a door opens
three catullus translations for a new year
The Roman deity Janus was the god of doorways, transitions, and time. The Latin noun ianus itself means “a covered passage,” and the first month of the Roman calendar, now our January, was named Ianaurius (“month of Ianus”) after him.1 In art, Janus is depicted with two faces: one looking forward and one looking back. He presided over both the past and the present; both war and peace; both birth and death; both beginnings and endings. He had one foot in each world.
In the spirit of Janus and his gateways, something a little different for this newsletter: three Catullus poems centered around the duality of love and loss.
carmen three: the death of a sparrow
Lugete, O Veneres Cupidinesque,
et quantum est hominum venustiorum:
passer mortuus est meae puellae,
passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quem plus illa oculis suis amabat.
nam mellitus erat suamque norat
ipsam tam bene quam puella matrem,
nec sese a gremio illius movebat,
sed circumsiliens modo huc modo illuc
ad solam dominam usque pipiabat.
qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum
illuc, unde negant redire quemquam.
at vobis male sit, malae tenebrae
Orci, quae omnia bella devoratis:
tam bellum mihi passerem abstulistis
o factum male! o miselle passer!
tua nunc opera meae puella
flendo turgiduli rubent ocelli.2
Mourn, all you Venuses and Cupids,
and all the beautiful people there are.3
My girl’s sparrow is dead—
that sparrow, my girl’s darling,
whom she loved more than her own eyes.
He was honey-sweet to her, and he had known her
as well as a girl knows her own mother.
He never moved himself from her lap—
hopping around, now here now there,
he was constantly chirping to his mistress alone—
and now he goes along that dark journey
from which they deny anyone return.4
May it go badly for you, wretched shadows
of the the underworld, you who devour all beautiful things:
you have taken such a lovely sparrow from me.
O evil deed! O miserable little sparrow!
Now, because of your work, my girl’s swollen eyes
are red from weeping.
carmen ninety-six: the death of a friend’s beloved
Si quicquam mutis gratum acceptumque sepulcris
accidere a nostro, Calve, dolore potest,
quo desiderio veteres renovamus amores
atque olim missas flemus amicitias,
certe non tanto mors immatura dolori est
Quintiliae, quantum gaudet amore tuo.
If anything pleasant is able to come out of our grief, Calvus,5
and reach through silent tombs to touch the dead,
then with that longing we can reaffirm old loves
and weep for once-ended friendships.
Quintilia must feel pain at her untimely death
but she rejoices more in your love for her.6
carmen one hundred and one: the death of a brother
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.
Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum.
Heu7 miser indigne frater adempte mihi,
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
Carried through many nations and many seas8
I have arrived, brother, to these miserable funeral rites
so that I might give to you a last gift in death
and speak in vain to silent ashes.
Since Fortune has snatched you away from me—
alas, wretched brother! undeservedly taken from me!—
now accept these rituals, which the ancient customs of our ancestors
have handed down as a sad gift and a duty,
dripping with so many brotherly tears.
Now and forever, brother, hail and farewell.
coda: the death of a year
I’ve never really cared for the rituals surrounding new years: the celebrations, the resolutions, or the reflections. This year has been a been different, and in a bad way. Staring down the barrel of 2025, the only thing I’ve been able to do is think of all the things that I wish had gone differently in 2024, whether through choice or through sheer luck. There’s nothing to be done about luck, of course, and—although I love to grasp for some semblance of responsibility and control even for events already past—there’s nothing to be done about choice now, either. I often find myself playing logic games, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when I met a fork in the road and took the wrong path, as if I might be able to reach back through time and warn myself away. But I can’t—what’s past is past, and nothing in the present can touch it—and by searching for these loopholes in time, agonizing over decisions that felt right in the moment, I dig myself deeper into a pit of regret and despair. That, too, has been a theme: a growing sense of hopelessness, like a cloud looming over the horizon; the growing conviction that happiness is a thing that happens to other people and not to me. When I look towards the future, the only landmarks I can make out are bad ones, things to dread or brace myself for. I wish I could have hope; I wish I could find something to cling to, a sort of goalpost to drag myself towards. I really, really wish I could believe there are still good things waiting for me.
If I have one resolution to make, it’s to be present. Janus can only look towards the past and towards the future; he can never look directly in front of him. This has been my curse, too. I dwell on should have and could have; I sink hours, sometimes days, into spinning out what if scenarios that push my body into extended anxiety spirals. And to what end? I can’t change the past and I can’t predict the future, and twisting my brain into hypotheticals pulls me away from the things—sometimes, maybe, even the good things—happening in front of me. I can’t go back; I can’t see ahead—I can only grasp the moment I’m living in with both hands, and hold it tight.
May the upcoming months hold more kindness and less sadness for us all. More about translation to come in a future newsletter.
In the earliest Roman calendars, the year actually began with Martius, March. Regarding spelling: Classical Latin did not use the letter J in either written or spoken language. Without getting too into the linguistical weeds: if a Latin word begins with i, treat that sound as y, as in yellow.
Addressed to Catullus’s girlfriend and sometimes literary muse, Lesbia, this is a mock funeral dirge written in the style of a Greek epigram to a deceased pet (a well-established genre by Catullus’s time) but using the sort of grave, serious language that would normally only be used for the death of a hero: Catullus is clearly trying to cheer Lesbia up by being overly dramatic. There is still ongoing scholarly debate as to the identity of Lesbia—the name is a pseudonym—but she’s generally assumed to be Clodia Metelli, the older sister of Publius Clodius Pulcher (he of the Bona Dea festival crossdressing) and one of the most notorious women of the late Roman Republic.
ie, the “beautiful people” of Roman high society.
ie, death and the journey to the underworld.
If you read my December newsletter, this is the same Gaius Licinius Calvus who sent Catullus the book of bad poetry for a Saturnalia gift.
I have taken an unusual amount of liberty with this one; a more directly faithful translation of the Latin leads to an English poem that is not very smooth to read. I’d like to think that I’ve still maintained the vibes and underlying emotions that Catullus was going for.
You may recognize this word from the opening of Bastille’s song “Pompeii.” Yes, it’s really Latin.
Catullus’s brother died somewhere near Troy, far from his native Italy. It’s likely that Catullus stopped to visit the grave during his own journey to Bithynia (modern-day Turkey) in 57 BCE, and this poem is written in the style of a Hellenistic grave epigram.
Thank you for translating these.
I don’t know if this will help at all, but I try to remind myself that nothing is permanent. So yes, happiness goes away, but so does misery. I try to remember to enjoy the little things because goodness knows, the world is on fire at the moment.