Classes will be starting up for me soon and this fall I am very excited that I will, once again, be teaching a Catullus course to my upper level Latin students. As I was looking through my notes and preparing my course materials, I was lingering on the Roman poet’s Carmen 76 which, for many reasons, is difficult to teach. Instead of going through his poems in numerical order (there are 116 poems in his corpus), I group them by theme: The Lesbia poems, the friendship and enmity poems, the poems about poetry. Poem 76 falls into the Lesbia set of poems and it is the very last one I translate with my classes; for me it is the ultimate end of their love affair and he references many of the other poems he has previously written about her in this elegy. In my mind this is most definitely the end of the affair.
Students always struggle with this poem because of the syllogism in the first few lines, the indirect speech, infinitives, etc. But they also have a difficult time with the subject matter. They have no patience for Catullus and his sick heart; time and again I hear them argue that he is weak, whining, feckless and on and on. For a group of people who are prone to melodrama and tend towards emotional ebullience (I say this with the utmost love and affection for them), one would think that they would have more sympathy with or even empathy for Catullus. But, alas, this is never the case. It could be, I’ve always thought, that they recognize in him the very qualities which they abhor in themselves; he mirrors the sentiments in the shows that they watch and music that they listen to. Perhaps he is all-too familiar to them. Or, as I also suspect, the depth of their emotions hasn’t quite reached the levels of soul-sickness that Catullus displays—they have yet, luckily, to get their little hearts broken like our dear poet. Whatever the reasons for their distaste, I will give it my best try, once again, to teach this poem and elicit a bit of tenderness for Catullus’s lost love.
I offer here my own translation of lines 10-26 of Carmen 76, my favorite piece of the poem:
But why should you crucify yourself any longer?
Why don’t you settle your mind and walk away
from this and, even if the universe is against you,
stop being so wretched. It is difficult to put aside
a long love affair; it is, indeed, very difficult; but
put it aside by whatever means necessary. This will be your
only salvation, and you must conquer this: You need to do
this whether you think it is possible or not. Oh gods, if
there is any way for you to show mercy, and if you’ve
ever brought a man relief on his deathbed, then look
down on me who is at this moment so wretched, and if
I have lived a decent life then relieve me of this
plague and this ruin. What a lethargy
has slithered into every part of my being and
has expunged every ounce of happiness from my heart.
And I do not ask what I know is impossible, that
she love me in return or that she decide to be faithful;
but I want to be well again and put aside this soul-sickness.
Grant me this, oh gods, in answer to my prayer.
I decided to translate the Latin morbum (usually rendered as “sickness”) in the penultimate line as “soul-sickness” because it captures so well the complete misery that Catullus feels at the loss of this relationship. I was reading Daniel Deronda this weekend and the female protagonist of Eliot’s novel rejects a kind, loving, and very eager young suitor named Rex. When his love is not returned, this twenty year-old decides that he can no longer continue his studies at Oxford and asks his father for permission to run away to the Canadian colonies where he can live off the land in an attempt to get over his sorrows. When Rex’s father objects to this ridiculous plan and tells his son that love has softened his brain and good sense Eliot writes of him: “What could Rex say? Inwardly he was in a state of rebellion but he had no arguments to meet his father’s; and while he was feeling, in spite of anything that might be said, that he should like to go off to “the colonies” tomorrow, it lay in a deep fold of his consciousness that he ought to feel—if he had been a better fellow he would have felt—more about his old ties. This is the sort of faith we live by in our soul-sickness.”
Rex and Catullus, eager, intense, passionate young lovers, are suffering from the same affliction. I like to think that Catullus would approve of me borrowing Eliot’s phrase, “soul-sickness” to describe his condition. Catullus does get over Lesbia—he runs off to the colonies, which in his case is Bithynia in Asia Minor and the time away proves to be the best cure for him. I hope that Rex’s fate in Eliot’s narrative is similar.
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Interesting, there could indeed be both a bit of a lack of experience and classic Jungian ‘shadow’ issues / projection; could also simply be that his sentiment is too foreign, too over-the-top…who knows? That mystery aside, what do you think of Josephine Balmer’s translations of Catullus (published by Bloodaxe)?
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I haven’t read Balmer’s translations of Catullus.
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Lovely lines Melissa and thank you for sharing your translation with us. I think soul-sickness is a wonderful way to put it – an ailment which is not physical but is just as debilitating as any illness.
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Thanks so much, Karen. I’m glad you enjoyed the lines! It is such a deeply sad poem.
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I too enjoyed your sensitive translation. Good idea to pair Eliot’s usage – contexts support it. I looked up ‘soul-sickness’ in OED online; the second definition (it’s more common as an adj., the form defined here) is usually literary: Sick at heart; suffering from spiritual unease or distress; deeply dejected or depressed. Among the most recent citations, both relating to Victorian sensibilities: 1873 T. Hardy Pair of Blue Eyes III. viii. 167 Knight, soul-sick and weary of his life, did not arouse himself to utter a word in reply; 1992 A. S. Byatt Angels & Insects 174 She was back in the world but not of the world, she was soul-sick and dwelt in shadows. As for the noun, here are the last two citations: 1907 E. von Arnim Fräulein Schmidt xxvii. 73 You are going through one of those tiresome soul-sicknesses that periodically overtake the too comfortable.
2004 S. M. Wolfe Unveiling i. 13 Depression, some called it… Rachel knew it as soulsickness—an old, familiar acquaintance.
So: these imply spiritual or psychological states. I suppose ‘heart-sickness’ might be more…romantic-literary? But soul-sickness resonates more profoundly. And of course the latin gave us our adj. ‘morbid’, which sets off another whole set of connotations, clinical, literary and psychological…
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Thanks so much for this, Simon! I love the uses the OED cites and they certainly align with what Catullus is describing.
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“Anima affliction”–technically the first word wouldn’t be a translation from latin.
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I loved reading your words here, and your translation – it took my right back to my own struggles with Catullus at O-level back in 1986-87! Of course, we were hampered by having a VERY prim Latin teacher – we had two classes in our year, so we used to have to go to Mr Neville’s students to find out what the rude bits actually said!
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Thanks so much! My students just Google the naughty bits now. There’s no way of keeping it from them!
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I follow your blog (always loved the name) and I believe you follow mine: LEAVE ME ALONE I AM READING AND REVIEWING @https://books6259.wordpress.com/. I just found you on Book Sirens. I am a bit confused I thought this was another way to get free books for an honest review similar to NetGalley and Edelweiss. Can you help me figure out Book Sirens? Many thanks.
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I don’t think I’ve ever signed up for book sirens. I have been contacted by authors who have seen my blog listed there. So I imagine it’s a site where your blog is listed and authors contact you for a review? I’m not exactly sure so I would suggest contacting the site moderators.
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Thanks. I have a feeling you are correct.
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Not knowing you wrote this I wrote my own commentary on Catullus 76.
See the website. There isn’t a poem that comes close to 76. And yet there’s scarcely an image in sight
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It’s one of my favorites. The pain and heartache are palpable. I will take a look at your post. Thank you.
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