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titillation. In love this contrast of fiction and human feeling is untenable. Love cannot help but be a fiction, but it is a fiction by which we live: and it is this role as a supreme fiction which makes it a paradigm for human culture in general.35 You do not have to read ei mihi in Propertius 2.28. 62 if you want to be moved by sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum: you do not have to choose between humour and pathos. But rather than explore the well-worn path of the elegists' irony, I want to return to an example of lover's irony that I have touched on before,36 Catullus 51, and to use it to enable me to move from the subject of closural Romantic Irony to more pervasive self-reflexivity. |
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In poem 51, Catullus translates Sappho Fr. 31 LP but then veers away at the end to address himself: |
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Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit |
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dulce ridentem, misero quod omnes
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
<vocis in ore> |
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lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures geminae, teguntur
lumina nocte. |
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otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes. |
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He seems to me the equal of a god,
he seems, if that may be, the gods' superior,
who sits face to face with you and again and again
watches and hears you |
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sweetly laughing, an experience which robs me
poor wretch, of all my senses; for the moment I set
eyes on you, Lesbia, there remains not a whisper
<of voice on my lips>, |
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35 As brilliantly argued in connection with Ovid's Ars Amatoria by Myerowitz (1985). |
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36 Fowler (1989) 11213. |
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