1. You have wearied yourself with dignity, so shorten your efforts,
And play as youth played and adorn yourself.

2. Your beauty crowning you will suffice you,
From the awe of tyrants and Alexander.

3. Why do I see you, when I had known you to be playful,
Perplexed, pondering the ponderings of a thinker?

4. The aura of majesty lifts you, a fear
Like a gazelle frolicking in a meadow.

5. Is your talk serious, or are you perhaps jesting,
Toying with acting composed and scorning?

6. And if a youth's heart is ignorant of cares,
Cares seem, in appearance, to be witty to him.

7. Have mercy on your gathering whom you have clothed
In the garb of gloom before you, wearing compulsion.

8. Imitate you in gloom, so who has, through your beauty,
Journeyed or not journeyed? Tell me.

9. Or the water of humanity has withdrawn from him, so who has,
With the spring of humanity in youth, gushed forth?

10. Wrongfully you direct transformations upon the aspects of your acquaintances.
Above the mask of contraction, upon the mask of disfigurement.

11. Wondrous! He who envies the slender envies
The stricken by calamities upon solemnity respected.

12. You have made sorrows beautiful to me, when I listened to them
As ornaments upon this bright forehead.

13. So leave trials, for their embers and ashes
Are for those who mine them, and win the essence!

14. And trick your companion with sternness, for I
Am not fooled by a laughing pretender.

15. Alas! Nature has not given you a touch
Of what you seek of counterfeit dignity.

16. You are her smiles, and through you her moods
Brighten for people, as if she never gloomed.

17. When her lips laugh, what has Nature
But the radiant, blossoming face?

18. And of wonders: that a smile should frown
While a star never darkened is shadowed!

19. Say to cleverness claiming what it claims
Except dignity - that is not to be achieved.