The translations were often not poetic, but prose transliterations of the text. I went to the extreme, so that my teacher often said my stuff was too scanable. I'm probably meandering and making no sense whatsoever. For that I apologize. But as a reader, I find both sets just missing the mark.
Winter is a trying time to die.
Gray filtered light drifts along the land. Trees bearing ice bend and bow. Brown shafts of simple plants stand like spoiled straw. And Earth lies sleeping within a glazed cocoom, Dreaming, unaware. It does seem to me that there is something undefinable about both good prose and good poetry.