When I plug the opening of a certain poem into Babelfish, Italian to English, I get this translation:
S’ I believed that my answer was To person who never returned to the world, This staria flame without piu jolt. But perciocche giammai of this bottom I do not return alive some, s’ i’ I hear the true one, Without infamy topic I answer to you.
So what does the epigram actually say?
And anyone else want to run other famous non-English passages through babelfish?
I cannot translate directly for you right now, but the epigram is from Dante’s Inferno.
It is a damned spirit speaking to Dante, telling him that this damned spirit would not reveal the truth to Dante if he had any hope that Dante would escape from Hell, but since he knows Dante won’t, he will tell what he knows.
It’s from Dante–spoken by Guido da Montefeltro in the Inferno, Canto 27:
“If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy.”
Pain of the shavers you;
The rivers are humid;
The acids blot them;
And spasmo of cause of drugs.
The guns are not lawyers;
Nooses gives;
The gas feels the odore of terrible;
You could also living.
“Life is but a poor mere player, who struts and frets his hour upon the steam turbine and gas turbine systems, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by at idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying emergency-hung.”
-William Fishspeare.
(Well, it WAS an english passage to start with, but it’s fun to play with, anyhow…)
“Its heart is a suspended lute; as soon as that it is touched it resounds.”
-De Béranger, as quoted by E.A. Poe
Once a man of Nantucket gave;
Whose would be thick, could suck it a long time thus him.
It means with Grinsen,
like it wiped its chin,
“if my ear were [c—] which I could to him bumsen.”
This one’s German by way of French :
“You are not conscious that impulse, O never becomes acquainted with the other! Two hearts live, ach! in my chest, One wants to separate from the other; One holds, in a rough expensive desire, Him in the hanging world with bodies; The Andre one raises himself strongly of Dust In Gefilden of high ancestors.”
Another :
“Over all summits Is rest, In all treetops You feel Hardly a breath, The small birds are silent in the forest. Control room only, balde You rest also.”
Control Room only?
Oddly enough, “Once a man of Nantucket gave” has a kind of slow and stately rhythm to it.
In a place of Mancha, of whose name I do not want to decide to me, there is not long time that lived hidalgo on those of lance in shipyard, running old shield, rocín skinny and galgo. A pot of something more cow than sheep, salmigundi the pluses nights, duels and breaks Saturdays, lantejas Fridays, some palomino of addition Sundays, consumed the three parts of their property. The rest della concluded sayo of velarte, stockings of velludo for the celebrations, with their pantuflos of mesmo, and the days of entresemana it was honored with his vellorí of finest. It had in his house a master who happened of the forty and one niece which she did not reach the twenty, and a young man of field and seat that thus rocín saddled as it took the pruning knife. Frisaba the age of ours hidalgo with the fifty years. Era of strong complexión, dry of meats, tidbit of face, great madrugador and friend of the hunting. They mean that it had the sobrename of “Jaw”, or “Quesada”, that in this is some difference in the authors who deste case write, although by verisímiles conjectures is let understand that “Quijana” was called. But this concerns little to our story: it is enough that in the narration dél does not leave a point the truth.
HA! And my students think running their compositions through Babelfish is a good idea! 
Era of strong complexión, dry of meats, tidbit of face, great madrugador and friend of the hunting. Hey, I’ve had days like that.
Aurelian, why would your students run compositions through Babelfish?
I teach introductory Spanish classes at UW Madison, and some of them think that if they type an essay in English (or hell, just copy some stuff of the internet) and plug it into Babelfish, voila, a Spanish composition, worthy of an A.
Strangely enough, it usually doesn’t work too well. As you can see in the passage, Babelfish just leaves words it doesn’t know untranslated, so I’m reading along in bizarro Spanish, and bang, a word in English. Babelfish also can’t differentiate between different forms of a word; for example, ‘left’ could function as a verb, an adverb or an adjective; and Spanish is actually different from English, so it may not be the same word in all three forms…so I have to try and decipher what it was they were trying to say.
I love these translations. This was done in Google translations, from English to French back to English.