Hi, Carl. Sorry to have neglected this so long.
"the smile
that comes over the features of Laïs" is beautifully metrical, but it waters down (no pun intended) the progression from sweet smile to sweet tears to the mix of tears and mouths. Is there a way to make the smile reference more mouth-specific, even though smiles do involve more of the face than that? If the answer is "No," that's fine. Just thought I'd ask.
I think your "gently averting her eyes" is a reasonable rendering of the gentle eye-rolling bit. The Autenrieth lexicon's entry for the base verb
here (click on "Autenrieth" to expand) supports you, I think.
“Whatever it is, you must tell me” seems awfully filler-ish, probably because "Why are you crying?" is so much shorter than the literal Greek, which says "On account of what are you pouring forth tears?" Perhaps not very idiomatic, but hey, it's a poem. Also, that reference to a reason seems to echo the "without a cause" and "without any reason"— which has been the prevailing male interpretation to my own and my daughter's tears, so i tend to picture the narrator as annoyed rather than solicitous. (Then again, I'm also thinking that the lips are likely to be dripping with snot as well as with tears. Blechh.)
"Men are untrue to their word" omits the (somewhat accusatory) second person of the original ("You men are oath-breakers"). Would you consider something like "All of you men break your word"? The narrator is telling this story to his friends for a reason, and I think it's because Laïs has addressed her speech to a second person plural (you men), and the singular narrator wants to know how a group of men will respond to this story's punchline.
A general note of caution: much as I love the Perseus Project, they sometimes have uncorrected transcription errors, so take their versions' authority with a grain of salt, even if they have taken their text from an authoritative source.
The Ausonius poem I recently translated had several punctuation errors (periods rendered as commas), and even a word on the wrong line, so that I wasted an hour or so trying in vain to get the two lines involved to scan.
LL2-3 of Epigram XXXIII, PDF version
here (bolding below is mine):
Quote:
quique Iovem fecit ; tertia palma ego sum.
sum dea quae rara et paucis OCCASIO nota.
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LL2-3 of Epigram 33, Perseus Project version
here (bolding below is mine), based on the same print edition:
Quote:
quique Iovem fecit; tertia palma ego sum. sum
dea quae rara et paucis occasio nota.
|
They also had an error in the title of the poem (nominative plural OCCASIONES instead of genitive singular OCCASIONIS). You can easily see that if you follow the two links above. When I emailed them to report it, I got an automated message saying that they are already aware that users are experiencing slow loading speeds and occasional timeouts, if that's what I was notifying them of. They are in the midst of a major update.
Conclusion: The Perseus Project is great, but it's still a good idea to double-check their version against a PDF photo-facsimile version, especially if tiny breathings, accents, or punctuation marks are involved. These aren't always rendered correctly when transcribed or scanned.