The Translator’s Invisibility

{89} Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
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.

Let’s live, and love, my darling fair!
And not a single farthing care
For age’s babbling spite;
Yon suns that set again shall rise;
But, when our transient meteor dies,
We sleep in endless night:
Then first a thousand kisses give,
An hundred let me next receive,
Another thousand yet;
To these a second hundred join,
Still be another thousand mine,
An hundred then repeat:

Such countless thousands let there be,
Sweetly confus’d; that even we
May know not the amount;
That envy, so immense a store
Beholding, may not have the pow’r
Each various kiss to count.

(Nott l795:I, 17)

Nott’s first stanza possesses considerable fluency, with its continuous syntax woven through a moderately intricate rhyme scheme, but in the second stanza the false rhymes proliferate, and the third fairly creaks with syntactical inversions and suspensions and the jarring rhyme on “store” / “pow’r.” Nott’s suggestive revisions of the Latin text stress the opposition between the morality of age (“babbling spite”) and the passion of youth (“transient meteor”) and include a couple of mildly {90} sexual references, the erotic pleasure signified by “sweetly confus’d” and the experienced sexuality hinted in “various” kinds of “kisses.” Nott’s second stanza also revises the Latin (by shifting from “give” to “receive”), creating the rakish image of the male lover passively receiving Lesbia’s kisses and thus exaggerating, somewhat comically, the male fantasy of female sexual aggressiveness in Catullus’s text. Nott’s masculinist translation is a humorous, slightly prurient, and not entirely felicitous celebration of the lovers’ youth and sexuality against age and moral strictness. Its sexual frankness conflicts with Lamb’s more decorous version, in which the lovers are given to shameful “blushing”:

Love, my Lesbia, while we live;
Value all the cross advice
That the surly greybeards give
At a single farthing’s price.

Suns that set again may rise;
We, when once our fleeting light,
Once our day in darkness dies,
Sleep in one eternal night.

Give me kisses thousand-fold,
Add to them a hundred more;
Other thousands still be told
Other hundreds o’er and o’er.

But, with thousands when we burn,
Mix, confuse the sums at last,
That we may not blushing learn
All that have between us past.

None shall know to what amount
Envy’s due for so much bliss;
None—for none shall ever count
All the kisses we will kiss.

(Lamb 1821:I, 12–13)