Catullus 51

“Catullus 51” is a Latin interpretation of Sappho’s “Fragment 31.” Catullus effectively translates Sappho’s particular meter and style from the original ancient Greek into Latin. Though Sappho wrote in a variety of line lengths and forms, the form most commonly associated with her poetry are four-line stanzas comprising of three 11-syllable (hendecasyllabic) lines followed by a five-syllable (pentasyllabic) line called an adonic. The original Latin “Catullus 51” is made up of four Sapphic stanzas, consistent with the number of surviving stanzas in Sappho’s original. “Catullus 51” is Catullus’s only extant translation of Sappho, but he also uses Sapphic stanzas in “Catullus 11.”

There are notable formal differences between Catullus’s original poem and Chris Childers’s English translation. Childers’s decision to incorporate an ABAB rhyme scheme into the Sapphic stanzas is representative of many attempts to Anglicize ancient forms. Though assonance and consonance are common structural elements of ancient western poetry, end-line rhymes are rare and often accidental. Childers’s translation also adopts an irregular iambic pentameter (five feet of unstressed followed by stressed syllables per line) for the stanzas’ first three lines, followed by a four- or five-foot adonic. Childers’s translation maintains the hyperbolic tone of the original, and even works to emphasize some of the original’s poetic devices. For instance, the two repeated, stress syllables of “Free time” that open Lines 13-15 give a stronger sense of repetition than the original.

Childers’s translation is representative of common changes translators make when reworking Sapphic stanzas into English, and is largely successful at conveying the original’s meaning despite these differences.