Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

LESBIA, SIRMIO, CALVUS
o uenusta Sirmio: uenustus belongs to the same range of feeling as ocellus
(2 ocelle). Only one other writer uses both these words of lovely places, Cicero —
of his villas, Att. 16.6.2 ocellos Italiae, of die sea-shore at Astura (?), Att. 15.16b. 1
kaec loca uenusta. (On the language of Catullus in his polymetric poems the
most informative 'commentator' by far is Cicero in his letters.) But the vocative
here is unique, and all but personifies Sirmio. The tone is further heightened by
the second apostrophe o Lydiae lacus undae; an example of enallage or 'transferred
epithet', a figure appropriate to the highest style of poetry. Earlier critics
therefore, persuaded that Catullus should be simpler in his shorter poems,
wished to rid die line both of its figure and its too erudite allusion (by emendation,
limpidi, lucidae, or the like): plainly they were reading, or fancied diey
were, a quite different poem.
85
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
/ hate and love. Why do that, perhaps you ask. I don't know, but I feel it happen and
am tormented.
The padios of ordinary speech: fourteen words, a poem. The reader may be
strangely moved, and perhaps ask why. There is no ornament of language, no
learned allusion, no very striking word. For too much, probably, has been
made of excrucior in this context: while excrucior can signify the deepest distress,
it is Plautine and colloquial, like discrucior in 66.76 or Plaut. Cos. 276 ego
discrucior miser amore ' I am wretchedly distracted by love'; the metaphor is
scarcely felt. The whole effect of a poem only two lines long, a couplet, must
depend rather, or as well, upon the compression and exactness of its form. The
hexameter is active in sense (faciam), the pentameter passive (fieri); die initial
phrase of die hexameter (od(i) et amd) is balanced by the final phrase of the
pentameter (senti(o) et excrucior); and the pentameter is so articulated diat a
rhydimic emphasis falls on nescio and sentio: I don't know, I feel. The poem
defines not so much the feeling as the fact of feeling.
109
Iucundum, mea uita, mihi proponis amorem
hunc nostrum inter nos perpetuumque fore.
di magni, facite ut uere promittere possit,
atque id sincere dicat et ex animo,
ut liceat nobis tota perducere uita
aetcrnum hoc sanctac foedus amicitiae.
You promise me, my life, that this love of ours will be pleasant, and will endure. Great
gods, make her able to promise truly, and say this sincerely and from her heart, so that
we may extend, our whole life through, this everlasting compact of sacred friendship.
203
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