Godlike the man

From Catullus 51

Godlike the man who sits at her side,
who watches and catches that laughter
which softly tears me to tatters:
nothing is left of me, each time I see her…

This is a poem, or excerpt from a poem, I first heard in Michael Winterbottom’s film, Jude (1996), based on the Thomas Hardy novel. I prefer the film’s translation over others I have seen on the web.

It’s hard to say such a film and such a book are “favourites” as such, but they are both so tragic and poignant and beautiful in their ways, and are towards the top of my film and book lists. They are different in the overall endings, but neither is better than the other in my opinion.

The film features two actors that I have loved for a long time, and they are perfect in this; Kate Winslet and Christopher Eccleston – both so great, so tragic in this film. The scene in the pub where Jude recites latin, when he cries out in frustration when he has finished something like “which of you knows if I said it right”; heartbreaking!

Another beautiful Catullus poem is number 101 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_101), which I discovered through looking up a quote I saw on a bench in a private garden in Pimlico (“Atque in perpetuum, frāter, avē atque valē”):

Having been carried through many nations and over many seas,
I arrive, brother, at these wretched funeral rites
so that I might present you with the last tribute of death
and speak in vain to silent ash,
since Fortune has taken you, yourself, away from me.
Alas, poor brother, unfairly taken away from me,
now in the meantime, nevertheless, these things which in the ancient custom of ancestors
are handed over as a sad tribute to the rites,
receive, dripping much with brotherly weeping.
And forever, brother, hail and farewell.

(again, I prefer different bits of different translations, but I’ll give the one from Wikipedia here!)