Let's Live and Love

Catullus enjoying Lesbia

I recently translated Catullus poem 5, Vivamus mea Lesbia!, which describes Catullus’s delight in the affair he has begun with the girl he calls Lesbia.

Let’s live, my Lesbia, and let’s love each other,
and old folk's sour muttering let us weather,
rating it worth a penny altogether.
The sun goes down and comes back up as bright;
but we, once we’ve relinquished our brief light,
must sleep a long and everlasting night.
A thousand kisses, then, a hundred more,
a thousand times again, and then five score,
another thousand, then a hundred more!
And when we’ve umpteen thousands on account,
we’ll swirl them up and blot out the amount, 
so that no evil eye can jinx our tryst
by counting up how many times we’ve kissed.

Last month I saw a performance of Tom Stoppard’s play Invention of Love and was disappointed to hear the first line misquoted incorrectly in Latin - with a short a in vivāmus. It not only spoils the rhythm of the line and makes no sense of the Latin word (a subjunctive form meaning “let us”), it ruins the  effect of the long vowels - aah, eeh, in vivāmus, amēmus- that Catullus uses to give a sense of expansive delight in living and loving. These vowel sounds contrast with those of the second line - ooh, aw, oom, aw - expressive of old people's disapproving mutters. I translate 'old folk' because although the standard text we have says 'censorious old men', senum severiorum, the text I prefer adds -que to the second word, making it mean "old men and censorious types" - and no doubt the old women also muttered about the happy young couple, the poet and his married girlfriend (for Latinists, that added -que requires that the line is closely attached to the following, since it creates a 'hypermetric elision').

The last four lines are a reflection of the Roman magical notion that knowing something about a person allows an ill-wisher to put a curse on them. In this case it's the precise number of kisses that Catullus humorously suggests ill-intentioned critics should be prevented from knowing (though from his careful accounting we can add them up to make 3300...)

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorumque
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.