Édith

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
Translated by Edris Iravi

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Dreamt for Winter

Winter, we shall go in a little pink carriage
With blue cushions.
We shall be well. A nest of mad kisses lies
In every soft corner.

You will close your eye, so as not to see, through the glass,
The shadows of evenings grimacing,
These snarling monstrosities, populace
Of dark demons and dark wolves.

Then you will feel your cheek scratched…
A little kiss, like a mad spider,
Will run along your neck…

And you will say to me: “Find it!”, inclining your head,
– And we shall take our time to find this beast
– Which travels a great deal…

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Roman

I

You are not serious, when you are seventeen.
– One fine evening, to hell with the beers and the lemonade,
Noisy cafés with gleaming chandeliers!
– You go beneath the green lindens of the promenade.

The lindens smell sweet on the fine evenings of June!
The air is sometimes so soft, you close your eyelids;
The wind laden with sounds – the city is not far –
Has scents of vine and scents of beer…

II

– There you perceive a tiny scrap
Of dark azure, framed by a little branch,
Stabbed by a wretched star, blending
With soft shivers, little and all white…

June night! Seventeen! – You let yourself get intoxicated.
The sap is like champagne and rises to your head…
You wander; you feel upon your lips a kiss
That throbs there, like a little creature…

III

The mad heart roams like Robinson through novels,
– When, in the pale light of a dim streetlamp,
Passes a young lady with charming little airs,
Under the shadow of her father’s frightening fake collar…

And, as she finds you immensely naïve,
All while trotting her little boots,
She turns, alert and with a lively movement…
– Upon your lips then die the cavatinas…

IV

You are in love. Praised until August.
You are in love. – Your sonnets make her laugh.
All your friends go away, you are in bad taste.
– Then your adored one, one evening, deigned to write to you…!

– That evening… – you return to the gleaming cafés,
You ask for beers or lemonade…
– You are not serious, when you are seventeen
And you have green lindens on the promenade.

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Faun’s Head

In the foliage, a green case flecked with gold,
In the uncertain, flowered foliage
Of splendid flowers where the kiss sleeps,
Lively and bursting the exquisite embroidery,

A startled faun shows his two eyes
And bites the red flowers with his white teeth.
Bronzed and blood-stained like an old wine,
His lip bursts into laughter beneath the branches.

And when he has fled – like a squirrel –
His laughter still trembles on every leaf,
And one sees, frightened by a bullfinch,
The Golden Kiss of the Wood, gathering itself.

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What We Say to the Poet About Flowers

I

Thus, always, toward the black azure
Where the sea of topazes trembles,
The Lilies will function in your twilight,
Those clysters of ecstasies!

In our age of sago puddings,
When Plants are industrious,
The Lily will drink the blue disgust
In your religious Proses!

– The lily of Monsieur de Kerdrel,
The Sonnet of eighteen-thirty,
The Lily given to the Minstrel
With the carnation and the amaranth!

Lilies! Lilies! One sees none!
And in your Verse, like the sleeves
Of Sinners with gentle steps,
Those white flowers always tremble!

Always, Dear, when you take a bath,
Your shirt at the blond armpits
Swells in the morning breeze
Above the filthy forget-me-nots!

Love lets through your tollgates
Only Lilacs – O swings! –
And the Wood Violets,
Sweet spit of black Nymphs!…

II

O Poets, even if you had
Roses, roses blown open,
Red upon laurel stems,
Swelled with a thousand octaves!

When Banville would make them snow,
Blood-red, whirling,
Bruising the mad eye of the foreigner
At readings ill-disposed!

From your forests and your meadows,
O very peaceful photographers!
Flora is about as varied
As bottle-stoppers!

Always the French plants,
Snarling, consumptive, ridiculous,
Where the belly of dachshunds
Sails in peace at twilight;

Always, after dreadful drawings
Of blue Lotuses or Sunflowers,
Pink prints, holy subjects
For young communicants!

The Ashoka Ode frames
The stanza like a courtesan’s window;
And heavy brilliant butterflies
Drop their filth on the Daisy.

Old greenery, old braids!
O vegetable trifles!
Fantastic flowers of the old Salons!
– For cockchafers, not for rattlesnakes,

These weeping vegetable toddlers
That Grandville would have placed at borders,
And that wicked visor-stars
Nursed with colours!

