William Butler Yeats
Bald heads, forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
All shuffle there, all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk their way?
16.
Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi...
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Andrew: A Challenge
I. Hendecsyllables
This is Cattullus’ name for the line of eleven syllables that he uses in no less than forty of the epigrams I-LX. The first line of his libellus represents its most usual form, opening with a spondee, i.e. two long syllables; the last syllable of the line in this and the other metres he uses can be indifferently long or short.
Cui do|no lepidum|nouum|libellum?
12.
“Return my napkin then or expect
Three hundred hendecasyllables”
2 comments:
I'll fuck you both right up the ass,
Gay Furius, Aurelius
For saying I'm not chaste, what brass!
Because my poems arent. Thus
You miss the point; my poetry
Is simply not the same as me.
But all my verses really owe
Their wit and charm and all their salt
To spicy, merry, sexy flow
Of words that even stir up halt
And hairy granddads--no young crew--
Whose stiffened loins can hardly screw.
Well, read my poems: If your brass
Insists my verse makes me like you,
I'll fuck you both right up the ass.
That's the translation I like that I was talking about. It's by Reney Myers and Robert J. Ormsby.
Also, I don't think hendecasyllables will work very will in English. Length of syllables isn't the best way to establish rhythm for our language. You could switch it to stresses and try. Like, a spondee for us would be two stresses rather than to long syllables. But maybe you already know that...
In the words of Brandt, “No dude, that did not occur to us.” Andrew probably doesn’t know the difference either though, so he’ll write it out with stresses and not length too. I like how Ovid and Catullus (and maybe others) threaten people with poetry. In the Amores Ovid tells girls that he does not have money, but he can immortalize them in poetry, which is better. There are the three translations I have. You would think that they were all from a different poem
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bugger you and stuff your gobs,
Aurelius Kink and Poofter Furius,
For thinking me, because my verses
Are rather sissy, not quite decent.
For the true poet should be chaste
Himself, his verses need not be.
Indeed They've salt and charm then only
When rather sissy and not quite decent
And when they can excite an itch
I don't say in boys but in those hairy
Victims of lumbar Sclerosis.
Because you've read of my x thousand
Kisses you doubt my virility?
I'll bugger you and stuff your Gobs.
Oxford World Classics (Guy Lee)
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Peciabo et irrumabo
Furius & Aurelius
twin sodomites
you have dared to deduce me from my poems
which are lascivious
which lack pudicity...
The devoted poet remains in his own fashion chaste
his poems not necessarily so:
they may well be
lascivious
lacking in pudicity
stimulants (indeed) to prurience
and not solely in boys
but those whose hirsute genitalia are not easily moved.
You read of those thousand kisses.
You deduced an effeminacy there.
You were wrong. Sodomites Furius & Aurelius
Pedicabo et irrumabo vos
Penguin Classics (my least favorite)
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Up your ass and in your mouth
Aurelius, you too Furius, you cocksuckers
calling me dirt because my poems
have naughty naughty words in them.
Just the poet has to be a boy scout
fellas, not his goddamn poems.
Anyway, look, they've got wit, sass
and sure they're lewd and lascivious
and can get somebody pretty hard up too.,
I mean not just young kids, but you hairy guys
who can barely get your stiff asses going
so just because you read about a lot of kisses
You want to put something nasty on me as a man?
Fuck you, up your ass and in your mouth.
Carl sesar's Translation(Mason & Lipscomb)
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