Going back to my rant about citing Whitman and Dickinson, at what point can we say that a line is "gnomic" or "sprawling"? Because when we look elsewhere, a line containing a certain number of characters could be seen as gnomic in one language and sprawling in another. I'm thinking mostly about the differences between the alexandrine line and the iambic pentameter, how the former contains more information and is considered a long line in French, while the latter is considered, I guess, a medium length one.

I've been working on translating a Renaissance poem by Joachim du Bellay, because Lauren was interested in it. It opens with the lines

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,
Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la toison,
Et puis est retourné, plein d'usage et raison
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge!"

I'm translating it very conservatively, or at least, I'm trying to. Yet, I find it difficult to keep the structure of the stanza intact while maintaining the same meter.

Or think about a mostly monosyllabic language, like Chinese, where you could have 9-12 different words within a line of twelve syllables. Or compare (silly example) a haiku written in Japanese with one written in English, and see how the Japanese one is more precise than the English one.