My preference would be:

Not obtaining (or Not getting) what one desires is suffering. Or more literally,

Not obtaining what one desire -- that is suffering.

We are allowed some licence for English idiom, otherwise we may have Palish English :)

With metta,

Piya


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On Sat, Apr 1, 2017 at 8:19 AM, jdabud@... [Pali] <Pali@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
 

Thanks to all who replied both on and offline. I don't think there is any argument about what is meant. My issue was syntactic, not semantic. As far as can see, icchaṃ is the present participle of Icchati, not a noun; labhati is a 3rd, sing., present indicative verb. So, as far as I can see, the sentence means

   Desiring that which [one] does not obtain [is] dukkha.