Cyclopean language consists of consonants:
palatals, labials, sniveling sibilants,
and glottals. It will never be confused
for the sonorous lilts of the ancients.

In those it’s meet to praise silvern streams
and lover’s hair woven with starlit evenings,
or to sing sadness and mourning,
the fierce battles of earth and heaven,

cups with bitter drafts. But this tongue,
just like a lone eye lodged in a forehead,
is fit for spitting curses at the ages,
blaring your fate to the cosmos like a trumpet.

In all the lowland dialects it is unequalled,
voiceless; in it people keep quiet.
And you, my garrulous dol’nik, shut up too!
The cyclops’s speech is stern and sacred.