venuti

90 The Translator’s Invisibilitysexual references, the erotic pleasure signified by “sweetly confus’d”and the experienced sexuality hinted in “various” kinds of “kisses.”Nott’s second stanza also revises the Latin (by shifting from “give” to“receive”), creating the rakish image of the male lover passivelyreceiving Lesbia’s kisses and thus exaggerating, somewhat comically,the male fantasy of female sexual aggressiveness in Catullus’s text.Nott’s masculinist translation is a humorous, slightly prurient, and notentirely felicitous celebration of the lovers’ youth and sexuality againstage and moral strictness. Its sexual frankness conflicts with Lamb’smore decorous version, in which the lovers are given to shameful“blushing”:Love, my Lesbia, while we live;Value all the cross adviceThat the surly greybeards giveAt a single farthing’s price.Suns that set again may rise;We, when once our fleeting light,Once our day in darkness dies,Sleep in one eternal night.Give me kisses thousand-fold,Add to them a hundred more;Other thousands still be toldOther hundreds o’er and o’er.But, with thousands when we burn,Mix, confuse the sums at last,That we may not blushing learnAll that have between us past.None shall know to what amountEnvy’s due for so much bliss;None—for none shall ever countAll the kisses we will kiss.(Lamb 1821:I, 12–13)Compared to Nott’s, Lamb’s translation is distinguished by an extremefluency: the quatrains unwind quickly, driven by a smoothly variedtrochaic meter, and they parcel out the meaning in precise syntactical