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As I was going down impassive Rivers,
I no longer felt myself guided by haulers :
Yelping redskins had taken them as targets,
And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.
I was indifferent to all crews,
The bearer of Flemish wheat or English cottons.
When with my haulers this uproar stopped,
The Rivers let me go down where I wanted.
Into the furious lashing of the tides,
More heedless than children’s brains, the other winter,
I ran ! And the Peninsula, unmoored,
Has not suffered more triumphant tumults.
The tempest blessed my maritime awakenings.
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves
That are called eternal rollers of victims,
Ten nights, without missing the foolish eye of the lights !
Sweeter than to children the flesh of sour apples,
The green water penetrated my hull of pine
And washed me of spots of blue wine and vomit,
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 and delighted
Flotsam, a pensive drowned man sometimes descends ;
Where, suddenly dyeing the bluenesses, deliriums
And slow rhythms under the gleams of the day,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,
Ferment the bitter reds of love !
I know the skies bursting into lightning, and the waterspouts
And the surges and the currents : I know the evening,
The Dawn exalted like a people of doves,
And I have sometimes seen what man thought he saw !
I have seen the low sun, stained with mystic horrors,
Lighting with long violet coagulations,
Like actors in very ancient dramas,
The waves rolling far off their shivers of shutters !
I have dreamed the green night with dazzling snows,
A kiss rising slowly to the eyes of the seas,
The circulation of unheard-of saps,
And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorescences !
I have followed, for whole months, like hysterical
Cows, the swell in its assault on the reefs,
Without thinking that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could force the muzzle of the panting Oceans !
I have struck, you know, incredible Floridas
Mingling with flowers the eyes of panthers with the skins
Of men ! Rainbows stretched like bridles
Under the horizon of the seas, to glaucous herds !
I have seen the enormous marshes ferment, fish-traps
Where a whole Leviathan rots in the reeds !
Cascades of water in the midst of calms,
And the distances cataract into the abysses !
Glaciers, silver suns, pearly waves, skies of embers !
Hideous strandings at the bottom of brown gulfs
Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs
Fall, from twisted trees, with black perfumes !
I would have wanted to show the children these gilt-heads
Of the blue wave, these gold fish, these singing fish.
– Foams of flowers have cradled my derelictions
And ineffable winds have winged me at moments.
Sometimes, martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea whose sobbing made my gentle rolling
Raised toward me its shadow flowers with yellow suckers
And I remained, like a woman on her knees…
Almost an island, tossing on my sides the quarrels
And the droppings of clattering birds with blond eyes.
And I sailed on, when through my frail lines
Drowned men descended to sleep, backwards !
Now I, a boat lost under the hair of the coves,
Thrown by the hurricane into the birdless ether,
I whose Monitors and Hanseatic sailboats
Would not have fished out my carcass drunk with water ;
Free, smoking, risen from violet mists,
I who pierced the sky glowing like a wall
That bears, exquisite jam for good poets,
Lichens of sunlight and snots of azure ;
Who ran, stained with electric crescents,
A mad plank, escorted by black seahorses,
When Julys beat down with blows of switches
The ultramarine skies with their burning funnels ;
I who trembled, feeling at fifty leagues away
The rutting of Behemoths and the thick Maelstroms,
Eternal weaver of blue immobilities,
I regret Europe with its ancient parapets !
I have seen 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 heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter :
Sharp love has swollen me with intoxicating torpors.
O let my keel burst ! O let me go to the sea !
If I desire a water of Europe, it is the black
And cold puddle where toward a fragrant twilight
A child full of sadness, crouching, launches
A boat as frail as a May butterfly.
I can no longer, bathed in your languors, O waves,
Take up their wake from the cotton carriers,
Nor cross the pride of flags and flames,
Nor swim under the horrible eyes of the pontoons.
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-the-drunken-boat-arthur-rimbaud/