Yes, your pipe-stains
Make precious sugars!
– Piles of fried eggs in old hats,
Lilies, Ashokas, Lilacs, and Roses!…

III

O white Hunter, running barefoot
Through the panic pasture,
Can you not, must you not
Know a little botany?

You would succeed, I fear,
In making red Crickets follow Cantharides,
The gold of the Rios follow the blue of the Rhines –
In short, Floridas after Norways:

But, Dear, Art no longer now –
It is the truth – permits
The astonishing Eucalyptus
The constrictors of a hexameter;

There!… As if Mahoganies
Even in our Guianas
Served only for the waterfalls of monkeys,
For the heavy delirium of lianas!

– In sum, is a Flower – Rosemary
Or Lily, living or dead – worth
An excrement of sea-bird?
Worth a single candle-tear?

– And I have said what I wished!
You, even seated there, in a
Bamboo hut – shutters closed,
Curtains of brown Persian cloth –

You would smear floras
Worthy of extravagant Geese!…
– Poet! these are reasons
No less ridiculous than arrogant!…

IV

Say, not the spring pampas
Black with dreadful revolts,
But the tobaccos, the cotton plants!
Name the exotic harvests!

Say, white brow tanned by Phoebus,
How many dollars
Pedro Velasquez of Havana draws;
Plunder the sea of Sorrento

Where the Swans go by the thousand;
Let your stanzas be advertisements
For mangrove clear-cuttings
Probed by Hydras and waves!

Let your quatrain dive into bloody woods
And return proposing to Men
Various matters of white sugars,
Lozenges and gums!

Let us know through You whether the blondness
Of snowy Peaks toward the Tropics
Are egg-laying insects
Or microscopic lichens!

Find, O Hunter – we demand it –
Some fragrant madder roots
That Nature in trousers
May make blossom – for our Armies!

Find, at the edge of the sleeping Wood,
Flowers like muzzles
From which golden pomades drool
On the dark hair of Buffaloes!

Find, in mad meadows where over the Blue
The silver of down trembles,
Calyxes full of Eggs of fire
Cooking among the essences!

Find cottony Thistles
Where ten donkeys with ember eyes
Labour to spin the knots!
Find Flowers that are chairs!

Yes, find at the heart of black seams
Flowers almost stones – famous! –
That toward their hard blond ovaries
Bear gem-like almonds!

Serve us, O Jester – you can –
On a splendid vermeil platter
Stews of syrupy Lilies
Gnawing our Alfénide spoons!

V

Someone will speak of the great Love,
Thief of dark Indulgences;
But neither Renan nor the cat Murr
Have seen the immense Blue Thyrsi!

You, make hysteria play in our torpor
Through perfumes;
Exalt us toward candours
More candid than the Maries…

Merchant! colonist! medium!
Your Rhyme will gush, pink or white,
Like a ray of sodium,
Like rubber pouring forth!

From your black Poems – Juggler! –
White, green, and red dioptrics,
Let strange flowers escape
And electric butterflies!

There! It is the infernal Century!
And the telegraph poles
Will adorn – lyre with iron songs –
Your magnificent shoulder blades!

Above all, rhyme a version
On the potato disease!
– And, for composing
Poems full of mystery

To be read from Tréguier
To Paramaribo, buy back
The Volumes of Monsieur Figuier –
Illustrated! – from Monsieur Hachette!

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The Hands of Jeanne-Marie

Jeanne-Marie has strong hands,
Dark hands that summer tanned,
Pale hands like dead hands.
– Are these hands of Juana?

Did they take the brown creams
From the pools of voluptuousness?
Did they dip into moons
In the ponds of serenity?

Did they drink barbaric skies,
Calm on charming knees?
Did they roll cigars
Or traffic in diamonds?

On the burning feet of Madonnas,
Did they wither golden flowers?
It’s the black blood of belladonna
That bursts and sleeps in their palms.

Hunting hands of the dipterans,
Whose buzzing fills your bruises
Auroral, towards the nectars?
Hands that decant poisons?

Oh! What Dream seized them
In the stretches of yawning?
An unheard-of dream from Asia,
From Khenghavers?

