--- title: "Catullus 85 in eleven words" author: "Nefeli Aslanidou (@marginalia)" date: 2025-11-11T08:33:38.256Z updated: 2025-11-11T08:33:38.256Z canonical: "https://jot.place/@marginalia/catullus-85-in-eleven-words" description: "Fourteen words, eight of them verbs, not a single noun. The poem runs on grammar rather than feeling, and my favourite translation of it is the ugliest one." tags: - "close-reading" - "latin" - "primary-sources" - "rome" - "translation" --- # Catullus 85 in eleven words For eleven years I told classes that this poem was eleven words long. It is fourteen. Ioanna counted them out loud last October, on her fingers, slowly, the way you count when you want the teacher to hear each one. I have left the wrong number in the title. I would rather be caught than tidy. > Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. > nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask how I manage it. I do not know, but I feel it being done, and I am on the cross. That "how" is a contested choice and I defend it at the bottom. The last four words are the argument of everything above them. ## What is not here No nouns. Go and look: not one noun in fourteen words, and no adjectives either, which for a Latin love poem is close to a stunt. Eight of the fourteen words are verbs; the other six are three conjunctions, a pronoun, an interrogative and one adverb. Nobody is named. Lesbia is not here. No fire, no wound, no honey, none of the furniture the elegists build with. The poem cannot be working through images, because it has none until the last word. It works through morphology, which is an unfashionable thing to say about a love poem and I think it is flatly true. ## The engine *Odi et amo*, not *odi sed amo*. A boy in my second year class once wrote "I hate but I love" and I put a tick beside it before I rubbed the tick out, because "but" is what every reader brings to this poem and Catullus declined it. *Sed* would set the two verbs against each other and let one win. *Et* lays them side by side like two facts about the weather. The flatness is the scandal. They are not even the same shape. *Amo* is an ordinary present. *Odi* is a perfect doing a present's work,[^1] so line one reads closer to "I have come to hate, and I love": the hatred finished, the love still running. Latin joins those with one conjunction and no seam shows. Then *faciam*: present subjunctive in an indirect question after *requiris*, and here is the pedantry I cannot keep down. The form is identical to the future indicative. On the page it is "I would do it" and "I shall do it" at the same instant, and only the syntax decides. Beginners read it as a future, get a red mark, and are right about the noise it makes. Then the switch, which is the best thing in the couplet. *Faciam* is active: for one line the poem concedes he might be the one doing this. *Fieri* is the passive infinitive of the same verb. Between line one and line two he stops being the subject of his own condition. He is not doing it; it is being done. The grammar book calls this voice, which is a cold word for the most violent event in the poem. ## Excrucior *Ex* plus *crucio*, and *crucio* comes from *crux*. Translators reach for torment, torture, racked. They are not wrong, exactly. *Crux* is a frame before it is a cross, and *cruciare* in this period means torture in general; Armand d'Angour says so in a footnote, and since I am about to disagree with his article I want that on the record first. But this is the poet who wrote, about stealing a kiss from Iuventius and being made to pay for it, *suffixum in summa me memini esse cruce* (99.4): I remember being nailed up at the top of the cross. He reaches for the object when he wants it, and he wanted it in the poem next door. Meanwhile *excrucior* by itself is not solemn at all. It is Plautine. Lewis and Short send you to the *Cistellaria*, the *Trinummus* and the *Epidicus* for the first person passive, where it is what a slave says about waiting or a young man says about a girl who is late. So the word arrives carrying an instrument of execution and a comic exaggeration in the same five syllables, and it arrives last, and English has nothing that is both at once. @thirdculture/the-words-i-cannot-say-in-english covers the general case. This is a small vicious instance: pick "crucified" and you sound melodramatic, pick "in torment" and you sound like a discharge note. :::info The full stop after *amo* is not Catullus, and neither is the comma after *faciam*. One standard text prints a full stop and a comma; d'Angour prints a semicolon and nothing. All of it descends from copies of one manuscript that surfaced in Verona around 1300 and was then lost. ::: ## Five people trying | Translator | Version | Cost | | --- | --- | --- | | Richard Lovelace, 1617 to 1657 | "I hate and love; would'st thou the reason know? / I know not, but I burn, and feel it so." | Imports the burning of poem 72. Passive gone. | | F. W. Cornish, Loeb, 1912 | "I hate and love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask? / I know not, but I feel it, and I am in torment." | Taught English schools this poem for a century. No body in it anywhere. | | James Michie, 1969 | "I hate and love. If you ask me to explain / The contradiction / I can't, but I can feel it, and the pain / Is crucifixion." | Fourteen words inflated into a rhymed contraption. Dodges *quare*. Keeps the cross. | | Peter Green, 2005 | "I hate and love. You wonder, perhaps, why I do that? / I have no idea. I just feel it. I am crucified." | "I have no idea" is the exact register of *nescio*. Four sentences for two clauses, so the compression is spent. | | Armand d'Angour, 2019 | "I hate and love; perhaps you ask how both of these I do. / I don't know: I just feel it, and it's tearing me in two." | Wins the argument about *quare*, pays with an inversion nobody has said aloud since about 1890. | All five are printed together in d'Angour's article in *Philologia Classica* 14.1 (2019), which is where I got them. My favourite is Michie's and it is the worst writing in the table. The rhyme clangs. "The contradiction" is a phrase he needed for the sound. And then the last line does the one thing none of the others manage, which is hurt. "Is crucifixion" is not a good translation of *excrucior*, and it is the only line in that column that has ever made a sixteen year old in my room go quiet. ## About that quare D'Angour argues that *quare* here means "how" and not "why": an exchange in Terence's *Eunuchus* where *qua re* plainly means "by what means", the oddity of answering "why" with *nescio* when poems 72 and 75 explain exactly why, and Martial 1.32, *nec possum dicere quare*, teaching later readers the wrong sense. I think he is probably right and I distrust how much I enjoy it. "How" makes the poem tidy: the paradox becomes a puzzle, the puzzle gets an honest shrug, the shrug gets a cross. Arguments that make Catullus tidier have a poor record. I teach it as "how" anyway. Not because anything is settled, but because when I say "how do you manage it" the fifteen year olds have the poem in four seconds, and when I say "why do you do it" they explain to me, kindly and at length, that people are complicated. @nightshift/the-word-resilience-has-been-taken-from-us is about a word rubbed smooth by people who meant well. *Excrucior* has been rubbed smooth the same way, down into "torment", down into a mood. It is a machine for killing people, in the first person, in the present tense, and the man on it cannot get down. [^1]: *odi, odisse*, one of that small awkward tribe with *memini* and *novi* whose perfect does a present's job. Lewis and Short record later attempts at a regular present (*odis*, *odiant*, *odiebant*), which tells you that scribes found the missing form as irritating as my students do.