5 Translations of Catullus 85 by Matthew Nisinson
Translator’s Note
These poems are part of an ongoing project translating, adapting, and reacting to a single poem by the Roman poet Catullus, the 85th of his surviving work, often referred to as Catullus 85. Catullus 85 is a simple metric couplet in Latin, but it contains worlds.
One question with translation is how one should best approach the unsaid, and with a short poem, there is a lot of unsaid. Sometimes the unsaid needs to be resolved by the reader, the tension in the original relies on the reader connecting dots, drawing conclusions, or perhaps recognizing that there is an elephant in the room of the poem. But that becomes increasingly difficult the greater the gap, in time, in culture, in circumstance, is between reader and poet. One of the greatest challenges in translating from Latin for a modern reader, is not translating the writing itself, but translating it past the enormous edifice of our own culture’s ideas and relationships to “classical antiquity” and the “western canon”. This challenge is further complicated by the fact that we often think we want “the right answer”, a one to one correspondence from the source language into our own. But, as Forrest Gander explains in his introduction to his translation of Pura López-Colomé, “one form of totalitarianism, surely, is the corralling of human feelings into uniform language.”* Seeking the true answer, the true translation, can be a noble goal, but it’s important that we not persuade ourselves that a single right translation, boxing out all other possible interpretations, is achievable.
Hence this project. Rather than attempting one perfect translation, I am putting together a web of imperfect translations as I approach Catullus’ elegantly crafted and passionate Latin from different directions, trying to pull as much truth out of it as I can.
*(López-Colomé, Pura (2002) No Shelter: The Selected Poems of Pura López-Colomé (F, Gander, Trans.). Graywolf Press.)
Catallus 85
Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
HATE! LOVE!
HATE! LOVE! I’m full of both! Why would you ask why?
Neither of us knows. But I can tell you it sucks!
Burning All Through
I loathe what I lust. Why I do it, you ask?
I don’t know it, but I feel it — burning all through me.
Tattooing My Knuckles
It burns as they etch each letter, one by one through eight
Why do I do these things to myself? Who is it for?
[I’m suffering cruelly]
I’m suffering cruelly from an incurable condition
How I caught it? No idea. Hate and love overwhelm me.
Cat 85 on a Trapper Keeper in ‘98
I, I hate, I love too! Why? You ask, you ask me?
I, I don’t, I don’t know!!! I feel it — I am SUFFERING!
Matthew Nisinson (he/him) lives in Queens, NY with his wife and daughter and their two cats. He has a BA in Latin from Vassar College, and a JD. Each summer he grows chili peppers. By day he is a bureaucrat. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Bullshit Lit, Cathexis Northwest Press, Novus Literary, and Southern Humanities Review. You can find him on Instagram or Threads @lepidum_novum_libellum and on Twitter and Bluesky @mnisinson.
Gaius Valerius Catullus was a poet at the end of the Roman Republic, a society on the precipice of collapse from a republic into a dictatorship. Catullus, influenced by Greek poets like Sappho, wrote poems that break from his Roman predecessors’ more patriotic focus on historic and epic themes instead centering his life and relationships with many of his poems famously tracing the course of his romantic relationship with a woman he dubbed Lesbia from early passion through heartbreak and hostility.
14 August 2024
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