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The enmity I bear you,
Surpasses—so strong it is—
That of lambs and wolves,
Old shameless sorceress,
Whom the executioners whipped,
Dishonoring you with blows.
Dragging after you a crowd
Of men and women thick,
You showed your flank naked,
And showed naked through the street
Your belly, and your bare shoulder
Reddened with blood.
But the punishment was very small,
If one weighs your merit:
Heaven should not
Pardon so cowardly a head,
But should with its tempest
Crush it down below.
Mother Earth still weeping
For the violent death of the Giants
Burned by the fire of the skies,
(Releasing you from her womb with pain)
Bore you, old woman, for the hatred
She bore the Gods.
You know what the mixture is worth
Of the drug given to us
From hot countries,
And in what month, in what hours
The flowers of women are best
For the love potion.
No herb, whether in the mountains,
Or poisonous in the fields,
Escapes your sorcerer’s eyes,
That you have not cut a thousand times
With a curved bronze sickle,
Gaping against the night.
In the evening, when the Moon whips
Her horses through the mute night,
Full of rage, then
Veiling your furious head
With the skin of a strange beast
You rush outside.
At the mere breath of her exhalation
The dogs terrified across the plain
Sharpen their barking:
The rivers flow backward,
The wolves frightfully howl
After you through the woods.
Then through solitary places,
And through the horror of cemeteries
Where you haunt the most,
To the sound of the verses you murmur
The bodies of the dead you unwall
From their sealed tombs.
Clothing yourself in the vain image of one
You come to terrify with a torment
(Patching up a spell)
Some widow who torments herself,
Or some mother who laments
Her only dead heir.
You make the enchanted Moon
Walk through the air all silvered,
Darting from down here
Such color to her pale cheeks,
That the sound of a thousand cymbals
Would not divert it.
You are the terror of the village:
Each one fearing your sorcery
Closes his house to you,
Trembling with fear that you may taint
His oxen, his sheep and his cows
With the juice of your poison.
I have often seen your left eye,
Three times gazing from afar grazing
The guide of the flock,
Bewitch it in such a way,
That soon after I saw it dead
And the worms on its skin.
Like you, abominable Medea
Was indeed sometimes profitable:
Her poisons served,
Reviving Eson’s bark:
On the contrary, you have by force
My beautiful spring ravished.
Gods! if up there pity remains,
As recompense let her die,
And her defamed bones
Deprived of the honor of burial,
Be pasture for greedy birds,
And for starving dogs.
Pierre de Ronsard
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-against-denise-sorceress-pierre-de-ronsard/