– These hands did not sell oranges,
Nor darken upon the feet of gods:
These hands did not wash the diapers
Of heavy little blind children.

These are not the hands of cousins,
Nor workers with big foreheads
That burn, in the woods stinking of factory,
A sun drunk on tar.

These are the backs of spines,
Hands that never cause pain,
More fatal than machines,
Stronger than a whole horse!

Moving like furnaces,
And shaking all its shivers,
Their flesh sings Marseillaises
And never Eleisons!

They would grip your necks, oh wicked women,
They would crush your hands,
Noble women, your infamous hands
Full of whites and carmines.

The brilliance of these loving hands
Turns the skull of the sheep!
In their savoury phalanges
The great sun places a ruby!

A stain of the populace
Browns them like a breast of yesterday;
The back of these hands is the place
That every Proud Rebel kissed!

They have paled, wonderful,
In the great sun of love, heavy,
On the bronze of the machine-guns
Through Paris in insurrection!

Ah! sometimes, oh Sacred Hands,
To your fists, Hands where our
Lips never sober,
A chain with bright rings cries!

And there’s a strange jolt
In our beings when, sometimes,
We want to unmask you, Hands of angels,
By making your fingers bleed!

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The Stolen Heart

My sad heart drools at the stern,
My heart covered with caporal;
They fling jets of soup at it —
My sad heart drools at the stern:
Beneath the jeers of the crew
Who burst into general laughter,
My sad heart drools at the stern,
My heart covered with caporal.

Ithyphallic and soldiery
Their jeers have debauched it.
At the helm one sees frescoes
Ithyphallic and soldiery.
O abracadabrant waves
Take my heart, let it be washed.
Ithyphallic and soldiery
Their jeers have debauched it!

When they have drained their quids,
What shall be done, O stolen heart?
There will be Bacchic hiccups
When they have drained their quids;
I shall have stomach convulsions,
I, if my heart is hauled up again:
When they have drained their quids,
What shall be done, O stolen heart?

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Rages of Caesars

The Pale Man, along the flowered lawns,
Walks on, in black coat, cigar between his teeth:
The Pale Man broods again on the flowers of the Tuileries
– And sometimes his dull eye has ardent glances…

For the Emperor is drunk on his twenty years of orgy!
He had said to himself: “I shall snuff out liberty
Very delicately, like a candle!”
Liberty lives again! He feels exhausted!

He is taken. – Oh! what name upon his silent lips
Quivers? What implacable regret bites him?
We shall not know. The Emperor’s eye is dead.

He perhaps thinks again of the Companion in spectacles…
– And watches drift from his burning cigar,
As in the evenings at Saint-Cloud, a slender blue cloud.

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The Orphans’ New-Year Gifts

I

The room is full of shadow; faintly
Can be heard the sad, soft whispering
Of two children. Their foreheads bend, still heavy with dreams,
Beneath the long white curtain trembling and lifting…

Outside, the birds draw near, shivering;
Their wings grow numb under the grey tone of the sky;
And the New Year, in a misty train,
Trailing the folds of her snowy robe,
Smiles with tears, and sings while shivering…

II

Now, the little children, beneath the floating curtain,
Speak softly, as one does in a dark night.
They listen, thoughtful, like a distant murmur…
They start at the clear golden voice
Of the morning bell, striking again and again
Its metallic refrain and glass globe…

Then, the room grows cold… scattered on the floor,
Around the beds, lie mourning clothes:
The harsh winter breeze lamenting at the doorway
Breathes its gloomy breath into the house!
One feels, in all this, that something is missing…

So there is no mother for these little children,
No mother with a fresh smile, triumphant gaze?
She has forgotten, at evening, alone and bent,
To spark a flame in the plucked-down ashes,
To pile on them the duvet’s wool
Before leaving them, crying out: forgive me.
She did not foresee the morning’s cold,
Nor close the door tightly against the winter breeze?…

A mother’s dream is the warm rug,
The cottony nest where children, hidden,
Like fine birds rocked by branches,
Sleep their gentle sleep full of white visions!…

And here, it is like a nest without feathers, without warmth,
Where the little ones are cold, cannot sleep, are afraid;
A nest that the bitter breeze must have frozen…

