(Concerning the Nose)

Come, dear friend, and dine with me
and bring with you what I have not:
wine to wet our lips and wit to laugh
at what’s not funny. Bring dinner too
and all the cupids you can catch
and any venus who’s gone astray.
Do all this, Fabullus, and you
will dine well with me tonight, 
though you may blush, you handsome man, 
to see yourself chopped up in verse, 
to please the gods and that saucy girl, 
who sticks her nose not in a book. 

This poem began as a translation of Catullus XIII, a witty invitation to his friend Fabullus, promising that if Fabullus brings the wine, dinner and good cheer, he – Catullus—will provide an unguentum, a perfume, that will make Fabullus beg the gods to make him totum nasum, all nose.  It’s a poem with priapic possibilities. My original intent was simply to do a playful translation that was true to the original, but I got the idea in my head that Catullus was inviting his friend to dinner because he had learned that the reason his girlfriend, the notorious Lesbia, was not able to come to his dinner party was that she was having one of her own, a tête-à-tête with this same Fabullus, a perhaps too handsome man. There are such. The invitation in my version becomes a clever way of telling his good friend Fabullus that he knows what is going on. Is this in the original? Not obviously, but there are intimations, especially since Lesbia, more disparagingly known as the quadrantaria Clytemnestra and Palatina Medea (though her real name was Clodia Metelli, herself of distinguished though promiscuous breed) had lost interest in our besotted poet (see Catullus VIII). Who is that candida puella in line 4 and who is being referred to in line 11 as meae puellae? Are they the same? Just what sort of sacculus, purse, is it that is full of cobwebs? Is Catullus asking Fabullus to bring Lesbia along, whom Catullus hopes to enchant with his verse about Fabullus and win her back? I could go on, but it would amount to little more than the ‘satyrical’ leer and would be in any case too unseemly, though it can perhaps be said that Catullus hopes to have his cena and the unguentum too. Few folks are going to appreciate the classical background or possess the requisite prurience or even be able to read the original in Latin, so I am hoping that the poem will stand on its own hind legs.  

    Below is the original Latin poem and a literal translation in full undress:

Catullus XIII

Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me                 
paucis, si tibi di favent, diebus,                         
si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam           
cenam, non sine candida puella                       
et vino et sale et omnibus cachinnis.                 
Haec si, inquam, attuleris, venuste noster,       
cenabis bene; nam tui Catulli                           
plenus sacculus est aranearum.                         
Sed contra accipies meros amores,                   
seu quid suavius elegantiusve est:                   
nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae            
donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque;                     
quod tu cum olfacies, deos rogabis                   
totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum.    

You will dine well, my Fabullus, at my house
in a few days, if the gods favor you,
if you will have brought with you a good & large
dinner, not without a sparkling girl
and wine and wit and every sort of laughter.
If these things, I say, you will have brought, 
     you charming man,
you will dine well; for your Catullus’s
purse is full of cobwebs.
But in return you will receive pure love
or if there is anything more sweet or refined;
for I will give you a perfume, which to my girl       
Venuses and Cupids have given;
which when you smell, you will ask the gods
to make you, Fabullus, totum nasum.