May 2012
Carried through many a foreign land and much-unknown people,
I arrive to these mis’rable funeral motions
Only so I may present you with this final death-gift
Vainly addressing your ash which cannot ever respond
Fortune having stolen your flesh from my desperate* fingers.
Piteous brother, now ripped from my life like a thread,
Gifts of our love and our sadness hand we down to your gravestone
As is always done for our* dead when they fall.
Take them from us now, my young-dead brother now fallen;
Hear me when I say, “Hail and good-bye for all time.”
I arrive to these mis’rable funeral motions
Only so I may present you with this final death-gift
Vainly addressing your ash which cannot ever respond
Fortune having stolen your flesh from my desperate* fingers.
Piteous brother, now ripped from my life like a thread,
Gifts of our love and our sadness hand we down to your gravestone
As is always done for our* dead when they fall.
Take them from us now, my young-dead brother now fallen;
Hear me when I say, “Hail and good-bye for all time.”
This is a translation of Catullus's 101st poem. I took the Latin and provided a very loose translation, but I maintained the elegiac couplet meter. It's important to note that this is more of an adaptation than a translation, as I had to manipulate what the Latin actually says on occasion. Even so, I tried to be as faithful as possible to the Latin as I understood it.
