There are a score of versions in Italian, some far from Sappho, and Ronsard’s good French version; and many an American or English poet has tried his hand at translating the lines,[94] which in the Greek toll like a curfew bell. All too little known is the rendering by Alan Seeger, the poet who was killed in battle on July 4, 1916, in his poem, Do You Remember Once?
Under the western-seas
The pale moon settles and the Pleiades.
The firelight sinks: outside the night-winds moan—
The hour advances, and I sleep alone.
For the Greek silence of nature Seeger substitutes the sympathy of nature in the moaning of the night winds. A more literal translation is:
Sunk is the moon
The Pleiades are set;
Tis midnight; soon
The hour is past: and yet