Laudator Temporis Acti

This post supplements Travels of a Leaf, about a little poem that struck my fancy, Antoine-Vincent Arnault's Fable XVI (La Feuille). Sainte-Beuve (Causeries du Lundi, March 21, 1853) called the poem "cette épigramme vraiment digne de l'antique, cette légère et douce élégie," and Alexandre Dumas in his memoirs (tr. E.M. Waller) wrote, "I do not know what the famous poets of my day would have given to have written those fifteen lines; I know I would have given any of my plays the fates might have chosen."

There is a fairly literal English translation by Robert Pogue Harrison in his book The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 152:

Detached from your stem,
Poor desiccated leaf,
Where go you?—I know not.
The storm battered the oak
That was my sole support:
With its inconstant breath
The zephyr or north wind
Has led me from that day
From the forest to the plain,
From the mountain to the valley.
I go where the wind takes me,
Without complaint or fear;
I go where all things go:
Where goes the petal of the rose
And the laurel leaf.

I also found two translations into Latin verse, the first by Léon Thiessé, in Répertoire de la Littérature Ancienne et Moderne, vol. 2 (Paris: Castel de Courval, 1824), p. 238:

Ramo lapsa tuo, tristis et arida,
Quò, frons, tendis iter? — Nescio; concidit
    Nimbos passa furentes,
Solum heu! quae columen fuit,
Quercus; nunc Zephyrus, nunc aquilo procax,
Hùc illùc, variis flaminibus, vagam
    E vallo ad jugum, ab agro
Ad sylvam docilem ferunt.
Quò me ventus agit, nulla querens agor;
Quò res cuncta fluit, nulla timens fluo,
    Hùc quò denique currunt
Et lauri folium, et rosae.

and the second by Herbert Kynaston, in Hubert A. Holden, ed., Folia Silvulae, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1870), p. 455:

Avolso sitiens stipite quo fugis,
  infelix folium? dicere nescio;
quae me sustinuit sola valentibus
  ramis diffidit ilicem
tempestas; zephyris aut aquilonibus,
crebrescens quoties halitus impulit,
ex illo trucibus, quo ferar inscium,
  ventis ludibrium volo:
a convallibus ad culmina montium,
ad rura a silvis usque patentia,
huc illuc fugio, quidlibet impotens
  quo me proripiunt pati.
vado nec metuens fata nec ingemens;
vado quo properant omnia vadere,
quo frons occubuit laurea militis,
  quo lapsae pereunt rosae.