Multās per gentēs et multa per aequora vectus adveniō hās miserās, frāter, ad īnferiās, ut tē postrēmō dōnārem mūnere mortis et mūtam nēquīquam alloquerer cinerem quandoquidem fortūna mihī tētē abstulit ipsum heu miser indignē frāter adēmpte mihī nunc tamen intereā haec, prīscō quae mōre parentum trādita sunt trīstī mūnere ad īnferiās, accipe frāternō multum mānantia flētū. 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.1 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.
Oxford Latin Dictionary, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982, reprinted 1985) p. 965, entry on ipse, meaning 5 ("the actual").
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“I want to explain about the Catallus poem (101). Catallus wrote poem 101 for his brother who died in the Troad. Nothing at all is known about the brother except his death. Catallus appears to have travelled from Verona to Asia Minor to stand at the grave. Perhaps he recited the elegy there. I have loved this poem since the first time I read it in high school Latin class and I have tried to translate it a number of times. Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind. I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.” ― Anne Carson, Nox
