Translation fun

I've been working on a project connected to thehugopages.com, my site for Victor Hugo poetry. I've been working through a poetry primer (the delightful Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry) and have enjoyed learning how English poetry works, having learned a bit about French poetry in grad school. So now the plan is to revise some old translations and undertake a few new ones after I've improved my ear for English verse.

One fun challenge: words like lugubre - do you translate them with the obvious correspondent, lugubrious, or the more common gloomy. And since English offers these two choices, and French but one, where do balance things out so that your translations are neither highfalutinly Latinate nor abrasively Anglo-Saxon?

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On the Uzbek front, I've been using a nice dictionary I found on uztranslations.net.ru and have made my way through a few songs that weren't making much sense before.