Okey-Dokey. I'm back as promised. Here's take two:
te amare paulum adspectum caeli recipere
(to love you is to receive a small sight [i.e. glimpse] of heaven)
I'll provide an explanation of the grammar and syntax just so anybody else reading this can double-check my work. Also, if you post this somewhere else other latinists can have an idea of what I'm doing.
My previous attempts using the present participle aren't good because they fail to capture the meaning that the two things (loving and catching a glimpse of heaven) are being asserted as one and the same.
I've used the infinitive (amare - 'to love') as an indeclinable neuter noun (cf. Kennedy's Latin Primer section 365). The word order at the moment is fairly standard with the genitive (caeli - 'of heaven') following the accusative (paulum - 'small', adspectum 'sight') and the second infinitive at the end, but these can be rearranged since poetry allows a more flexible word order. The latin verb 'est' ( - 'is') has been omitted, and must be understood, as is often the case in poetic sentences.
I struggled to find the most suitable meaning for 'glimpse'. At the moment 'paulum adspectum' is the best I could come up with. But the jury is still out on that one. I could have sworn I came across a better word somewhere in Propertius or the Eclogues but for the life of me I can't remember it, I'll have to check later. I'm afraid the Roman's didn't have a word for glimpse, at least as far as I know. Latin may be a very precise, metrically pleasing language, but English has a richer, more flexible vocabulary.
Regarding alternative versions, here are a few words you might want to use in place of the others:
small: paulum/parvum parvulum-very small
sight: adspectum/aspectum/visum
receive: recipere/percipere/accipere
These words are not without their nuances. Recipere carries with it a sense of receiving for oneself, percipere a sense of receiving with one's own senses (i.e. sight, understanding) and accipere a sense of receiving passively. The nuances present in the other words are negligible I'd say.
Regarding word order you might prefer this:
te amare paulum caeli adspectum recipere.
But apart from that I wouldn't recommend rearranging the words. It just wouldn't feel right.
Well that's all for today. Sorry for the amount of detail, but I'm sure that this means a lot to you, and I want to get it 100% right because this is one mistake that I don't want weighing on my conscience.
Now, what you need to do is do your very best to get my work double-checked by someone. I may be a classicist, but I'm also a human being and at the moment it's quite likely I've made a mistake, like I have with my first attempt. In the meantime, I'll see if I can improve it a little more and with any luck next time will be my final version.
If you absolutely can't find anyone else to check my work, don't worry. I can get it checked by one of my fellow students (I'm a classicist at Oxford), but I'd rather not bother them with this unless there's no other choice. Also, you didn't tell me if you liked the other 'raised to the stars' version.
I'll get back to you with a final version in a day or two. I hope that's okay. If you manage to get my work reviewed by someone else, let me know.
You're more than welcome. It's a nice feeling to finally use my learning to benefit someone else, and who says Latin's a dead language?
