Catullus 70:
My woman says she wants to marry no one
but me, not even if Jupiter himself were to court her.
She says: but what a woman says to her waiting lover,
he must write in the wind and running water.
Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle
quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat.
Dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,
in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.
In this poem (which is similar to an
epigram written by the
Greek poet
Callimachus),
Catullus analyzes the failure of his love affair with
Lesbia (a pseudonym, some think for a woman named
Clodia, but also a name he probably used as a tribute to
Sappho, one of his major influences as a
poet. The
translation, obviously, isn't in
meter, but for those of you who can pronounce
Latin, the poem is in a form called
elegaic couplet (a variant of the meter used for the
Iliad and the
Aeneid). Basically, this means that for each couplet the first line is in
dactylic hexameter, and the second line is in a basically
dactylic pentameter, except slightly modified, so it ends up looking like this (^ denotes a short
syllable, || a
diaeresis):
dactyl/
spondee | d/s | - || - ^^ | - ^^ | ( ^ or - )
Original translation. Text and some background from:
Aronson, Andrew C. and Robert Broughner.
Catullus and Horace. White Plains, NY: Longman, 1988