Constantine Cavafy wrote “The City” in 1894. This poem doesn’t speak for me or articulate feelings that I happen to hold. But it is a famous work that is difficult to render in other languages, particularly because the original is densely rhymed. I gave it a try:

You said: I will get out of here, I will leave.
Some other place will be better than here.
Here everything I write comes back as a jeer, 
And here my heart feels buried like a corpse.
Can my mind still bear what withers and warps?
Wherever I look, where I turn my eye,
I see black ruins from my life gone by.
Here, where time has dragged on without reprieve.

You will find no new places, no other coasts.
This city will follow you. You will return
To the same streets and quarters in turn.
In the same neighborhood, you will grow old.
You will turn white in this very household.
You will always arrive back at this station.
Stop hoping for any other destination.
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
Just as you ruined your life in this abode,
So you have ruined all the world’s outposts.

Last summer, I read a most of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, which is an homage to Cavafy and his city (Alexandria) and concludes with Durrell’s loose translation of this poem. However, I quit before the end because I didn’t like the characters and found the novel’s evocation of Alexandria fervent yet vague. I thought this remark by a character (not the narrator) rang too true: “Justine and her city are alike in that they both have a strong flavour without having any real character” (p. 125).

See also: “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt, which begins “Oh, the days they pass by uselessly …”; and Istanbul melancholy. (Pamuk loves Cavafy’s “The City.”)

Now give us your true mind, turn to reason.
A new thing is trying to reach your ears 
To reveal itself to you in novel forms.
But nothing is so simple that it is not
At first hard to believe, nor any marvel 
So great that we don’t soon forget our wonder.

The sky’s clear and pure color, so restrained,
The stars shining everywhere, the moon,
And the splendid brightness of the sun’s light— 
If all this were suddenly, for the first time,
Unexpectedly revealed to mortals,
What could be called more miraculous than this,
Not less than what nations had dared to believe?

Nothing, I think; this scene would compel wonder.
We’re so tired of seeing, we don’t care to look up
To the resplendent temples of heaven.
Stop being terrified by this novelty
Stop spitting reason out of your mind.
Rather weigh it with sharp judgment, and if it seems true
Give it assent, or, if not, fight against it. 

For the mind seeks reason, and the highest place 
Is infinitely beyond the walls of this world. 
What is there beyond, where the mind wishes to look,
Where the free-thrown spirit itself can fly?

This is an excerpt from Lucretius (2.1023-46), which I found because Montaigne quotes the second part of it in his essay “It is Madness to Base True and False on our Self-Confidence” (1.27). My translation of this Latin text. Stephen Batchelor also discusses this passage (in his translation) in The Art of Solitude (Yale University Press, 2020), p. 42.