 The latest database of translations of the Elegy , amongst which the above version figures , records over 260 in some forty languages . As well as the principal European languages and some of the minor such as Welsh , Breton and Icelandic , they include several in Asian languages as well . Through the medium of these , Romanticism was brought to the host literatures in Europe . In Asia they provided an alternative to tradition @-@ bound native approaches and were identified as an avenue to modernism . Study of the translations , and especially those produced soon after the poem was written , has highlighted some of the difficulties that the text presents . These include ambiguities of word order and the fact that certain languages do not allow the understated way in which Gray indicates that the poem is a personalised statement in the final line of the first stanza , “ And leaves the world to darkness and to me ” . 
