One of the poems of the
Iuventius Cycle in the poetry of
Catullus. This song is characterized by the sharp contrast between the passionate expression of his love for the
boy, and the constricting nature of the metre (the
hendecasyllabus) and the
syntactic structure: one
composite sentance, made up of two seperate
conditionals in which the
protasis makes up two lines and the
apodosis one, in a symmetrical (2+1)+(1+2) structure.
Mellitos oculos tuos, Iuventi,
si quis me sinat usque basiare,
usque ad milia basiem trecenta,
nec numquam, videar, satur futurus,
non si densior aridis aristis
sit nostrae seges osculationis.
this is my own as-literal-as-possible translation of the poem:
Your honey-sweet eyes, Iuventius,
If someone should let me kiss again and again,
Again and again I would kiss three hundred thousend times
But never, it seems to me, am I going to be sated,
Not even if denser than the dry ears of corn
Will be the crops of our kissing.