Catullus (above left) is the best translator of Sappho (right), managing to create both a sense of the original and something that stands as an original poem on its own.

Catullus was (according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary) “doctus,” learned, “but he used doctrina in his own way.” He was an original mind, and a real wit who knew how to insult people. Intelligence and skill are the soul of wit, and one marvels at the crystalline economy of words at which Catullus is truly unsurpassed.

Take Catullus 85,

Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior

I hate and I love, why do I do this you may ask.
I don’t know but I feel it and am on the cross

Catullus uses the technique of elision, running words together for effect, to merge the words hate and love into one, creating an implicit sense of the tension between two opposing forces that are tearing one apart. He then runs the sound of senti-et excrucior together, as though feeling and pain were inextricably linked.He ends the couplet with a word he has made up excrucior/excruciate (a word that is so apt it has been used ever since). Catullus uses it as sort of a joke, a word-play that describes what he is doing: He is not merely complaining about suffering in love. He is creating a classic Greek poetic structure and a word that points to what it is: ex crux, a cross, a chiasmus.

That Catullus was a highly trained and brilliant writer first, and a lover second, is indicated by the fact that he called his girlfriend Lesbia in a nod to Sappho, a famous poet who had lived on the island of Lesbos six hundred years before he was born.

In his memoir Speak Memory Nabokov describes the desired amorata of a young man from an aristocratic family as a rich older woman whose husband is preoccupied with affairs of state. Lesbia was just such a person, and she was only available to Catullus, one of her many lovers, from time to time.

Thus Catullus writes,

Caeli, Lesbia nostra,
Lesbia illa, illa Lesbia
Quam Catullus unam plus quam se atque suos amavit,
Nunc in quadriviis et angiportis
Glubit magnanimis Remi nepotis

Caelus, our Lesbia,
Lesbia this, this Lesbia,
Whom Catullus loved more than himself and his own,
Now in alleys and doorways
Strips for the rich descendants of Rome

(There is much scholarly speculation about Catullus’s intended meaning of glubit- which means to peel)

That Sappho was sapphic would have been news to Catullus. Sappho wrote songs to be performed at weddings, in which the focus was naturally the bride who moved like the moon among stars, or was like the first hyacinth of spring, smashed into the snow by the shepherds with their feet.

Catullus was not a professional writer like Sappho. He was an intellectual who belonged to the urban society of his day. He came from a rich family. His father entertained Caesar. He had, as he says more than once, too much free time. Until he died at the age of thirty (apparently by his own hand), he wrote for himself. Catullus begins his little book, which contains some of the finest poetry ever written in any language, with the phrase

To whom shall I give this charming little book…

It is difficult to capture the sense, beauty and complexity of these two great masters in another language, (although Ben Johnson’s ’tis with us perpetual night is a good call for perpetua una dormienda). Catullus (51) is the best translator of Sappho (31), managing to create both a sense of the original and something that stands as an original poem on its own. Both poems are filled with tactile words and phrases that closely capture the physical response of falling in love. Catullus, typically making up words, uses: tintin/tinnitus– my ear’s ring, for Sappho’s epirrombeisi (as though the ears were full of bees). Sappho has wonderful lines like greener than grass am I. She uses the Greek words sick, cold, and troma, trembling. Catullus has flamma demanat– flame descends my limbs, for Sappho’s lepton d’autika xro pur, a slender flame runs under my skin. Sappho has glossa eage (my tongue breaks), Catullus, lingua sed torpet (my tongue stiffens).

The best translation of this poem around today was written by 21 year old Jackie DeShannon in 1963 and recorded by Bruce Springsteen in 1975, Every Time That You Walk in the Room. Deshannon (one of the great songwriters of her time, who wrote Needles and Pins in her teens) unknowingly captures the classic verses, and the force, delight and excitement of the actual writing of Catullus and Sappho. DeShannon (singing it in this YouTube clip) may have been around Sappho’s age when Sappho wrote the original:

Catullus 51

Ille mi par esse deo videtur

Ille si fas est superare divos

qui sedens adversus identitendem

spectat et audit

Dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis

Eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,

Lesbia, aspexi, 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…

(etc.)

He seems to me to be equal to the gods, to surpass the gods, who sits opposite you and sees and hears you sweetly laughing- for it tears the sense away from poor me; as soon as I see you, Lesbia, nothing is left of the voice in my mouth; my tongue stiffens, a slender flame runs down my limbs, my ears ring with their own sound, both eyes are covered with night. Too much free time is your problem, Catullus…

Sappho 31:

Phainetai moi kenos isos theoisin
Emmen oner, ottis enentios toi
Isdanei kai plasion adu phoneisas
Upakouei
Kai gelaias imeroen, to me manKardian en stetheian eptoaisen-
Os gar es s’ido broxe, os me phonais’Oud’ev et eikei
All akan men glossa eage,
Lepton d’autika xro pur
Upadedromeken.
Oppatessi d’oud’ en oremm’
Epirrombeisi d’akouai,
Ekade m’idros
Psuxros kakxetai,
Tromos de paisan agrei,
Xlorotera de poias
Emmi, tethnaken d’oligo Pideues
Phanaim’ em autai
That one seems to me to be equal to the gods who sits opposite you and hears you sweetly speaking and pleasantly laughing, for my heart flutters in my breast, as soon as I look at you I can’t speak, my tongue breaks and a slender flame runs under my skin, I cannot see with my eyes, my ears buzz, a cold sweat pours down and trembling seizes me, greener than grass am I and I seem near death

This essay appeared in Best American Poetry December 26, 2022

Author and poet Susan Brind Morrow is the recipient of the 2022 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Water, a book of Morrow’s poems, pen and ink drawings and watercolors, is the recipient of the Sowell Emerging Writers Prize 2022.