Gaius Valerius Catullus

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.

Sourced

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.

See also

• Catulli Carmina

External links

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of

The Poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus

• Catullus translations: Catullus' work in Latin and multiple modern languages
• Catullus in Latin and English
• Catullus: Latin text, concordances and frequency list
• Latinum podcast: includes Catullus' poems read in Latin
• Catullus purified: a brief history of Carmen 16 by Thomas Nelson Winter
• SORGLL: Catullus 5, read by Robert Sonkowsky