Jax Gottschalch

on translating Catullus

This poem is an elegy for the poet's brother, who has died far away from Rome. It differs starkly in tone from the rest of Catullus's corpus, and masterfully and tragically explores the vacuum left by a loved one's passing, and the futility of funeral rites to truly reconcile this grief and to service the dead. It has been my intention to display the futility, as many translators have not focused on rendering this powerful, human aspect of the mythologized poem by way of employing an idiomatic, personal attitude. For instance, I have added the English exhortation "God" to the line accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu – literally “Take [these rites] laden with many fraternal tears” – or I have broken the mostly pentametric translation (keeping in line with Catullus’s formal poem) to demonstrate the author’s overwhelming emotion in “Death’s decorations. / You are dead, and I have come”. Regarding my unorthodox punctuation, I have chosen to render the stacking of adverbs in nunc tamen interea – literally “now however meanwhile” – as a grief-filled loss of composure. Moreover, I have rendered frater, ave atque vale – literally “Brother, hail and be strong” – which some scholars believe was a sort of stock phrase in funeral rites, as another instance of Catullus going through the motions of the rites, only for these motions to finally break. This differs from the traditional translation of a formal sendoff, which I do not believe matches the tone of the rest of the poem.