So, even with a severed tongue, Philomela recounted her tribulations,
weaving them one by one into her robe with patience and faith,
with modest colors—violet, ash, white and black—and as is always true
with works of art, there's an excess of black. All the rest—
Procne, Tereus with his axe, their pursuit in Daulis,
even the cutting out of the tongue—we consider insignificant, things we forget.
That robe of hers is enough, secret and precise, and her transformation
at the crucial moment into a nightingale. Still, we say: without all the rest,
those things now contemptible, would this brilliant robe and the nightingale exist?