III

Your heart understands: – these children have no mother.
No mother in the house! – and the father is far away!…

An old maid then took care of them.
The little ones are all alone in the frozen house;
Orphans of four years, and now in their thoughts
Awakens, gradually, a laughing memory…
It is like a rosary counted in prayer:
– Ah! what a beautiful morning, this morning of gifts!
Each, during the night, had dreamed of their own
In some strange vision where toys were seen,
Candies dressed in gold, sparkling jewels,
Whirling, dancing a sonorous dance,
Then fleeing under the curtains, then appearing again!
One awoke in the morning, rose joyful,
Lips sweetened, rubbing eyes…
One went, hair tangled on the head,
Eyes all radiant, as on great festive days,
And small bare feet barely touching the floor,
Gently touching the parents’ doors…
One entered!… Then the greetings… in nightshirts,
Repeated kisses, and the allowed gaiety!

IV

Ah! It was so charming, these words said so often!
– But how changed, the house of old:
A great fire crackled, clear, in the hearth,
The whole old room was illuminated;
And the reddish reflections from the great fire
On the varnished furniture loved to whirl…

The wardrobe had no keys!… no keys, the great wardrobe!
One often looked at its dark brown door…
No keys!… strange!… one dreamed many times
Of the mysteries sleeping between its wooden sides,
And believed to hear, deep in the open lock,
A distant, vague, joyful murmur…

The parents’ room is empty today:
No red reflection beneath the door shines;
There are no parents, no hearth, no keys taken:
So, no kisses, no sweet surprises!
Oh! how sad New Year’s Day will be for them!

V

Now, the little ones slumber sadly:
You would say, to see them, that they cry in sleep,
So swollen are their eyes, so laboured their breath!
The tiniest children have such sensitive hearts!

But the cradle angel comes to wipe their eyes,
And in that heavy sleep places a joyful dream,
A dream so joyful that their half-closed lips,
Smiling, seem to murmur something…

They dream that, leaning over their little round arm,
Gentle waking gesture, they advance their foreheads,
And their vague gaze rests all around them…
They think themselves asleep in a pink paradise…
At the hearth full of sparks the fire sings gaily…
Through the window one sees a beautiful blue sky afar;
Nature awakens and intoxicates in sunlight…
The half-naked earth, happy to live again,
Shivers with joy at the kisses of the sun…
And in the old house all is warm and vermilion:
The dark clothes no longer litter the floor,
The breeze beneath the threshold has finally ceased…
One would say a fairy passed through it all!…

The children, full of joy, gave two cries… there,
Near the mother’s bed, beneath a beautiful pink ray,
There, on the great carpet, something gleams…
These are silver, black, and white medallions,
Mother-of-pearl and jet with sparkling reflections;
Small black frames, glass crowns,
With three words engraved in gold: “TO OUR MOTHER!”

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The Drunken Boat

As I was descending impassive Rivers,
I felt no longer guided by the haulers:
Shrieking Red-Skins had taken them for targets,
Nailing them naked to coloured posts.

I cared nothing for all the crews,
Bearer of Flemish wheat or English cotton.
When the uproar with my haulers was done,
The Rivers let me drift wherever I pleased.

Amid the furious splashing of the tides,
I – that last winter, deafder than children’s brains –
Ran! And the launched Peninsulas
Never endured more triumphant chaos.

The storm blessed my maritime awakenings.
Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves
Called eternal rollers of victims,
Ten nights, without regretting the lanterns’ foolish gaze!

Sweeter than to children the flesh of sour apples,
The green water penetrated my fir hull,
And spots of blue wine and vomit
Washed me, scattering rudder and grapnel.

And from then on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars, and milky,
Devouring the green azures; where, pale afloat
And enraptured, a thoughtful drowned man sometimes descends;

Where, suddenly tinting blues, deliriums
And slow rhythms beneath the day’s gleams,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,
Ferment the bitter reds of love!

I know the skies bursting in lightning, and waterspouts,
And undertows and currents; I know the evening,
The dawn exalted like a people of doves,
And I have sometimes seen what men think they see!

I saw the low sun, stained with mystic horrors,
Illuminating long violet freezes,
Like actors in very-ancient dramas,
The waves rolling far their shuttering shivers!

