Is the Catullus Fragment in Invention of Love an Actual Housman Translation?

[Theron Mann]

In his play _The Invention of Love_, Tom Stoppard has A.E. Housman
translate a portion of Catullus V as:

Suns can set and rise again: when our brief light
is gone we sleep the sleep of perpetual night.
Give me a thousand kisses, and then a hundred more,
and then another thousand, and add five score

Does anyone know whether the translation is actual Housman (or,
presumably, Stoppard), and, if it's real, where I can find the rest of
it?

[Johannes Patruus]

"Theron Mann" <scary_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:6bd0585c.03070...@posting.google.com...

In this PDF, the translation is attributed to Pollard:
http://www.guthrietheater.org/pdf/invention.pdf
whom one presumes to be the Alfred William Pollard (1859-1944) referred to
elsewhere in the document.

I was unable to locate any further translation-text.

However, I commend to you Thomas Campion's rendition of your first two
lines, which runs as follows:

Heaven's great lamps do dive
Into their west, and straight again revive,
But soon as once set is our little light,
Then must we sleep one ever-during night.

Johannes

[Francis A. Miniter]

Hi Theron,

The poem is No. 5 in the edition of Catullus edited by Elmer Merrill
(Harvard UP 1893) (but republished regularly for use in colleges as the
definitive text of Catullus. In college back in the late 60s, I lost a
bet with a friend and had to memorize the poem in Latin. It goes:

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
Rumoresque senum severiorum
Omnes unius aestimemus assis.
Soles occidere et redire possunt:
Nobis, cum semel occideit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
Dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
Deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum,
Dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
Conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
Aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
Cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

There is not enough room on the internet to say everything that could be
said about this poem. It may be one of the greatest poems ever written.
Elision (words ending in vowels followed by words beginning with vowels
and the vowels run together) is rampant, liquid consonants abound. Read
aloud, it is truly beautiful. Practice. It is well worth the effort.
And why the elision and the liquids? Because it is a poem of
seduction, of intercourse, of sexual climax and, finally, of the sigh
that follows orgasm. "Lesbia" is the nickname that Catulllus gave to
the married woman he was in love with. It refers to the poet Sappho who
lived on the island of Lesbos. Of course, we get the word "lesbian"
from some interpretations of the poetry of Sappho.

The seduction ends with the long slow line "Nox est perpetua una
dormienda". The love making begins with the kisses, rises to a climax
with the exploding "b"s in "Conturbabimus illa" and coasts to a close in
the last two lines.

My own translation, which owes some phrasing to various translations I
read decades ago is the following:

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,
And the rumors of puritanical patriarchs
Let us value altogether as a penny.
Suns can rise and set over and over:
For us, when once our brief light goes out,
Night is one perpetual sleeping.
So give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
Then another thousand, then a second hundred,
Then again a thousand, and another hundred,
Then, when many thousands of kisses have we made,
Let us blast the count, so even we don't know it,
Lest some evil doer could cast a spell
knowing the number of kisses.

Francis A. Miniter

[Johannes Patruus]

"Francis A. Miniter" <min...@attglobal.net> wrote in message
news:3F04F14F...@attglobal.net...

> Hi Theron,
>
> The poem is No. 5 in the edition of Catullus edited by Elmer Merrill
> (Harvard UP 1893) (but republished regularly for use in colleges as the
> definitive text of Catullus. In college back in the late 60s, I lost a
> bet with a friend and had to memorize the poem in Latin. It goes:
>
> Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
> Rumoresque senum severiorum
> Omnes unius aestimemus assis.
> Soles occidere et redire possunt:
> Nobis, cum semel occideit brevis lux,
> Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
> Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
> Dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
> Deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum,
> Dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
> Conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
> Aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
> Cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

You can hear it recited in Latin and English by Professors Tarrant and
Clausen from this page:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~classics/poetry_and_prose/tarrant.catul.5.html

Johannes

[William C Waterhouse]

In article <6bd0585c.03070...@posting.google.com>,

It doesn't seem to be in the big Oxford _The Poems of A. E. Housman_,
so almost certainly it isn't by Housman. I would not be at all surprised
if Stoppard wrote it.

William C. Waterhouse
Penn State