Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
To Arsène Houssaye.
Shivering woods, starry sky,
My beloved has gone away,
Carrying off my desolate heart!
Winds, may your plaintive murmurs,
May your songs, charming nightingales,
Go tell him that I am dying!
The first evening he came here
My soul was at his mercy.
I no longer cared for pride.
My glances were full of confessions.
He took me in his sinewy arms
And kissed me near my hair.
A great shudder ran through me;
And then, I no longer know how
He became my lover.
And, though he was unknown to me,
I pressed him to my bare breast
When he came into my room.
*
I said to him: “You will love me
As long as you can!”
I slept well only in his arms.
But he, feeling his heart extinguished,
Went away the other morning,
Without me, to a distant land.
*
Since I no longer have my friend,
I shall die in the pond, among
The flowers, beneath the sleeping wave.
To the sound of foliage and waters,
I shall tell my sorrow to the birds
And I shall part the reeds.
Stopped on the bank, in the wind
I shall say his name, dreaming
That here I often waited for him.
And as in a gilded shroud,
In my loose hair, at the whim
Of the wave I shall abandon myself.
*
Past joys will pour
Their gentle glow upon my brow;
And the green rushes will entwine me.
And my breast will believe, trembling
Under the caressing embrace,
That it endures the clasp of the absent one.
*
May my last breath, carried away
In the perfumes of the summer wind,
Be a sigh of voluptuousness!
May it fly, a butterfly charmed
By the lure of May roses,
Onto the lips of the beloved!
Charles Cros
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-nocturne-charles-cros/