by Catullus
now the furor of March skies
retreats under Zephyrus …
and Catullus will forsake
these Phrygian fields
the sun-drenched farm-lands of Nicaea
& make for the resorts of Asia Minor,
the famous cities.
Now, the trepidation of departure
now lust of travel,
feet impatiently urging him to be gone.
Good friends, good-bye,
we, met in this distant place,
far from our Italy
who by divergent paths
must find our separate ways home.
48
Iuventius,
were I allowed
to kiss your eyes
as sweet as honey
on & on, three
thousand kisses
would not seem
too much for me,
as many as
ripe harvest ears
of sheaves of corn
would still not be
too much of kiss-
ing you, for me.
50
The other day we spent,
Calvus, at a loose end
flexing our poetics.
Delectable twin poets,
swapping verses, testing
form & cadence, fishing
for images in wine
& wit. I left you late,
came home still burning with
your brilliance, your invention.
Restless, I could not eat,
nor think of sleep. Under
my eyelids you appeared
& talked. I twitched, feverishly,
looked for morning … at last,
debilitated, limbs
awry across the bed
I made this poem of
my ardour & for our
gaiety, Calvus … Don’t
look peremptory, or
contemn my apple. Think.
The Goddess is ill-bred
exacts her hubris-meed:
lure not her venom.
51
Godlike the man who
sits at her side, who
watches and catches
that laughter
which (softly) tears me
to tatters: nothing is
left of me, each time
I see her,
… tongue numbed; arms, legs
melting, on fire; drum
drumming in ears; head-
lights gone black.
Coda
Her ease is your sloth, Catullus
you itch & roll in her ease:
former kings and cities
lost in the valley of her arm.
58
Lesbia, our Lesbia, the same old Lesbia,
Caelius, she whom Catullus loved once
more than himself and more than all his own,
loiters at the cross-roads
and in the backstreets
ready to toss-off the ‘magnanimous’ sons of Rome.
65
Although entangled in prolonged grief
severed from the company of the Muses
and far from Pieria
my brain children still-born
myself among Stygian eddies
the eddies plucking at the pallid foot
of a brother
who lies under Dardanian soil
stretched by the coastland
whom none may now hear
none touch
shuttered from sight
whom I treasured more than this life
and shall –
in elegies of loss
plaintive as Procne crying under the shadow of the cypress
for lost Itylus,
I send, Hortalus, mixed with misery
Berenice’s Lock –
clipped from Callimachus
for you might think my promise
had slipped like vague wind through my head
or was like the apple
unavowed
the girl takes from her lover
thrusts into her soft bodice
and forgets there …
till her mother takes her off guard –
she is startled,
the love-fruit trundles ponderously across the floor
and the girl, blushing, stoops gingerly
to pick it up.
68
Borne down by bitter misfortune
you send me this letter, Manlius,
blotted with tears,
it comes like flotsam
from a spumy sea –
from the shipwreck of your affairs –
a cry from the undertow …
and that you,
whom Venus deprives
of soft sleep,
whom the Greek Muse
no longer tempts,
who turn restlessly
in an empty bed,
call me ‘my friend’,
that you look to Catullus
for love-gifts of Venus
& of the Holy Muses,
is a gift in itself,
but your own tears blind you to mine.
I am not neglectful of friendship,
but we two squat in the same coracle,
we are both swamped by the same stormy waters,
I have not the gifts of a happy man …
Often enough,
when a man’s toga first sat on my shoulders
I chased love & the Muses,
in the onset of youth
the tart mixture of Venus
seeming sweet,
but a brother’s death
drove a young man’s kickshaws
into limbo –
I have lost you, my brother
and your death has ended
the spring season
of my happiness,
our house is buried with you
& buried the laughter that you taught me.
There are no thoughts of love nor of poems
in my head
since you died.
Hence, Manlius
the reproach in your Roman letter
leaves me unmoved:
‘Why loiter in Verona,
Catullus, where
for men of our circle
cold limbs in an empty bed
are the rule –
not the exception?’
Forgive me, my friend
but the dalliance of love
that you look for
has been soured by mourning.
As for a poem …
our tastes call for my Greek books,
and those are at home
where we both live
and where our years pile up,
in Rome …
I have few copies of anything by me.
One case only has followed me North.
There is nothing curmudgeonly here –
on whom do you think
I would sooner lavish
love-gifts of Venus
& gifts of the Holy Muses
than you?
You have turned to a friend
& the friend’s hands are empty …
How can I give what I have not got?
[…]
[Abridged.]
70
Lesbia says she’d rather marry me
than anyone,
though Jupiter himself came asking
or so she says,
but what a woman tells her lover in desire
should be written out on air & running water.
72
There was a time, Lesbia, when
you confessed only to Catullus in love:
you would set me above Jupiter himself.
I loved you then
not as men love their women
but as a father his children – his family.
To-day I know you too well
and desire burns deeper in me
and you are more coarse
‘How,’ you may ask, ‘can this be?’
Such actions as yours excite
increased violence of love,
Lesbia, but with friendless intention.
73
Cancel, Catullus, the expectancies of friendship
cancel the kindnesses deemed to accrue there:
kindness is barren, friendship breeds nothing,
only the weight of past deeds growing oppressive
as Catullus has discovered, bitter & troubled,
in one he had once accounted a unique friend.
75
Reason blinded by sin, Lesbia,
a mind drowned in its own devotion:
come clothed in your excellences –
I cannot think tenderly of you,
sink to what acts you dare –
I can never cut this love.
