#catallus

Jonathan (JJSponge120's sona) and Michael (UnknownArtistML's sona) are having a nice chat, discussing about OCs and how I gave Lottie and Catallus a redesign AND a "Dullahan AU" makeover.

Happy Lupercalia, everyone! To celebrate the precursor to Valentine's Day, I made some nice, normal Lupercalia memes you can send to your lovers, enemies, baristas, & coworkers. You will have to procure the bloody goatskin yourself, however :(

“I want to explain about the Catallus poem (101). Catallus wrote poem 101 for his brother who died in the Troad. Nothing at all is known about the brother except his death. Catallus appears to have travelled from Verona to Asia Minor to stand at the grave. Perhaps he recited the elegy there. I have loved this poem since the first time I read it in high school Latin class and I have tried to translate it a number of times. Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind. I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.” ― Anne Carson, Nox

from Nox by Anne Carson

Lottie and Catallus © JJSponge120 Gangle © Amazing Digital Circus, SMG4, Glitch Productions Fanart © Me

By ways remote and distant waters sped, Brother, to thy sad graveside am I come, That I may give the last gifts to the dead, And vainly parley with thine ashes dumb; Since She who now bestows and denies Hath ta’en thee, hapless brother from mine eyes. But lo! these gifts, the heirlooms of past years Are made sad things to grace thy coffin-shell; Take them, all drenchèd with a brother’s tears, And, brother, for all time, hail and farewell.

My woman says there’s nobody she prefers to marry Than me - not even if Jupiter himself wooed her, She says. But what a woman says to an eager lover One should scribble in the breeze and in the fast-flowing water.