Catullus Quotations
Gaius Valerius Catullus
From Wikiquote (Redirected from 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.
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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
Wikipedia has an article about: Catullus Wikisource has original works written by or about: Gaius Valerius Catullus 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
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