Odi et amo

Odi et amo. A reader who knows no Latin can almost hear the first three words — the hate and the love jammed together with a plain and, no but, no yet, nothing to rank one over the other or to say they take turns. They are simultaneous and equal. Then the poem asks itself the question a friend would ask — quare id faciam?, why do I do this? — and answers it with the only honest answer: nescio, I don't know. The not-knowing is the whole of the diagnosis. What remains is not a thought but a sensation: fieri sentio et excrucior — I feel it happening, and I am being torn apart.

That is the poem. It is also a machine built to resist English in four exact places, and the nine translators below — across 1821 to 1913, every one of them out of copyright and checked here word for word against the page it was printed on — fail and succeed in different ones. Three instruments take the machine apart; then you can watch the hands.

I · The poem with no nouns

The first thing to verify is the strangest, and it costs nothing but counting. Catullus wrote the most turbulent feeling in the language and reached for no object to hang it on. Fourteen words; eight of them are verbs; not one is a noun. There is nothing in the poem to point at — no amor, no cor, no name. The two verbs that carry the suffering — fieri and excrucior — are passive: the speaker is not doing, he is being done to, and the one doing it is never named. Tap a word to see its work; toggle the verbs and the two passives.

II · The cross in the last word

The poem ends on excrucior, and inside it is a thing made of wood. Pull the word apart: ex- (thoroughly, utterly) + cruci-, the stem of crux, crucis — “the wooden frame on which criminals were crucified, especially a cross” — + -or, the first-person passive ending: I am —ed. Literally: I am thoroughly crucified. Catullus did not write that he is in pain; he wrote that he is on the cross, and that someone has put him there. Tap each piece.

No English version below carries the cross. They reach for torture, torment, agony, the rack, the pains of hell, or merely “vext.”

III · Nine hands on two lines

Here are nine renderings by eight translators — Cranstoun, unable to settle it, printed two — each transcribed exactly from the edition named. Pick a loss along the top and watch how every hand takes it, or fails to. Tap a rendering for the note on what it did.

The four places the Latin resists English: the conjunction (Catullus’s plain et — and, not but) · the cross (excrucior, passive) · the process (fieri sentio — feeling it being done, not knowing it is so) · the naming (a noun where the Latin had none).

What the nine lose, and what one keeps

The conjunction. Six of the nine keep Catullus’s bare and — hate and love, level and at once. Lamb (1821) is the outlier who breaks it: “Tho’ I hate, yet I love” imports a though…yet, turning a simultaneity into a contradiction the Latin refuses to make. Ellis (1871) splits the self instead — “Half I hate, half love” — partitioning what Catullus kept whole. Only Macnaghten (1899) reaches the other way and makes the simultaneity explicit: “I hate the while I love.”

The cross, and the passive. This is where every hand loses something. The wood disappears entirely — no one writes “crucified.” Most reify the pain into a thing: a torture (Burton), the pains of hell (Cranstoun’s second try, importing a Christian afterlife Catullus had no word for), a fact (Martin). Cranstoun’s first version keeps one true echo — “torture racks my brain” — because the rack is, like the cross, an engine of execution; but he then invents the brain. Lamb softens hardest: the man on the cross becomes a man who is “vext.” The one hand that keeps the grammar is Kelly’s plain Bohn prose (1854): “I am tortured” — passive, the act falling on the speaker, the only one of the nine that does to its verb what Catullus did to his.

The process. Fieri sentio means I feel it being done — an event still unfolding, the speaker its spectator. English keeps reaching instead for a settled state: “I feel it to be thus” (Smithers), “I feel that it is so” (Kelly). Two hands — Cranstoun’s first, and Martin — quietly swap the feeling for knowing: “The bitter fact I only know,” “know the fact too well.” Catullus’s point is precisely that he does not know (nescio) and can only feel; to make him know the fact is to give him a composure the poem was written to deny him.

None of this is a verdict that the translators failed. Two lines this dense cannot be carried whole into a language that conjugates differently and crucifies no one in its dictionary; each hand chose what to save. The venue’s habit is only to lay the choices side by side and let the disagreement be the evidence. What the disagreement shows here is the shape of the original by its shadow: a poem with nothing to point at, a feeling that happens to you, and a cross you carry in the last word and set down in none of the others.