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but my tongue is paralysed, a subtle flame
course through my limbs, with sound self-caused
my two ears ring, and my eyes are
covered in darkness. |
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Idleness, Catullus, is your trouble;
idleness is what delights you and moves you to passion;
idleness has proved ere now the ruin of kings and
prosperous cities. (Trans. G. Goold). |
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It was this self-address that persuaded Veyne37 that we should read the 'I' in Catullus like that of a pop-singer rather than an ego of anguished sincerity: 'Catullus calls to himself under the name Catullus, but this is just a fiction, for after all, we really do not address ourselves by name and say to ourselves, "Listen, Veyne, stop this foolishness." Catullus took his own name, Catullus, as his stage name.' Certainly this self-address marks a strong break in the last stanza, a break so strong, indeed, that many have thought of it as a separate fragment: and the translation of the previous stanza has been manipulated to give it a strong closural force. Where Sappho had talked merely of not seeing, Catullus talks more emphatically of his eyes being covered in night,38 a closural allusion which crams two nouns into the final Adonean and which gains added force from the hints of fainting and even death generated from the presence of Sappho's untranslated fourth stanza,39 and Lucretius' contemporary use of it in DRN 3.1528: |
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my tongue has snapped, at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh, I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum, sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over, I am greener than grass, and it seems to me that I am little short of dying. |
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37 Veyne (1988) 174. |
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38 It is difficult to choose between the MSS gemina . . . nocte and Schrader's aures geminae printed by Goold. Certainly aures geminae is a familiar iunctura, but the collocation with gemina might elegantly suggest the familiar phrase without saying it, and the bold hypallage gemina . . . nocte is more interesting. On the other hand, the simple teguntur lumina nocte has a stronger closural force as unqualified 'categorical assertion'; two short and simple cola frame two lengthier ones. |
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39 Cf. Immisch (1933) 10, Lefèvre (1988) 3278. |
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