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I'm finally getting around to transcribing the poems of Catullus that I translated on airplanes and hotel tables while I was at Fourth Street Fantasy. See below.
Catullus 6
Flavius, unless your lover
should be indelicate or inelegant,
you’d want to tell Catullus and couldn’t be silent.
But I don’t know what kind of feverish skin*
you’re fond of; you’re ashamed to admit this.
For during your uncelibate nights
your never-silent bed of garlands
squeaks and smells of Syrian olive-oil,
and your pillow is worn down equally
both here and there, during the shaking of the trembling bed
and its squeaking and walking.
For nothing wicked succeeds, nothing wicked is quiet.
Why? You would not show such a sex-wearied body
unless you were doing something rather foolish.
Therefore, whatever you’ve got of good or bad,
tell us. I want to cry out to the sky**
you and your love, in light verse.
---
* Slang for someone “available for a price”, according to my book’s notes. A possibly more accurate translation would be “piece of ass”, but I don’t want to imply that’s the literal.
** To shout to the sky = to immortalize. Not quite sticking it up in the stars, but you know how poets are about their Immortal Verses That Will Outlast Time. (Which I can’t blame them for, given how many years later we are still reading Catullus.)
Catullus 6
Flavius, unless your lover
should be indelicate or inelegant,
you’d want to tell Catullus and couldn’t be silent.
But I don’t know what kind of feverish skin*
you’re fond of; you’re ashamed to admit this.
For during your uncelibate nights
your never-silent bed of garlands
squeaks and smells of Syrian olive-oil,
and your pillow is worn down equally
both here and there, during the shaking of the trembling bed
and its squeaking and walking.
For nothing wicked succeeds, nothing wicked is quiet.
Why? You would not show such a sex-wearied body
unless you were doing something rather foolish.
Therefore, whatever you’ve got of good or bad,
tell us. I want to cry out to the sky**
you and your love, in light verse.
---
* Slang for someone “available for a price”, according to my book’s notes. A possibly more accurate translation would be “piece of ass”, but I don’t want to imply that’s the literal.
** To shout to the sky = to immortalize. Not quite sticking it up in the stars, but you know how poets are about their Immortal Verses That Will Outlast Time. (Which I can’t blame them for, given how many years later we are still reading Catullus.)