The Latin texts of the poems are appended.
Erotic relationships seem sometimes, to
some lovers, reducible to the rules of accountancy: a bit of pleasure in return
for a certain amount of trouble, a financial cost balanced against flights of
delight. When upbraiding Ameana for an
excessive fee (41) or complaining of Aulifilena’s deception (110), Catullus displays
the confident misogyny of a substantial citizen in a patriarchy.
Yet with passionate attachments, the values
shift dramatically. One lover’s side, at
least, of the exchange can balloon to virtually infinite value which may or may
not be equaled by the love object. Catullus
expresses the degree of romantic love by a figure of speech, as innumerable kisses.
[1] The association of love and kisses
is natural, of course, but, when the kisses become uncountable, the image
signifies the power of eros. Such
lover’s desperation may lead either to love-sickness, depression, and the
miserable conviction that one has been playing the fool or, for the more
fortunate, to an ascent to Elysium.
In Catullus XLVIII the convention appears
at its simplest in the context of gay relationship.
Your honeyed eyes, Juventius,
if I could kiss them on and on,
three hundred thousand times would not
suffice. I’d never
have enough,
not if they numbered more than grains
could grow in fields of one estate.
A hyperbolic compliment, but one fully
intended in passionate moods, the hundreds of thousands of kisses remain still
insufficient to express the lover’s emotion.
He cannot rest in languorous pleasure, but always wants more. Love is measured by a currency of kisses, and
the quantity must be countless to indicate the ineffable magnitude of the love.
The association here, first with honey and
then with ears of cereal grain reinforces this indefinite and enthusiastic
measure of love, and links the poem to archaic practices designed to foster
fertility, human, animal, and vegetable alike. [2] If, as Frazer reported, people would copulate
in their fields in hopes of a good harvest, holding one’s lover may remain, in
a vestigial way, a ritual of sympathetic magic to renew the world. Such a link has at least an emotional
reality, recorded in all the poems of spring’s regreening accompanying the
blossoming of romance.
Catullus VII first extends the hyperbole,
with an elaborate series of references at first geographical, then historic and
cosmic.
How many, Lesbia, kisses between us,
might be enough to surfeit me and more?
As many as the grains of Libyan sand
that lie in Cyrene where the silphium grows,
between the oracle of torrid Jove
and Battus’ old and holy sepulchre,
as many as the stars in silent night
that see all peoples’ secret love affairs.
So many kisses must the mad Catullus have
to be enough and then some, too,
so that the curious can never count
nor any tongue cast evil words our way.
This lyric reinforces the kisses’
meaning familiar from XLVIII and expandss it with concrete specifics, while
also adding considerable semantic territory.
Extravagant love, measurable only by countless kisses, is associated
with the exotic (Cyrene), the rare and precious (silphium or asafoetida), the
sensual (“torrid”), and yet the venerable (the grave of the city’s founder) and
indeed the universally human (“peoples’ secret love affairs”).
Rich in content if lacking the
straightforward and spontaneous-seeming apparent speaking from the heart of XLVIII
this poem suddenly turns in the final two lines to reveal a new aspect of the
lovers’ situation. Whereas the original
referent of the currency of kisses had been erotic intensity, here they provide
a mystical protection from hostile busybodies very like the “jealous ones” of
Troubadour lyric over a millennium later.
As a subjective experience of the lovers from which all others are
excluded, the kisses create a private utopian world, protected against all
threats by the power of their affection.
These ill-wishers are the projection of the lovers’ fear that their
bliss is endangered and perhaps cannot last.
In V, likely the most familiar Catullan carmina,
the motif of countless kisses is employed in service of the carpe diem
topos. Here it spotlights the contrast
between the couple’s delirium of love-making and those disapproving
superannuated meddlers.
Oh, let us live, my Lesbia, let us love!
And any idle talk of crabbed old men
we’ll value at one pennyworth, no more.
The sun, we know, will set and rise again,
and yet, for us, when our brief light is gone,
what follows then will be an endless sleep.
A thousand kisses and a hundred more I want,
another thousand, and a hundred yet,
and when the thousands upon thousands mount,
we’ll stir the pot and then we’ll never know
and those who envy us won’t know as well
how many kisses you and I enjoyed.
The seventh through the tenth lines simply juggle numbers,
indicating the ineffable quality of a necessarily private erotic
experience. Like a jazz singer going
into scatting the artist best approximates the joy of love by admitting its
inexpressibility. The two are so
confidently in control that they, as though with a wave of a magic wand, can
fling the scene into confusion and frustrate the hostile intentions of the
envious while enjoying the marvels of each other’s bodies.
Catullus’ lyrics
portray a range of lovers, some selfish, some selfless. For him erotic play was could be simple
recreation without emotional engagement, but other verses suggest a
whole-hearted tumble into total commitment scarcely expressible in words. Adopting the apparently natural association
of love and kisses, he elaborates the imagery of a currency of kisses to
signify a passion so great as to require a figure of speech, so great it may
provide an apotropaic charm against the invidious.
A master of
invective and insult and capable of plain-speaking to the point of outright
vulgarity, Catullus was at the same time a virtuoso of love poetry whose elegant
and original language might be either ardent or nasty. His range is evident in another poem using
the multitude of kisses topos. In his
most notorious poem (XVI) he complains that Aurelius and Furius have mistaken
his romantic side for weakness, and the very image under discussion is to
blame. “Because I write of countless kisses, you
think me as less a man?” Catullus defends his masculinity with the purest
sexual aggression “I will fuck your ass and mouth”. [3] That this verse is written by the same author
who wrote as a devotee of true love only suggests the breadth and variety of
the wild territory of eros.
1.
Among others who use the same image is Baudelaire who in “Le Balcon”
exclaims “ô baisers infinis!”
2. Leah O’Hearn demonstrates the details of the
implications of honey and of grain, particularly the latter’s association with
the emergence of facial hair in Classical love poetry. See “Title:
Juventius and the Summer of Youth in Catullus 48,” Mnemosyne LXXIV, 1.
3.
“Vōs, quod mīlia multa bāsiōrum, lēgistis male mē marem putātis?”
and (“Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō”.
XLVII
Mellitos oculos tuos, Iuventi,
siquis me sinat usque basiare,
usque ad milia basiem trecenta,
nec unquam videar satur futurus,
non si densior aridis aristis
sit nostrae seges osculationis.
VII
Quaeris, quot mihi bāsiātiōnēs
tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque.
Quam magnus numerus Libyssae
harēnae
lasarpīciferīs iacet Cyrēnīs
ōrāclum Iovis inter aestuōsī
et Battī veteris sacrum sepulcrum;
aut quam sīdera multa, cum tacet
nōx,
fūrtīvōs hominum vident amōrēs:
tam tē bāsia multa bāsiāre
vēsānō satis et super Catullō est,
quae nec pernumerāre cūriōsī
possint nec mala fascināre lingua.
V
Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt;
nobis, cum semel occidit brevis
lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda
centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde
centum;
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.
No comments:
Post a Comment