Echo-producing cicada, you make yourself tipsy on dewdrops,
……..belting your back-country song; wilderness warbles along.
Perching up high in the leaves with your serrated legs, you play music —
……..brown (as if toasted by fire) skin making sounds like a lyre.
Go and perform some new melody, though, for the Nymphs of the wood, dear.
……..Partner with pipe-playing Pan, thereby permitting my plan:
briefly escaping from Eros, I’ll slip into slumber at midday,
……..taking my ease where I’ve stayed — under your sycamore’s shade.
Untitled (Greek Anthology 7.196)
by Meleager of Gadara
Ἀχήεις τέττιξ, δροσεραῖς σταγόνεσσι μεθυσθείς,
……..ἀγρονόμαν μέλπεις μοῦσαν ἐρημολάλον·
ἄκρα δ᾽ ἐφεζόμενος πετάλοις πριονώδεσι κώλοις
……..αἰθίοπι κλάζεις χρωτὶ μέλισμα λύρας.
ἀλλά, φίλος, φθέγγου τι νέον δενδρώδεσι Νύμφαις
……..παίγνιον, ἀντῳδὸν Πανὶ κρέκων κέλαδον,
ὄφρα φυγὼν τὸν Ἔρωτα μεσημβρινὸν ὕπνον ἀγρεύσω,
……..ἐνθάδ᾽ ὑπὸ σκιερῇ κεκλιμένος πλατάνῳ.
Born in an ancient Syrian city whose ruins lie near modern Umm Qais, Jordan, Meleager of Gadara lived during the second and first century BCE (ca. 140–70). He spent most of his career in the Phoenician city of Tyre (in modern Lebanon), then retired to the Greek island of Kos/Cos, off the coast of modern Türkiye/Turkey. His anthology The Garland, which originally included about 4,000 lines from at least 46 lyric poets, formed an important basis for what today is known as the Greek Anthology. 134 of Meleager’s own epigrams survive.
Although at least one scholar titles this poem “The Cricket to the Cicada” (and its immediate predecessor in the Anthology “The Cicada to the Cricket”), this translation preserves the possibility that the narrator is human. The original’s elegiac couplets do not use rhyme, but in this English translation, internal rhyme emphasizes the even-numbered lines’s caesurae. Note that the Ancient Greek word for cicada (τέττιξ) is grammatically masculine.