Case d’Armons – The Sighs of the Dakar Servant

Poem by Guillaume Apollinaire Collection CalligrammesThemes WarPeriod 20th century

It is in the hut of round logs veiled with wicker
Beside the gray cannons turned toward the north
That I dream of the African village
Where they danced where they sang where they made love
And long speeches
Noble and joyful

I see again my father who fought
Against the Ashantis
In the service of the English
I see again my sister with her crazy laugh
With breasts hard as shells
And I see again
My mother the sorceress who alone in the village
Despised salt
Pounding millet in a mortar
I remember the so delicate so disturbing
Fetish in the tree
And the double fetish of fertility
Later a severed head
At the edge of a marsh
O pallor of my enemy
It was a head of silver
And in the marsh
It was the moon that shone

It was therefore a head of silver
Up there it was the moon that danced
It was therefore a head of silver
And I in the cave was invisible
It was therefore a Negro head in the deep night
Similitudes Pallors
And my sister
Later followed a tirailleur
Dead at Arras
If I wanted to know my age
I would have to ask the bishop
So gentle so gentle with my mother
Butter butter with my sister
It was in a little cabin
Less savage than our gunner-servants’ hut
I knew the hunt at the edge of the marshes
Where the giraffe drinks with legs spread
I knew the horror of the enemy who devastates
The Village
Rapes the women
Takes away the girls
And the boys whose hard rump leaps
I carried the administrator for weeks
From village to village
Humming

And I was a servant in Paris
I do not know my age
But at the recruitment
They gave me twenty years
I am a French soldier they whitened me at once
Sector 59 I cannot say where
Why then is being white better than being black
Why not dance and discourse
Eat and then sleep
And we fire on the Boche supplies
Or on the barbed wire in front of the bobosses
Under the metallic storm
I remember a dreadful lake
And couples chained by an atrocious love
A mad night
A night of witchcraft
Like this night
Where so many dreadful looks
Burst in the splendid sky

Guillaume Apollinaire

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-case-darmons-the-sighs-of-the-dakar-servant-guillaume-apollinaire/