Do not grieve the one who is hungry, nor anger a man in want: Good News Translation neatly and economically combines the two lines. The one who is hungry and the one who is in want are certainly the same person. The verbs grieve and anger speak of two different emotions. Good News Translation interprets grieve as giving cause for “resentment,” but it could also be taken to refer to causing hurt, emotional pain, desperate depression. “Never give a hungry person any cause for heartache or anger” might work. For those translators who will use poetry here, we may keep the parallel lines as follows:

• Don’t make a hungry person sad [or, desperate],
or make a needy person angry.

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Sirach. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2008. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.