of the soul.
    • CVII
  • Simul te aspexi, nihil est super mi vocis in ore,
    lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus flamma demanat,
    sonitu suopte tintinant aures, gemina teguntur lumina nocte.
    • Directly when I see you, nothing is left from the voice in my mouth,
      but my tongue is paralyzed, in my limbs flows a delicate flame,
      By their own sound sing my ears, my eyes are being covered by a double night.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Wikibooks
Retrieved from "http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gaius_Valerius_Catullus"