[Julie Steiner]

Thank you, Carl and Glenn. Very helpful impressions. Tweaks posted above.

My overall impression of the original is that it subtilely, but repeatedly, emphasizes the artificiality of this scene, rather than just the usual fleetingness of beauty trope. The modest blushes are drawn-on. The costume "gives them the svelteness of elegant virgins," leaving open the question of whether these girls are all actually as virginal as their ritual dress makes them appear. As Glenn pointed out, the "cándidas" describing the girls has connotations of naïvety and purity (contrasting starkly with the violence and gore represented by the sacrificial knife), but "cándidas" is also cognate with the root of the word "candidate," for the snow-white garment worn by Romans who were presenting themselves for election to public office, thereby clothing themselves in the appearance of incorruptibility that may or may not have been the case.

The religious ritual described in the poem is thus presented by Rueda as performance art, and I view the image of the blond hailstones at the end not only as an image of impermanence (since hailstones melt in the sun, and natural blond hair rarely lasts past puberty), but also an image of falsity, since the grains of wheat, like the sun-lit hailstones to which they are compared, only look golden, rather than literally being made of gold, like the trays and baskets. (Blondness, too, only resembles gold.)

Some of my choices are far less subtle than Rueda's original in regard to the artificiality angle, and I've changed L14 to make the final word of the poem even less subtle. Perhaps my choices go a bit too far in steering the interpretation that way, but I hope that the new end-word "pretense" might send the reader back for a second reading, to take another look at earlier clues that not all is as it appears in this scene.

Carl, I wondered if I could get away with "chicness" instead of the cognate "svelteness." I guess not! I'm keeping the hyphen in "virgin-dress," since I think dropping it turns "virgin" from noun to adjective, but have dropped the one in "face paint."

I didn't like the fact that my first changes put "with" / "within" / "with" in the final tercet, so I changed "within" to "inside."

I should note that the original mixes iambic pentameter with a few different versions of classical hendecasyllables, which substitute an anapest at a certain position in the line (different depending on whether it's Sapphic, Alcaic, etc.). I've included a few anapestic substitutions here and there (and have added one to my tweak of L12 since the Tontoism of my first attempt bothered me). But I did not feel obliged to stick to the same classical recipes each time in terms of exactly which foot Rueda had substituted, since most readers won't recognize these anyway.

Thanks very much for your help, Carl and Glenn.