[sonatagreen]

English translations of foreign-language poetry be like

My rival dresses to display her legs,
and her shoes are of an alluring fashion;

but my shoes are comfortable
and my tunic is plain.

She holds the most prestigious position in the women’s dance performance,
while I sit in the audience.

I dream that someday when you awaken
you will know that what you sought was always here.

You and I walk together,
you in the coarse and tattered trousers of a common working man;

we sit on a bench in the park, laughing together,
and nothing seems difficult.

[terpsikeraunos]

this is amazing and i can’t resist doing a classics version

On the one hand, of high-girt peplos is she;
I, on the other, am clad in coarse-spun weeds.
She leads the chorus, surpassing all others
as the moon does the stars;
yet I escape the notice of all.

Upon me dark-winged sleep drips phantom visions,
that at last the arrow of your gaze strikes the mark
of my heart, its prey, beneath the light of the sun,
Just as grey-eyed Athene were lifting a mist
from your two benighted eyes.

As we two walk down spacious city ways,
The laborer’s chiton upon your breast,
All-subduing Eros whispers to me, honey-sweet,
that the Fates have spun us matching threads;
For as I sit beside you, on a well-wrought pew
’midst Dryad-haunted precincts,
My mind churns with a singular thought:
That truly, Zeus could grant no lighter lot.