Catullus #85

I read this poem in AP Latin senior year of high school. I am posting it now (have I before?) because there's been a lot of poetry lately (on this blog and in this life) and I wanted to share some real oldies, but goodies. Just a snippet of a poem - but incredibly famous, perhaps because of its terseness.

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

Now this may be in Latin (and 12th grade Latin at that), but this here is not even the original as it was written. In addition to having little to no word order, Latin also of course had no punctuation, and believe it or not, no interword spaces (until much later). In place of those systems, Latin employed a rigorous declension system and some loose syntactic guidelines (such as the verb usually coming at the end of the sentence, or phrase). Latin poetry, like many other traditions, was furthermore governed by tight metrical structures (each type of meter with its own particular traditional and cultural connotations), which not only strictly limited word choice and placement (because of Latin's use of long and short syllables, somewhat akin to syllable stress in English), but also determined the overall rhythm and "line breaks" of the poem. Scansion was not just a limitation, however; it in fact added a level of signification which was more structured and visible than the individualized rhythms and breaks of modernist English poetry to which it could conceivably lay claim to grandfathering.

ODIETAMOQUAREIDFACIAMFORTASSEREQUIRIS
NESCIOSEDFIERISENTIOETEXCRUCIOR

Odi (o-dee) et amo (ah-moe). Quare (kua-ray) id faciam (fa-kee-am) fortasse (for-tas-say) requiris (re-kui-rees).
Nescio (nes-kee-o), sed fieri (fee-eh-ree) sentio (sen-tee-o), et excrucior (ex-kru-kee-or).

Translation word by word:
I-hate and I-love. How this I-do perhaps you-ask.
I-know-not, but done I-feel, and I-am-excruciated (tortured to death: "excrucior" in fact has no English equivalent. It connotes ultimate agony. It is derived from crux, "cross" and has the sense of being crucified, but this is 75 years before Christ).

General translation:
I hate and I love. How do I do this, perhaps you ask?
I know not, but I feel it done, and I am tortured.

Compare the words "odi et amo" with the last three words "sentio et excrucior." "I hate and I love"'..."I feel and I am tortured." This poem has an overall chiastic structure. It couples these juxtaposition-statements at the beginning and the end, and between those, in the middle, it couples the words "faciam fortasse requiris" with "nescio sed fieri": "I do perhaps you ask"..."I know not but it is done." To extrapolate on this idea of the chiasmus further, "odi" can be coupled with "excrucior" (I hate and am tortured), and between those can be coupled "amo" and "sentio" (I love and feel), and then between those come "faciam" and "fieri" (I do and it is done), and finally between those are "requiris" and "nescio" (you ask and I do not know).

Or take the line, "Quare id faciam fortasse requiris." The alternating assonance here of both the hard "keh" and the grinding "r" sounds with the soft "f" and "s" sounds reiterates the dual sentiment of the poem itself. This assonance is then repeated in the reply to the question: "nescio." It again continues, into the next phrase, which is full of softness and runs off the tongue beautifully: "sed fieri sentio." Yet from this soothing sonorousness, we are soon led by the "et" (and) into the final, and incredibly forceful word, "excrucior", where the "keh" sound is repeated three times, and the "r" sound twice. It might also be important to note here that the "r" ending of "excrucior" denotes the passivity of the verb. And of course, besides being the kicker in this game of mouth-sounds, and being the final word in the poem itself, "excrucior" also stands out because of its unique four syllables. It is in fact an almost excruciating word to get through, which is exactly the point.

It is a poem toying (toying may be too light of a word) with the theme of irreconcilable internal contrasts: hate, love, activity (embodied in the verbs of the first line), passivity (embodied in the verbs of the second), feeling, pain. In my short little humble analysis of these two huge lines, I did not even get to things like meter and rhythm, etymology of the words other than excrucior, intraline syntactic structures, other overarching syntatic structures such as the possibility of an ABAB structure in addition to the chiasmatic one (i.e. I hate/I do not know... you ask/I am tortured), nor the context of this poem within Catullus' works - many of which are focused on "his" relationship problems with a specific girl (or at least a feminine figure). Nor did I mention Catullus' ties to Sappho (who may in part play the figure of the girl).

I hope you guys like this poem as much as I do. I'll probably post another Catullus one soon with another short analysis.