LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,102)
  • Text Authors (19,442)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,114)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by Gaius Valerius Catullus (c84 BCE - 54 BCE)
Translation by Anonymous / Unidentified Author

Let us, kind Lesbia, give away
Language: English  after the Latin 
Let us, kind Lesbia, give away
In soft embraces all the day;
We'll laugh at what the old report,
And make their gravity our sport.
The sun sets ev'ry night, and can
Rise ev'ry day as bright again,
But when once sets our smallest light,
We then shall find it always night:
Dissolv'd in sleep, both thou and I
Must ever, Lesbia, ever lie.

Then let us kiss and kiss again,
And give a hundred, thousand more;
Let us kiss on as we began,
And give as many as before.
But lest perchance our printed bliss
Some envious rival should descry,
We'll wipe out all with one more kiss,
And so deceive his jealous eye.

Text Authorship:

  • by Anonymous / Unidentified Author [an adaptation] [author's text not yet checked against a primary source]

Based on:

  • a text in Latin by Gaius Valerius Catullus (c84 BCE - 54 BCE), no title, appears in Carmina, no. 5
    • Go to the text page.

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Henry Purcell (1658/9 - 1695), "Let us, kind Lesbia, give away", Z. 466, published 1684 [sung text checked 1 time]

Settings in other languages, adaptations, or excerpts:

  • Also set in English, a translation by Dominick Argento (1927 - 2019) , copyright © [an adaptation] ; composed by Dominick Argento.
      • Go to the text.
  • Also set in French (Français), a translation by Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532 - 1589) , no title [an adaptation] ; composed by Reynaldo Hahn.
      • Go to the text.
  • Also set in French (Français), a translation by Georges Lafaye (1854 - 1927) ; composed by Darius Milhaud.
      • Go to the text. [Note: the text is not in the database yet.]

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website: 2003-10-19
Line count: 18
Word count: 115

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris