Catullus 51: Ille mi par esse deo uidetur, Ille, si fas est,

[Nooj]

okay, I should warn beforehand that I did take certain liberties with this translation. I just tried to translate it so that it sounded...'right' to my ears. If I butchered it too much, feel free to point it out.

Ille mi par esse deo uidetur,
Ille, si fas est, superare diuos,
Qui sedens aduersus identidem te
Spectat et audit

Dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
Eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, adspexi, nihil est super mi
[vocis in ore]

Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
Flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
Tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
Lumina nocte.

Otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
Otio exsultas nimiumque gestis.
Otium et reges prius et beatas
Perdidit urbes.

Like a God he seems to me
Better than the Gods, if it is right to say so.
That man who is sitting opposite you, facing you
watching and listening everyday to your warm laugh

from my devastated self
its sweetness steals each of my senses:
Because Lesbia, as soon as I lay my eyes on you
there is no voice left in my throat.

More than that, my tongue is frozen,
a delicate fire trickles down through my body
my ears hear only their ringing,
by two-fold night my eyes are darkened.

Idleness, Catullus, is your problem.
You run wild in idleness and you indulge too much.
Idleness has laid waste to kings and splendid cities.

***
I puzzled over how to translate sonitu suopte/tintinant aures for a long time and what Catullus meant by 'my ears ring with their own sound', but I think he meant that 'my ears ring with their own sound as opposed to hearing any other sound', and so from there I translated it as 'my ears hear only their ringing'. Otium in the last stanza confuses me - does it have the sense here of 'Loving you from a distance/my love stupor is going to ruin me'?

 

[Cato]

Re: catullus 51

You are right to question the sense-break of the final stanza. Many commentators (myself included) believe this is a copyist's mistake, and that this is part of some other poem accidentally added here. Remember, Catullus survives in only one manuscript, and that itself was copied before the original was lost.

Today, because of the imagist trend in modern poetry, the break in sense is less noticeable (many modern poems jump from subject to subject and leave the reader to make the implied connection). One can choose to interpret Catullus as a very early imagist, but I'm not sure the bulk of his work justifies that opinion.