Catullus 5: Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus
Gaius Valerius Catullus
Catullus' most famous love poem — 'Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love' — a hendecasyllabic appeal to seize the day in the face of mortality, addressed to his lover.
About the Poem
Carmen 5 is the most famous of the Lesbia poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BCE), the leader of the neoteric movement of Roman lyric. “Lesbia” is the poetic pseudonym for Clodia Metelli, the aristocratic woman with whom Catullus had a tumultuous affair.
The poem is in hendecasyllables (the meter Catullus uses for his most personal and conversational pieces). Its emotional logic is unmatched in Latin: stern Roman elders are dismissed as cheap; the brief day of life will end in one perpetual night; therefore — kisses, thousands of them, in such heaped numbers that no one can count them and curse them with the evil eye.
The kiss-counting motif was endlessly imitated (Catullus 7, Marlowe, Jonson, Crashaw, Burns).
Original Latin
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.
English Translation (Sir Richard Francis Burton, 1894 — public domain)
Live we, my Lesbia, and love we one another, And all the prattle of the prim old folks, One single farthing’s worth let us esteem. Suns may set and rise again; We, when our brief light has set, Must sleep through a perpetual single night. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, Then another thousand, then a second hundred, Then yet another thousand, then a hundred more. Then, when we have made up many thousands, We will confuse them, lest we know the count, Or lest some envious wretch should overlook us Knowing too well the number of our kisses.
Translation by Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1600, more poetic)
The Sunne may set and rise: But we contrariwise Sleepe after our short light One everlasting night.
(Raleigh translated only the central conceit; widely anthologized.)
Notes on Reading
- unius aestimemus assis — “let us value at a single as” (the smallest Roman coin); idiomatic for “we don’t give a penny for.”
- brevis lux / nox perpetua una — life as a single brief day, death as one unbroken night. The Epicurean materialism is conspicuous.
- conturbabimus — a banking term (“to throw the accounts into confusion”) used playfully of kisses.
- invidere — the verb cognate with the fascinum / evil eye: Lesbia and Catullus must not let anyone count and so cast a spell on their love.
Sources & Citations
- Latin text: Perseus — Catullus, Carmen 5 (edition: E. T. Merrill, 1893)
- English (PD): Sir Richard F. Burton & Leonard C. Smithers, The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus (London, 1894) — archive.org
- Scholarly: Kenneth Quinn, Catullus: The Poems (Macmillan, 2nd ed. 1973); D. F. S. Thomson, Catullus: Edited with a Textual and Interpretative Commentary (Toronto, 1997).
- Wikipedia: Catullus 5