When you, Lydia, start to praise
Telephus’ rosy neck, Telephus’ waxen arms,
alas, my burning passion starts
to mount deep inside me, with troubling anger.

Neither my feelings, nor my hue
stay as they were before, and on my cheek a tear
slides down, secretly, proving how
I’m consumed inwardly with lingering fires.

I burn, whether it’s madhouse
quarrels that have, drunkenly, marked your gleaming
shoulders, or whether the crazed boy
has placed a love-bite, in memory, on your lips.

If you’d just listen to me now,
you’d not bother to hope for constancy from him
who wounds that sweet mouth, savagely,
that Venus has imbued with her own pure nectar.

Three times happy are they, and more,
held by unbroken pledge, one which no destruction
of love, by evil quarrels,
will ever dissolve, before life’s final day.