The Love that Dare Not Speak its Name: Catullus 31¹
Phoning it in this week (hey, moving’s stressful) with something of a previously-on: here’s my first-place entry for the Wellesley English Department translation contest. Sharp-eyed readers will note a continuing dialogue with my first blog post here, but I’ll let the treatment speak for itself…
‘But I am Love, and I was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden, till he came
Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.’
Then sighing, said the other, ‘Have thy will,
I am the love that dare not speak its name.’ ²\
— Alfred Douglas, “Two Loves” (1892)
Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnes
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
<vocis in ore;>
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
lumina nocte.
otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.
He seems unto a god to me— I know, I shouldn’t, but
he seems beyond the gods,
sitting near (near!) and gazing
and knowing sweetly
your honey-laughing, and o poor woman I³
it tears the sense away from me
because when I see you (from afar), Lesbia,⁴
nothing beside remains—
<all speech dead & buried.>⁵
See here: my tongue stills, & sweet pale fire
sings below my skin, & my ears— they ring
with selfsame sound, like twin flames
extinguished in the night.
(Lack, O poetess, is your vice:
sweetbitter⁶ pleasure, you know it oftener
than you ought.
Lack, darling, lack has ruined before you great kings
& cities of the blessed.)