Laudator Temporis Acti

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 33.1 (1912) 105-115 (at 111):

As a punishment for my sin in decrying rhyme as a vehicle of translation from the Greek, even in the hands of such a master as Gilbert Murray (A.J.P. XXXI 358-31), I have been haunted by my old enemy while in the Eden of the Anthology, and as I was reading the famous epigram (A.P. X 118), which, if not by Palladas, is in Palladas' vein, the Greek ran itself immediately into a sonnet, not of the best style:

πῶς γενόμην; πόθεν εἰμί; τίνος χάριν ἦλθον; ἀπελθεῖν;
   πῶς δύναμαί τι μαθεῖν, μηδὲν ἐπιστάμενος;
Οὐδὲν ἐὼν γενόμην· πάλιν ἔσσομαι ὡς πάρος ἦα·
   οὐδὲν καὶ μηδὲν τῶν μερόπων τὸ γένος.
Ἀλλ᾽ ἄγε μοι Βάκχοιο φιλήδονον ἔντυε νᾶμα·
   τοῦτο γάρ ἐστι κακῶν φάρμακον ἀντίδοτον.

How came I? is a question claims reply.
Whence am I? will have answer at my hands.
Why came I? is a problem that demands
To be resolved. Just to depart, to die?
How came I? Why, no matter how I try,
Each Argo of adventurous thought but lands
My seeking spirit on a waste of sands.
How can I learn, naught knowing but a why?
Naught was I when I came, and I shall be
Nothing again just as I was before.
Nothing and Naught is all the race of man;
What is there in the world that's left for me,
Save joyance from the Wine God's purple store,
The cure-all holden in the toper's can?

I put an interrogation mark at the end of Gildersleeve's first line of Greek, instead of his period, because his translation seemed to demand it. Here is a more literal translation by W.R. Paton:

How was I born? Whence am I? Why came I here? To depart again?
How can I learn aught, knowing nothing?
I was nothing and was born; again I shall be as at first.
Nothing and of no worth is the race of men.
But serve me the merry fountain of Bacchus;
for this is the antidote of ills.