Literary Kisses

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

How better to celebrate love and kissing than with one of my favorite passages.

Grant, this is from the Roman poet Catullus.

Yes, please.

And I’m not going to read the naughty parts, of which there are many,

But there’s this lovely passage that when I think about love and kissing,

It’s sort of inescapable.

It goes,

Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred, then another thousand,

Then a second hundred, then yet another thousand more, then another hundred.

Then, when we have made many thousands, we will mix them all up so that we don’t know,

And so that no one can be jealous of us when he finds out how many kisses we have shared.

Hot stuff, no?

Yeah, yeah, hot stuff.

Did you translate that from Latin yourself?

I wish I did.

You know, there are lots of different translations of this.

I found this one online by Rudy Neginborn, and I really like it compared to some of the other ones.

It’s also really sexy in Spanish, but I’ll spare you my Spanish.

Fantastic stuff.

I’ve got one of my own.

This is a little different.

It’s a fellow by the name of Charles Dekay, who was, lowercase d-e, space capital K-A-Y.

Oh, okay.

I was wondering.

He was a literary and art critic for the New York Times in the 1870s,

And he wrote a collection of poems pretending to be a poet by the name of Louis Barnaval, B-A-R-N-A-V-A-L.

And in these, through a series of verses, he talks about somebody, his loved one, being kind of a guiding light to him or like a shining influence.

And I’ve chosen one particular part that struck me.

And it goes like this.

Lamp of my path and beacon to my footsteps faint.

Guide in the dark, refreshments to endeavor.

This love for you strange byways hath untrod by saint.

Yet most delicious and of heavenly savor,

The graver’s subtle tool must fail to cut

And penman fairly write the hidden ways whereby I used your light.

And so in that passage, he’s kind of talking about

Even in the subtlest ways,

I mean, you could obviously compare somebody to the son,

But even in the subtlest ways,

This person through their love has influenced him

And made him basically a better person.

Yeah, lit his path.

That’s lovely.

Well, we’d love to hear from you about your favorite verse.

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