The grave of John Keats in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome famously reads, “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

While doing some prep for a class this fall, I chanced to read Catullus 70 and was reminded of Keats’s grave:

Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle
     quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat.
dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,
     in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.

It turns out that Wikipedia notes the echo. There is no footnote, and I have no idea whether this has been written on anywhere; it probably has.

The poem has been translated into English several times, including by Sir Philip Sidney, and his rendering is closest to that on the tombstone (other translations use “stream” [George Lamb] or “streams” [Richard Lovelace] instead of “water” for aqua, where Sidney uses both; another uses “water,” but removes the idea of “writing” [William James Linton]).

Here is Sidney’s version:

Unto no body my woman saith she had rather a wife be,

Than to my selfe, not though Jove grew a suter of hers.

These be her words, but a woman’s words to a love that is eager,

In wind or water streame do require to be writ.

All the English versions mentioned can be read in Julia Haig Gaisser’s collection Catullus in English.