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Welcome to Latinum, the Latin Language Learning Podcast from London.

This reading from Catallus, in the restored Latin is reproduced here with the kind permission of Robert Sonkowsky.

Vīvāmus mea Lesbia, atque amēmus,
rūmōrēsque senum sevēriōrum
omnēs ūnius aestimēmus assis!
sōlēs occidere et redīre possunt:
nōbīs cum semel occidit brevis lūx,
nox est perpetua ūna dormienda.
dā mī bāsia mīlle, deinde centum,
dein mīlle altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mīlle, deinde centum.
dein, cum mīlia multa fēcerīmus,
conturbābimus illa, nē sciāmus,
aut nē quis malus inuidēre possit,
cum tantum sciat esse bāsiōrum.
Let us live, my Lesbia, and love, and value at
one farthing all the talk of crabbed old men.
Suns may set and rise again. For us, when the
short light has once set, remains to be slept and the sleep
of one unbroken night.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then
another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet
another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we
have made up many thousands, we will confuse our
counting, that we may not know the reckoning, nor
any malicious person blight them with evil eye, when
he knows that our kisses are so many.

trans. F. Cornish