Catullus 85
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
(literal: I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask?
I don't know, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.)
My translation
Hates she I love. Don't ask!
My tongue's ripped out.
This will hardly seem a translation. What I have tried to do is to preserve the emotion.
1. In the Latin, odi et becomes through elision odet, creating a semantic confusion, the -t identifying a 3rd person subject. Thus, the "she" in my translation. The words themselves become jumbled, suggesting turbulent emotions. 'hates she I love' - is arranged as a chiasmus (A B B A - think of the Greek letter χ), and may be represented as a cross. For the relevance see the 3rd comment.
2. Again, by ellison quare id (why it) becomes quarid, suggesting that the question itself is an additional source of pain.
3. In the second line of my translation, I was attempting to convey in a single image both the anguish and the poet's inability to speak about it. The verb excrucior (I am tortured) suggests a crucifixion (crux: cross), a punishment reserved for slaves in Catullus's time.
All well and good, I say to myself, but is it a translation of Catullus's poem or is the original so changed in translation as to become something else? If something else, what would we call it? It's not really an original poem. Perhaps, a creative translation. It may or not be creative, but in my judgment, it is in fact a translation, one that tries to convey the emotion of the original as opposed to the dictionary meaning of the words themselves. Think: how does anyone but God join a soul to a body? With less fanfare, a translator is trying to transfer the soul or emotion of a poem in one language into the body of another.