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[fadeaccompli]

I have often thought this poem was one of the more boring ones, as the poems of Catullus go; his happy love poems just aren't as interesting as his bitter/angry/vicious/satirical/epic poems, at least in my estimation. But there's still some nice imagery involved, and it's rather satisfying to get through an entire poem with only one word needing looking up. (I have fudged the grammar rather terribly in a few places, and shuffled words further from the literal to satisfy my own sense of elegance in poetry, but by and large it's accurate.)



Catullus 5

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,
and as for the whispers of prudish old men,
let’s count those all worth one penny.
Suns may set and rise again;
when our brief light sets once,
our night must be eternal slumber.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred;
then another thousand, then a second hundred;
then another thousand each, then a hundred.
Then, when we’ve made many thousands,
we’ll mix them together, so that we may not know--
and so that no one wicked can begrudge them
when he knows--just how many kisses there are.