​Although I am exhausted, utterly shattered, from
the pain of unrelenting sorrow, Hortalus, and
although I find myself cast completely
adrift, at a complete remove from
any inspiration, my mind
feverish and numb,
unable to produce anything with any life
to it, when my own brother
has only so recently been swept away
out of time’s flow, the waters
of Lethe lapping at his pale foot, now
buried, crushed under Trojan soil,
forever out of sight (never again will
I look upon you, brother, never,
surely, will I cease from loving you, never
will I write anything but elegies
on your death, like a nightingale pouring forth
a grief abroad, singing for every poet
lost for words) – yet, Hortalus, even in all
this grief, still I send you this translation
of Callimachus, so you won’t imagine
I could let your words slip from my mind
and blow away in the storm, just as
a girl might have forgotten
the apple in the folds of her dress
given to her as a pledge
of forbidden love, rolling now
onto the floor as she leaps up
at her mother’s entrance, and startles,
caught out once again, by love betrayed...