 One other point, already mentioned, was how to deal with the problem of rendering the poem ’ s fourth line. Gray remarked to Anstey, “ ’ That leaves the world to darkness and to me ’ is good English, but has not the turn of a Latin phrase, and therefore, I believe, you were in the right to drop it. ” In fact, all that Anstey had dropped was reproducing an example of zeugma with a respectable Classical history, but only in favour of replicating the same understated introduction of the narrator into the scene: et solus sub nocte relinqor (and I alone am left under the night). Some other translators, with other priorities, found elegant means to render the original turn of speech exactly.