I dreamed the green night with dazzling snows,
A kiss rising to the eyes of the seas with slowness,
The circulation of unheard-of saps,
And the yellow-and-blue awakening of singing phosphors!

I followed, full months, like hysterical
Cows, the swell assaulting the reefs,
Without thinking that the luminous feet of the Maries
Could force the snout of the sluggish Oceans!

I struck, you know, incredible Floridas,
Mixing in flowers the eyes of panthers with men’s skins!
Rainbows stretched like reins
Under the horizon of seas, to sallow herds!

I saw fermenting enormous marshes, traps
Where a whole Leviathan rots in the reeds!
Water collapses amid the calms,
And the distance toward chasms cataracts!

Glaciers, silver suns, pearly waves, fiery skies!
Hideous strandings in the depths of brown gulfs
Where giant snakes devoured by bugs
Fall from twisted trees, with black perfumes!

I would have liked to show children these dorades
Of the blue surge, these golden fish, these singing fish.
– Foam of flowers rocked my wanderings
And ineffable winds winged me at times.

Sometimes, martyr tired of poles and zones,
The sea whose sob made my roll gentle
Lifted to me its shadow-flowers with yellow suckers,
And I remained, like a kneeling woman…

Almost an island, tossing on my sides quarrels
And the droppings of jabbering birds with blond eyes,
And I sailed, when through my fragile bonds
Drowned men descended to sleep, backward!

But I, boat lost beneath the hair of coves,
Thrown by the hurricane into the ether without birds,
I, whose Monitors and Hanseatic sailboats
Could not have fished up the water-drunk carcass;

Free, smoking, mounted in violet mists,
I who pierced the glowing sky like a wall
Bearing, exquisite jam for good poets,
Sun-lichens and azure snot;

I ran, stained with electric crescents,
Mad plank, escorted by black hippocampi,
When Julys made the ultramarine skies collapse
With clubs into fiery funnels;

I who trembled, feeling fifty leagues away
The rut of Behemoths and thick Maelstroms,
Eternal spinner of blue immobility,
I regret Europe with its old parapets!

I saw sidereal archipelagos! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to the voyager:
– Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself,
Million golden birds, O future Vigor? –

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are distressing.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter:
Acrid love swelled me with intoxicating torpor.
O may my keel burst! O may I go to the sea!

If I desire a European water, it is the puddle
Black and cold where toward the perfumed twilight
A crouching child, full of sadness, timidly
Sets afloat a frail boat like a May butterfly.

I can no longer, bathed in your languors, O waves,
Steal the wake from cotton carriers,
Nor traverse the pride of flags and flames,
Nor swim beneath the horrible eyes of the hulks.

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First Evening

– She was very undressed
And tall, indiscreet trees
At the windows cast their foliage
Craftily, so close, so close.

Seated on my large chair,
Half-naked, she joined her hands.
On the floor shivered with pleasure
Her tiny feet, so fine, so fine.

I watched, wax-coloured,
A little bushy ray
Flutter in her smile
And on her breast, – fly or rosebush.

I kissed her slender ankles.
She gave a gentle, sudden laugh
That broke into clear trills,
A pretty laugh of crystal.

The little feet beneath the chemise
Fled: “Do you want to finish!”

The first allowed audacity,
The laugh pretended to scold!

Poor little hearts trembling under my lips,
I gently kissed her eyes:

She threw her tender head back: “Oh! it’s even better!…

“Sir, I have two words to tell you…”

I threw the rest onto her breast
In a kiss that made her laugh
A good laugh that consented gladly…

She was very undressed
And tall, indiscreet trees
At the windows cast their foliage
Craftily, so close, so close.

---

My Bohemian

I was setting off, my fists in my torn pockets;
My overcoat too was becoming ideal;
I walked beneath the sky, Muse! and I was your faithful one;
Oh! what splendid loves I dreamed!

My only pair of trousers had a wide hole.
– Dreaming Tom Thumb, I scattered along my path
Rhymes. My inn was at the Great Bear.
– My stars in the sky made a gentle rustling

And I listened to them, seated by the roadside,
Those fine September evenings when I felt drops
Of dew on my brow, like a wine of vigour;

Where, rhyming amid fantastic shadows,
Like lyres, I pulled the elastic
Of my wounded shoes, one foot close to my heart!