76
If evocations of past kindness shed
ease in the mind of one of rectitude,
of bond inviolate, who never in abuse of God
led men intentionally to harm,
such, as life lasts, must in Catullus shed
effect of joy from disregarded love.
For what by man can well in act or word
be done to others has by me been done
sunk in the credit of an unregarding heart.
Why protract this pain? why not resist
yourself in mind; from this point inclining
yourself back, breaking this fallen love
counter to what the gods desire of men?
Hard suddenly to lose love of long use,
hard precondition of your sanity
regained. Possible or not, this last
conquest is for you to make, Catullus.
May the pitying gods who bring
help to the needy at the point of death
look towards me and, if my life were clean,
tear this malign pest out from my body
where, a paralysis, it creeps from limb to limb
driving all former laughter from the heart.
I do not now expect – or want – my love returned,
nor cry to the moon for Lesbia to be chaste:
only that the gods cure me of this disease
and, as I once was whole, make me now whole again.
77
Whom I have trusted to no end (Rufus)
other than expense of evil knowledge
has come to the ambush,
inflamed viscera,
raped all that was precious.
Here was poison in rape of life
here was disease of love.
Witness the chaste mouth of a chaste woman
soiled by loathsome saliva –
not with impunity:
your acts shall to succeeding ages
be by the bent Sibyl broadcast, in accents of infamy.
79
They nickname Lesbia’s brother ‘pulcher’,
naturally
since she prefers him to Catullus & the Catulli;
but let him dispose as he will of Catullus
(& the Catulli)
when he finds three men of distinction
willing to greet him in public.
83
Lesbia is extraordinarily vindictive
about me in front of her husband
who is thereby moved to fatuous laughter –
a man mulishly insensitive, failing to grasp
that a mindless silence (about me) spells safety
while to spit out my name in curses, baring
her white teeth, means she remembers me, and
what is more pungent still, is scratching the wound
ripening herself while she talks.
84
‘Hadvantageous’ breathes Arrius heavily
when he means ‘advantageous’,
intending ‘artificial’ he labours ‘hartificial’,
convinced he is speaking impeccably while
he blows his ‘h’s about most ‘hartificially’.
One understands that his mother – his uncle –
his family, in fact, on the distaff side
spoke so.
Fortunately he was posted to Syria
and our ears grew accustomed to normal speech again,
unapprehensive for a while of such words
until suddenly the grotesque news reaches us
that the Ionian Sea has become
since the advent of Arrius
no longer Ionian
but (inevitably) Hionian.
85
I hate and I love. And if you ask me how,
I do not know: I only feel it, and I’m torn in two.
86
We have heard of Quintia’s beauty. To me she is tall, slender
and of a white ‘beauty’. Such things I freely admit;
but such things do not constitute beauty.
In her there is nothing of Venus,
not a pinch of love spice in her long body.
While Lesbia, Lesbia is loveliness indeed.
Herself of particular beauty
has she not plundered womanhead of all its graces,
flaunting them as her adornment?
87
No woman loved, in truth, Lesbia
as you by me;
no love-faith found so true
as mine in you.
91
In this hopeless & wasting love of mine
I trusted you for one reason, Gellius:
not because I knew you well
nor respected your constancy
nor thought you able (or willing) to rinse out your mind
but merely because the woman for whom
this compulsive desire is eating me
happens to be neither your mother
nor sister
nor any other close female relative.
In spite of our intimacy I did not believe
you would find here incentive for action.
– You did,
in the overwhelming attraction
pure sin holds for you, Gellius,
or anything smacking of sin.
96
If, Calvus, effects of grief
affect
those enigmatic sepulchres
of former love
& spent friendships,
lamented & evoked in our desire,
reflect, her early death
will never grieve Quintilia
half so much
as your long love must make her gay.
99
Purloining while you played in honeyed youth
a kiss, sweeter than one suspects ambrosia tastes,
I paid, Iuventius, in full:
an hour or more
you racked me with my own self-exculpations
your loathing left untouched by tears.
No sooner had I kissed you
than with every finger
in every corner of your mouth
you washed & rubbed
all contact of my lips
like the slaver of some syphilitic whore
away. More:
you gave me, fallen, to an enemy
– Amor
who has not since ceased to rack me in his own usage,
so that a purloined kiss
once ambrosial,
is changed to one more acid than acid hellbane tastes.
Met with such strong despite of love
my fallen love
shall from this day no kisses more purloin.
101
Journeying over many seas & through many countries
I come dear brother to this pitiful leave-taking
the last gestures by your graveside
the futility of words over your quiet ashes.
Life cleft us from each other
pointlessly depriving brother of brother.
Accept then, in our parents’ c
ustom
these offerings, this leave-taking
echoing for ever, brother, through a brother’s tears.
– ‘Hail & Farewell’.
104
Do you really believe I could blacken my life,
the woman dearer to me than my two eyes?
If I could
I should not be sunk in this way in my love for her –
who performs a zoo of two-backed beasts,
daily with Tappo.
107
If ever anyone anywhere, Lesbia, is looking
for what he knows will not happen
and then unexpectedly it happens –
the soul is astonished,
as we are now in each other,
an event dearer than gold,
for you have restored yourself, Lesbia, desired
restored yourself, longed for, unlooked for,
brought yourself back
to me. White day in the calendar!
Who happier than I?
What more can life offer
than the longed for unlooked for event when it happens?
109
Joy of my life! you tell me this –
that nothing can possibly break this love of ours for each other.
God let her mean what she says,
from a candid heart,
that our two lives may be linked in their length
day to day,
each to each,
in a bond of sacred fidelity.
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