With regard to Catullus’ rendering (LI), Swinburne in his _Notes on Poems and Reviews_, speaking of his poem _Anactoria_, says: “Catullus translated or as his countrymen would now say ‘traduced’ the Ode to Anactoria; a more beautiful translation there never was and will never be; but compared with the Greek, it is colourless and bloodless, puffed out by additions and enfeebled by alterations. Let anyone set against each other the two first stanzas, Latin and Greek, and pronounce.... Where Catullus failed I could not hope to succeed; I tried instead to reproduce in a diluted and dilated form the spirit of a poem which could not be reproduced in the body.”
Tennyson has given the best paraphrase in _Eleänore_:
I watch thy grace; and in its place My heart a charmed slumber keeps, While I muse upon thy face; And a languid fire creeps Thro’ my veins to all my frame, Dissolvingly and slowly: soon From thy rose-red lips my name Floweth; and then, as in a swoon, With dinning sound my ears are rife, My tremulous tongue faltereth, I lose my color, I lose my breath, I drink the cup of a costly death, Brimm’d with delirious draughts of warmest life. I die with my delight, before I hear what I would hear from thee.
The following version I have based mainly on Edmonds’ recent text,[78] with a conjectural restoration of the last stanza, of which only a few words are preserved in the Greek:
O life divine! to sit before Thee while thy liquid laughter flows Melodious, and to listen close To rippling notes from Love’s full score.
O music of thy lovely speech! My rapid heart beats fast and high, My tongue-tied soul can only sigh, And strive for words it cannot reach.
O sudden subtly-running fire! My ears with dinning ringing sing, My sight is lost, a blinded thing, Eyes, hearing, speech, in love expire,
My face pale-green, like wilted grass Wet by the dew and evening breeze, Yea, my whole body tremblings seize, Sweat bathes me, Death nearby doth pass,
Such thrilling swoon, ecstatic death Is for the gods, but not for me, My beggar words are naught to thee, Far-off thy laugh and perfumed breath.
As J. A. K. Thomson says in his recent fascinating book _Greeks and Barbarians_ (London and New York, 1921), “Sappho, in the most famous of her odes, says that love makes her ‘sweat’ with agony and look ‘greener than grass.’ Perhaps she did not turn quite so green as that, although (commentators nobly observe) she would be of an olive complexion and had never seen British grass. But even if it contain a trace of artistic exaggeration, the ode as a whole is perhaps the most convincing love-poem ever written. It breathes veracity. It has an intoxicating beauty of sound and suggestion, and it is as exact as a physiological treatise. The Greeks can do that kind of thing. Somehow we either overdo the ‘beauty’ or we overdo the physiology. The weakness of the Barbarian, said they, is that he never hits the mean. But the Greek poet seems to do it every time. We may beat them at other things, but not at that. And they do it with so little effort; sometimes, it might happen, with none at all.”