1Perhaps you are, as usual, both demanding and expecting a speech; 1but I am offering you my diversions, as if they were some foreign and dainty merchandise. 2With this letter you will receive my hendecasyllables, with which I amuse my leisure hours in the carriage, in the bath, at dinner. 3In them I joke, play, love, grieve, complain, grow angry, describe something now in a plainer, now in a loftier style, and by this very variety I try to bring it about that different pieces may please different people, and some perhaps everyone. 4If, however, some of them seem to you a little too wanton, it will befit your learning to reflect that those great and most serious men who wrote such things did not refrain from lewd subjects, nor even from plain words; 4which I have avoided, not because I am stricter — for how could I be?
4— but because I am more timid. 5Besides, I know that the truest law of this kind of little work is the one Catullus expressed: 'For the true poet ought himself to be chaste, but his little verses need not be at all; for they only have salt and charm if they are a little soft and not too modest.' 6How much I value your judgement you can estimate even from this, that I have preferred to have everything weighed by you rather than selected pieces praised. 6And indeed the most pleasing pieces cease to seem so, once they begin to be all alike. 7Moreover, a wise and discerning reader ought not to compare different things with different things, but weigh each by itself, nor think worse than another what is perfect in its own kind.
8But why say more? 8For to excuse or commend follies in a long preface is the greatest folly of all. 8One thing it seems I should say beforehand: that I am thinking of entitling these trifles of mine 'Hendecasyllables', a title bound only by the law of the metre. 9So whether you prefer to call them epigrams or idylls or eclogues or, as many do, little poems, or anything else, you may call them so; 9I offer only hendecasyllables. 10I ask of your candour that what you are going to say about my little book to others, you should say to me; 10and what I ask is not difficult. 10For if this little work of ours were my chief or my only one, it might perhaps seem harsh to say: 'Find something to do'; 10but it is gentle and kind to say: 'You have something else to do.' 10Farewell.