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On the black gibbet, amiable one-armed man,
The paladins dance, dance,
The thin paladins of the devil,
The skeletons of Saladins.
Lord Beelzebub pulls by the necktie
His little black puppets grimacing against the sky,
And, slapping their brows with the back of his slipper,
Makes them dance, dance to the sounds of an old Christmas carol!
And the jolted puppets entwine their slender arms
Like black organs, their open chests
That gentle damsels once clasped
Collide at length in a hideous love.
Hurrah! gay dancers, who have no belly left!
One can caper about, the trestles are so long!
Hop! let no one know whether it’s battle or dance!
Beelzebub enraged scrapes his violins!
O hard heels, one never wears out his sandal!
Almost all have shed the shirt of skin;
The rest is little trouble and is seen without scandal.
On the skulls, snow applies a white hat:
The crow makes a plume on these cracked heads,
A piece of flesh trembles on their thin chin:
One would say, whirling in the dark melees,
Brave knights, stiff, knocking against cardboard armor.
Hurrah! the north wind whistles at the great ball of skeletons!
The black gibbet bellows like an iron organ!
The wolves reply from the violet forests:
On the horizon, the sky is a hellish red…
Ho there, shake me those funeral captains
Who file by, sly, with their big broken fingers
A rosary of love on their pale vertebrae:
This is not a monastery here, you dead ones!
Oh! look, in the midst of the macabre dance
A great mad skeleton leaps into the red sky
Carried by momentum, like a horse rearing:
And, feeling still the taut rope at its neck,
Clenches its little fingers on its cracking femur
With cries like sneers,
And, like a buffoon returning to his booth,
Bounces back into the ball to the song of the bones.
On the black gibbet, amiable one-armed man,
The paladins dance, dance,
The thin paladins of the devil,
The skeletons of Saladins.
Arthur Rimbaud
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-bal-des-pendus-arthur-rimbaud/