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The Mischievous Girl

In the brown dining-room, scented
With a smell of varnish and fruit, at my ease
I helped myself to a dish of I know not what
Belgian fare, and sprawled in my enormous chair.

While eating, I listened to the clock, – happy and still.
The kitchen opened with a gust,
And the servant came in, I don’t know why,
Her kerchief half undone, cunningly arranged.

And, while trailing her little trembling finger
Across her cheek, a peach-soft velvet, pink and white,
Pouting with her childish lip,

She set the dishes near me, to make it easier;
– Then, just like that, – surely to win a kiss, –
Softly: “Just feel, I’ve caught a chill on my cheek…”

---

Parisian War Song

Spring is evident, for
From the heart of the green Properties,
The flight of Thiers and Picard
Holds its splendours wide open!

O May! what delirious bare-arses!
Sèvres, Meudon, Bagneux, Asnières,
Listen then to the welcome guests
Sowing the things of spring!

They have shako, sabre and tam-tam,
Not the old candle-box,
And skiffs that never, never…
Split the lake with reddened waters!

More than ever we carouse
When upon our dens arrive
The yellow heads tumbling
In particular dawns!

Thiers and Picard are Eros,
Snatchers of heliotropes;
With oil they make Corots:
Here they beetle their tropes…

They are familiar with the Great Trick!…
And lying in the gladioli, Favre
Makes his aqueduct-like whistling,
And his peppery sniffings!

The great city has the pavé warm
Despite your showers of oil,
And decidedly, it is necessary for us
To shake you in your role…

And the Rustics who lounge
In long crouches,
Will hear branches breaking
Among the red rustlings!

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The Sideboard

It is a large carved sideboard; the dark oak,
Very old, has taken on the kindly look of old people;
The sideboard stands open, and pours from its shadow,
Like a flow of old wine, enticing scents;

Quite full, it is a jumble of old old things,
Of fragrant yellowed linens, of rags
Of women or children, of withered lace,
Of grandmother’s kerchiefs where griffins are painted;

– There one would find lockets, the locks
Of white or fair hair, portraits, dried flowers
Whose perfume mingles with scents of fruit.

– O sideboard of olden days, you know many stories,
And you would like to tell your tales, and you murmur
When your great black doors open slowly.

---

Ophelia

I

On the calm, dark water where the stars are sleeping,
White Ophelia floats like a great lily,
Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils…

In the distant woods, you hear the hunting horns.

For more than a thousand years, sad Ophelia
Has drifted, a white ghost, along the long black river;
For more than a thousand years, her gentle madness
Whispers her romance to the evening breeze.

The wind kisses her breasts and spreads in a corolla
Her great veils, softly rocked by the waters;
The trembling willows weep upon her shoulder,
The reeds bend over her large, dreaming brow.

The crumpled water-lilies sigh around her;
She sometimes awakens, in a slumbering alder,
Some nest from which a tiny wing-shiver escapes:

A mysterious song falls from the golden stars.

II

O pale Ophelia! Beautiful as snow!
Yes, you died, a child, swept away by a river!
For the winds falling from the great mountains of Norway
Spoke to you softly of harsh freedom;

A breath, twisting your long hair,
Brought strange sounds to your dreaming mind,
While your heart listened to Nature’s song
In the moans of trees and the night’s sighs;

The voice of the wild seas, an immense groan,
Shattered your child’s breast, too human and too soft;
One April morning, a pale, handsome rider,
A poor madman, sat silently at your knees!

Heaven! Love! Freedom! What a dream, O poor Madwoman!
You melted into him like snow into fire:
Your great visions strangled your speech—
And the terrible Infinite terrified your blue eye!

III

And the Poet says that by the starlight
You come at night to gather the flowers you pick;
And he has seen, on the water, lying in her long veils,
White Ophelia floating, like a great lily.

---

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
Translated by Edris Iravi

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At the Music

On the square cut into meager lawns,
The square where everything is proper, trees and flowers,
All the pompous bourgeois, choked by the heat,
Bring, on Thursday evenings, their jealous foolishness.

