My other wants I dare
To ask from Heaven in prayer,

But in a large majority of cases paraphrase is almost imposed on the
translator by the necessities of the case. Mr. William Cory's rendering
of the famous verses of Callimachus on his friend Heraclitus, which is
too well known to need quotation, has been justly admired as one of the
best and most poetic translations ever made from Greek, but it can
scarcely be called a translation in the sense in which that term is
employed by purists. It is a paraphrase.

It is needless to dwell on the difficulty of finding any suitable words
capable of being adapted to the necessities of English metre and rhythm
for the numerous and highly poetic adjectives in which the Greek
language abounds. It would tax the ingenuity of any translator to weave
into his verse expressions corresponding to the ἁλιερκέες ὄχθαι
(sea-constraining cliffs) or the Μναμοσύνας λιπαράμπυκος (Mnemosyne of
the shining fillet) of Pindar. Neither is the difficulty wholly confined
to poetry. A good many epithets have from time to time been applied to
the Nile, but none so graphic or so perfectly accurate as that employed
by Herodotus,[43] who uses the phrase ὑπὸ τοσούτου τε ποταμοῦ καὶ οὕτω
ἐργατικοῦ. The English translation "that vast river, so constantly at
work" is a poor equivalent for the original Greek. German possesses to a
greater degree than any other modern language the word-coining power
which was such a marked characteristic of Greek, with the result that it
offers special difficulties to the translator of verse. Mr. Brandes[44]
quotes the following lines of the German poet Bücher:

Welche Heldenfreudigkeit der Liebe,
Welche Stärke muthigen Entsagens,