i needed a distraction so i translated Bad Bunny's section from the song "Está Rico" (w/ Marc Anthony and Will Smith) into Ancient Greek hexameter.

there's a lot of nuance. it's also rather crude. i wanted to see how a dead language would hold up.

let's dive in.

in line 1 i had to simply the meaning a bit to fit everything in the verse. so instead of "if you have a bf, don't tell," my version reads "don't tell me about any bf" (φράζω + GEN 'tell of')

i translate 'mami' with νῆνι, the vocative of a dial. form of νεᾶνις 'young woman'

in l. 2, θελχθέντι is a masc dat participle ='enchanted' that agrees with μοι in l. 1.

i changed '[enchanted] with this (ese) butt' to 'with YOUR (τεῇ) butt.'

"culo" is a pretty coarse word; i don't know that πυγή can render that aspect of it, but at it means 'butt'

1 of my favorite bits is this parenthetical "Dios lo bendiga" (may God bless it) where lo = ese culo.

i think it works well as one of those Homeric not-quite-relative clauses with a demonstrative (like τὸν ... τέκε Λητώ in Il. 1.36): τὴν αἰνεέτω Ζεύς 'may Zeus approve of it!'

in l. 3 we have the interjection 'ey' taking up the entire 1st hemistich. i thought it made sense to go with ὤμοι ἐγώ 'oh, my'.

where the Spanish has 'bring your friends,' the Gk says 'gather many companions with you.'

dura = 'hot' (lit. 'firm').

l. 4 was challenging bc i did not want to translate 'dura (x3)' with a 3x-repeated word in Gk; so i took εὐφυής 'shapely, well-formed' and stretched it out a bit into its fem. superlative form, with εὐ- also becoming ἠϋ- for metrical reasons.

"ella no tiene liga" lit. means "she doesn't have a league"; in other words, everyone is out of her league, or she has no comparison. in Greek i have "no one could rival (ἐρίζω) her in beauty," with τὸ κάλλος 'beauty' in the accusative of respect/limitation.

the first 1/2 of l. 5 seems a bit unconnected in the Spanish (="from here to the boat") but i preserved that in Gk (with νῆα 'ship' for 'boat').

the 2nd half of l. 5 i translate as a vocative phrase.

chiquita -> γυνή is a little bland, i know. however, i do like περίευρυς 'exceedingly broad,' with γλουτώ being a *dual* (=buttocks) accusative of limitation (like πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς "Achilles swift w/r/t foot")

for l. 6, ἐμέ 'me' serves double duty as the object of both verbs in the Greek.

me lo hace ricote = she does it to me very well

ῥέζω 'to work, perform' is a great verb that makes it sound almost ritualistic; and it is cognate with both ἔργον and English 'work.'

the 2nd half of l. 6: "she makes me horny and makes it show" (i.e. makes it so that it's visibly apparent; use your imagination).

for poner bellaco, i have ἐν φρεσὶν ἐγείρει 'arouses [my] senses.'

i'm told bellaco is a fairly vulgar word. sorry about that.

the last part of this line (y hace que se note) was impossible to do proper justice to while keeping everything within a single line. i've rendered it simply as the adj δῆλον 'apparent, obvious' which agrees with ἐμέ. "she arouses my senses, such that i am obvious about it."

in l. 7 it gets fun. it's too much to squeeze into one Gk line, but everything is crucial (so that a pun later in l. 8 makes sense), so one verb does spill over into l. 8.

the Sp has "put on your spray (perfume); let's go to the shade b/c today i'm going to do those [shades] of Grey to you."

as in "50 Shades of Grey." i didn't want to use any proper nouns in the Gk, so i changed "las de Grey" into τὰς πεντήκοντα, "the 50 [shades]"

this, of course, means that the line ends in a spondee, not a dactyl. but hey, if Homer did it 1/20 of the time, i think 1/8 should be allowed for me, a noob.

note also that the ONLY way i could compact 'into the shade' was by borrowing the allative suffix: σκιήνδε 'shadowwards'

the orig l. 8 has "if you want, i'll throw/put (echar) another (sc. *spray*) to you, but [first] give me a break."

so, again, use your imagination.

to make this pun work i needed to make sure that l. 8 contains the active counterpart (χέω, 1sg subj) of the aorist middle participle (χευαμένη) from l. 7.

for ἄλλο, sc. μύρον 'perfume' based on μύρα in l. 7.

μετὰ παῦλαν = 'after a break/cessation'

the Greek may not be perfect (i was looking fruitlessly for a good translation of 'horny' for a long time, finding only κεράτινος 'made of horn') but it was a fun composition exercise.

here's an English version of the end result

and though i consider myself a Spanish speaker at this point, i could NOT have paid such attention to detail without @Pattzruiz to guide me through certain confusing structures, esp. the ins and outs of Puerto Rican slang.

oh yeah, and check out the song:



our section in question begins at 1:45.