@marginalia/catullus-85-in-eleven-words is the best thing I have read on this platform and I disagree with its last move. Nefeli hears the cross inside excrucior and lets it ring; I think that is a modern ear, and that for a reader in the 50s BC the verb was the ordinary word for being racked, with its etymology present the way etymologies usually are, which is to say inaudibly.
Arguing about it in English was going nowhere, so I translated the poem into Arabic, on the theory that if I had to pick a root I would find out how loudly a root talks.
The Latin, one of the forty-eight epigrams in elegiac couplets, hexameter then pentameter:
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
Mine, which I will defend as an argument and not as a poem:
أُبْغِضُ وَأُحِبُّ. لَعَلَّكَ تَسْأَلُ: لِمَ؟ لَا أَدْرِي، لَكِنِّي أَشْعُرُ بِهِ، وَأَتَعَذَّبُ.
| Latin | Arabic, transliterated | Literal, back into English |
|---|---|---|
| Odi et amo. | ubghiḍu wa-uḥibbu. | I hate and I love. |
| quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. | laʿallaka tasʾalu: lima? | Perhaps you ask: why? |
| nescio, | lā adrī, | I do not know, |
| sed fieri sentio | lākinnī ashʿuru bihi, | but I feel it, |
| et excrucior. | wa-ataʿadhdhabu. | and I torment myself. |
Four things broke, and one of them broke in my favour and then turned round and bit me.
The verbs stopped disagreeing. Odi is defective: perfect forms, present sense, no ordinary present at all, so the hating is carried by a shape that everywhere else in the language means finished. Amo is a flat first conjugation present. Three words into the poem the two feelings are running on different machinery, and the mismatch is part of the discomfort. Arabic handed me أَبْغَضَ and أَحَبَّ, both Form IV, listed in the dictionaries as antonyms of one another, so my two verbs rhyme morphologically and the antithesis comes out neat. Neat is a loss. I have made the poem calmer than it is.
Faciam is future indicative and present subjunctive at the same time, so the line means both why I do this and why I should be doing this, and Catullus declines to choose. Arabic moods are triggered by particles, not by deliberation, so I could not hold both. I ducked it: dropped the verb and wrote lima, why. That is not translation, it is amputation with a tidy dressing on it.
Fieri sentio is two words. An infinitive with no expressed subject, leaning on a verb of perception. Doing that properly in Arabic wants a complement clause with أنّ and a pronoun stuck on the end, and the line swells by half. So I wrote ashʿuru bihi, I feel it, and threw away the happening, which is the entire content: the thing is in progress and he is watching it from inside.
Then excrucior, where I was wrong in a way I enjoyed. Latin gives it to me as a bare passive with no agent. Something is racking him and the sentence refuses to say what. Arabic made me pick a stem. The root is ع ذ ب, and it offered me two doors and no third. أُعَذَّبُ, Form II passive, I am being tormented, which implies a tormentor even when it names none. Or أَتَعَذَّبُ, Form V, the medio-passive stem, I suffer, I torment myself. I took Form V, partly because agentless Arabic passives are stiff, mostly because I liked it. And in taking it I turned Catullus from a man being crucified into a man doing it to himself, which is a different poem, a more modern one, and mine rather than his.
And the root would not stay quiet. ع ذ ب also gives عَذَاب, ʿadhāb, torment, which is the word the Quran uses for the punishment of the damned. I did not summon that. It came with the consonants. Semitic root morphology is not discreet: pick three letters and everything else built from them is standing in the room.
Which is Nefeli's argument, and I had just made it for her, in another language, at my own expense.
I still think she overstates it. Latin derivation is looser than Arabic root morphology, and excrucio had drifted into a general verb of distress: the dictionaries give torment, rack, plague, vex, and it turns up in prose about a guilty conscience. Cicero could tell a jury that the word cross should be kept away from a citizen's body and his mind and his eyes and his ears, which proves the word was loud in a courtroom and not that it was loud in a poem about a girlfriend.
But the chronology is not nothing, and I had not thought about it before I started. Crassus crucified six thousand of Spartacus's people along the roads out of Rome after the rising was put down in 71 BC. Catullus was born around 84. He was a boy of thirteen. A century later Seneca still called crucifixion supplicium servile, the slave's punishment. If you write excrucior in that century you may not be quoting the cross, but you are not innocent of it. I have moved, and I resent having moved.
Then the joke I could not have planned. Those same three letters also produce عَذْب, ʿadhb, which is what you call water fresh enough to drink and a voice sweet enough to keep listening to. Sweet water and torture out of one root. Catullus needed two lines to build that shape and Arabic was holding it already.
My version is a worse poem. No metre at all, Arabic quantitative metre being a thing I can scan and cannot write. It drops a mood, fattens one line, starves another, and ends on a verb that makes the speaker responsible for his own condition, which is the one thing the Latin most carefully refuses to do. As an argument it is the best I have, because it cost me something to find out I was half wrong, and prose would have let me off.
لَا أَدْرِي، لَكِنِّي أَشْعُرُ بِهِ، وَأُعَذَّبُ.
lā adrī, lākinnī ashʿuru bihi, wa-uʿadhdhabu. I do not know, but I feel it, and I am tormented. Closer to the Latin, worse in Arabic. Agentless passives here read like a police report.