– The military band, in the middle of the garden,
Swings its shakos to the Fife Waltz:
Around, in the front rows, struts the dandy;
The notary dangles his charms with numbers.

Rentiers with eyeglasses accentuate every wrong note:
The swollen, grand offices dragging their grand ladies,
Next to whom go, officious lackeys,
Those whose frills look like advertisements;

On the green benches, clubs of retired grocers
Stir the sand with their knobbed canes,
Very seriously discussing treaties,
Then taking snuff in silver, and resuming: “All in all!…”

Puffed on his bench, the roundness of his loins exposed,
A bourgeois with pale buttons, a Flemish belly,
Savours his onnaing, from which strands of tobacco
Overflow—you know, it’s smuggled;—

Along the green lawns, the rascals snicker;
And, made amorous by the trombones’ song,
Very naive, smoking roses, the soldiers
Caress the babies to charm the nannies…

– I am, disheveled like a student,
Under the green chestnut trees, the lively girls:
They know it well; and, laughing, turn
Their eyes towards me, full of indiscreet things.

I do not speak a word: I keep looking
At the flesh of their white necks embroidered with stray locks:
I am, under the bodice and frail attire,
The divine back following the curve of their shoulders.

Soon I’ve discovered the boot, the stocking…
– I reconstruct the bodies, burned by fine fevers.
They find me amusing and whisper to each other…
– And I feel the kisses coming to my lips…

---

Nina’s Repartees

HE – Your breast against mine,
Eh? We would go,
With air filling the nostrils,
In the cool rays

Of the good blue morning, which bathes you
In the wine of day?…
When all the trembling wood bleeds
Mute with love

From every branch, green drops,
From the clear buds,
One feels in the open things
The flesh quiver:

You would plunge into the clover
Your white robe,
Rosying in the air that blue which circles
Your large black eye,

In love with the countryside,
Scattering everywhere,
Like champagne foam,
Your wild laughter:

Laughing at me, brutal with intoxication,
Whom you would take
Like that, – the beautiful braid,
Oh! – whose taste I would drink

Of your raspberry and strawberry,
O flesh of flower!
Laughing at the brisk wind that kisses you
Like a thief;

At the pink, sweetbriar which teasingly
Amuses you:
Laughing above all, O mad head,
At your lover!…

………………………………………………..

– Your breast against mine,
Mixing our voices,
Slowly, we would gain the ravine,
Then the great woods!…

Then, like a little dead one,
Heart swooning,
You would tell me that I carry you,
Eyes half-closed…

I would carry you, palpitating,
Along the path:
The bird would fly its andante
At the hazel…

I would speak to you in your mouth…
I would go, pressing
Your body, like a child put to bed,
Drunk with the blood

That runs, blue, beneath your white skin
With pinkish tones:
And speaking to you in the frank language – …
There!… – that you know…

Our great woods would smell of sap,
And the sun
Would sand with fine gold their great dream
Green and vermilion

………………………………………………..

Evening?… We would take up the road again
White, running,
Strolling, like a grazing herd,
All around

The good orchards with blue grass,
With twisted apple trees!
How far we would smell
Their strong perfumes!

We would return to the village
Under the half-dark sky;
And it would smell of dairy
In the evening air;

It would smell of the stable, full
Of warm manure,
Full of a slow rhythm of breath,
And of large backs

Whitening under some light;
And, far away,
A cow would foul, proud,
At every step…

– Grandmother’s spectacles
And her long nose
In her missal; the beer jug
Bound with lead,

Foaming between the large pipes
Which, boldly,
Smoke: the dreadful lips
Which, all smoking,

Snatch the ham from the forks
So much, so much and more:
The fire that clears the beds
And the cupboards:

The shiny and fat buttocks
Of the big child
Who, kneeling, thrusts into the cups,
His white snout

Brushed by a muzzle that growls
In a gentle tone,
And licks the round face
Of the dear little one…..

How many things we will see, dear,
In these hovels,
When the flame illuminates, clearly,
The grey panes!…

– Then, small and all nestled,
In the lilacs
Black and fresh: the hidden window,
Which laughs over there….

You will come, you will come, I love you!
It will be beautiful.
You will come, won’t you? And even…

SHE – And my desk?