Catullus Translation: Poem 5 (Love)

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love

and let us value all the rumors

of old men at one penny. 

The suns can fall and rise:

 for us, with our brief light being knocked out ,

the night is perpetual. 

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

then another thousand, then a second hundred,

then another thousand.

With these many thousands

 let us feel that we are frenzied,

let our minds not even know ,

and let us ignore what the old critics think.   

Catullus 5- Translated by Eric Ishak


Solar Eclipse (Public Domain)