Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
All roads go toward the city.
From the depths of the mists,
With all its stories on a journey
Up to the sky, toward higher stories,
As from a dream, it rises.
Over there,
They are bridges muscled with iron,
Flung, in bounds, across the air;
They are blocks and columns
Decorated with Sphinxes and Gorgons;
They are towers over suburbs;
They are millions of roofs
Raising to the sky their right angles:
It is the tentacular city,
Standing,
At the end of plains and domains.
Red glows
That move
On poles and tall masts,
Even at noon, still burn
Like eggs of purple and gold;
The high sun is not seen:
Mouth of light, closed
By coal and smoke.
A river of naphtha and pitch
Beats the stone jetties and the wooden pontoons;
The raw whistles of passing ships
Howl with fear in the fog;
A green beacon is their gaze
Toward the ocean and the spaces.
Quays resound with the shocks of heavy wagons;
Dump carts creak like hinges;
Iron scales make cubes of shadow fall
And suddenly slide them into cellars of fire;
Bridges opening in the middle,
Between the bushy masts raise dark gallows
And letters of brass inscribe the universe,
Immensely, through and across
The roofs, the cornices and the walls,
Face to face, as in battle.
And far off there, horses and wheels pass,
Trains glide, effort flies,
To the stations, raising, like prows
Immobile, from mile to mile, a golden pediment.
Branching rails descend underground there
As into wells and craters
To reappear in the distance as clear networks of lightning
In the din and the dust.
It is the tentacular city.
The street — and its eddies like cables
Knotted around monuments —
Flees and returns in long entwinnings;
And its inextricable crowds,
Hands frantic, steps feverish,
Hatred in their eyes,
Snatch with their teeth the time that precedes them.
At dawn, at evening, at night,
In haste, tumult, noise,
They cast toward chance the harsh seed
Of their labor that the hour carries away.
And the dreary black counters
And the shifty false offices
And the banks beat their doors
With the gusts of madness.
Along the river, a padded light,
Murky and heavy, like a rag that burns,
From lamp to lamp recedes.
Life is fermented with floods of alcohol.
Bars open onto sidewalks
Their tabernacles of mirrors
Where drunkenness and battle are reflected;
A blind woman leans against the wall
And sells light in penny boxes;
Debauchery and theft couple in their hole;
The immense reddish mist
Sometimes recedes and rolls back all the way to the sea
And then it is like a great cry hurled
Toward the sun and its brightness:
Squares, bazaars, stations, markets,
Exasperate so strongly their vast turbulence
That the dying vainly seek the moment of silence
That eyes need to close.
Such, by day — yet, when the evenings
Sculpt the firmament with their ebony hammers,
The city in the distance spreads out and dominates the plain
Like a nocturnal and colossal hope;
It rises: desire, splendor, haunting;
Its brightness projects gleams up to the skies,
Its myriad gas kindles in golden bushes,
Its rails are audacious roads
Toward the fallacious happiness
That fortune and force accompany;
Its walls are outlined like an army
And what still comes from it of mist and smoke
Arrives in clear calls toward the countryside.
It is the tentacular city,
The ardent octopus and the ossuary
And the solemn carcass.
And the roads from here go on to infinity
Toward it.
Emile Verhaeren
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-the-city-emile-verhaeren/