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So, I was wrong; I'm trying to translate one more ode out of Euripides, so here's my attempt at--well, however far I get today before I have to run for class. (It's the one I just copied another translation of, earlier. I suspect my translation will be more awkward, less accurate, and still more to my taste.)
Chorus:
I begin the wailing, O Pelasgia, setting fingernails through my white cheeks, a bloody ruin, and beating the head, which the lady of the dead obtained as her duty throughout the earth, the goddess with beautiful children. May the Cyclopian land shout, setting iron against the shorn head, the calamity of the house. Pity, pity comes here from those about to die, having been the general of Greece before.
They have gone, they have gone, the whole race of the children of Pelops, and the jealousy that was once of the blessed house. God-sent envy seized it, and the murderous vote of hatred among the citizens. Alas, alas, the all-tearful much-suffering nations of short-lived people, look at how Fate walks past hopes. Different calamity is traded out to different men on the vast earth; and the whole life of mortals is unsteady.
Electra:
If only I might go to the rock suspended and hung by golden chains in the middle of sky and earth, the whirlwind-carried sphere from Olympus, so that I might cry in lamentation to old father Tantalus, who sired, sired my forefathers, about the kind of ruins of my house I have seen; the flying chase of young horses, when Pelops drove over the sea with a four-horsed chariot, casting murdered Myrtilus into the swollen sea, driving from the heaving sea to the foam-white shores of Geraestus; from that, a mournful ruin came to my house, when the Maia-son saw born to his flocks a golden-wooled lamb, which became a deadly, deadly marvel for Atreus the Horse-Breeder; from that, Strife turned the winged chariot of the sun towards the evening road of the sky, binding one horse of Dawn, and the rest onto the other road, the seven-tracked Pleiades. And it still exchanges deaths for deaths, as that feast which Thyestes named, and the bed of Cretan Aerope, a deceiver in her deceitful marriages. And the very last things have come against me and my father, with the much-suffering necessities of the house.
Chorus:
But now your brother staggers this way under a confirmed vote of death, and Pylades, the most trustworthy of all men, like a brother to the man, supporting his sick limbs with the anxious steps of a true partner.
Chorus:
I begin the wailing, O Pelasgia, setting fingernails through my white cheeks, a bloody ruin, and beating the head, which the lady of the dead obtained as her duty throughout the earth, the goddess with beautiful children. May the Cyclopian land shout, setting iron against the shorn head, the calamity of the house. Pity, pity comes here from those about to die, having been the general of Greece before.
They have gone, they have gone, the whole race of the children of Pelops, and the jealousy that was once of the blessed house. God-sent envy seized it, and the murderous vote of hatred among the citizens. Alas, alas, the all-tearful much-suffering nations of short-lived people, look at how Fate walks past hopes. Different calamity is traded out to different men on the vast earth; and the whole life of mortals is unsteady.
Electra:
If only I might go to the rock suspended and hung by golden chains in the middle of sky and earth, the whirlwind-carried sphere from Olympus, so that I might cry in lamentation to old father Tantalus, who sired, sired my forefathers, about the kind of ruins of my house I have seen; the flying chase of young horses, when Pelops drove over the sea with a four-horsed chariot, casting murdered Myrtilus into the swollen sea, driving from the heaving sea to the foam-white shores of Geraestus; from that, a mournful ruin came to my house, when the Maia-son saw born to his flocks a golden-wooled lamb, which became a deadly, deadly marvel for Atreus the Horse-Breeder; from that, Strife turned the winged chariot of the sun towards the evening road of the sky, binding one horse of Dawn, and the rest onto the other road, the seven-tracked Pleiades. And it still exchanges deaths for deaths, as that feast which Thyestes named, and the bed of Cretan Aerope, a deceiver in her deceitful marriages. And the very last things have come against me and my father, with the much-suffering necessities of the house.
Chorus:
But now your brother staggers this way under a confirmed vote of death, and Pylades, the most trustworthy of all men, like a brother to the man, supporting his sick limbs with the anxious steps of a true partner.