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Groups of laborers, feverish and panting,
Who stand erect and pass down through the ages
With the dream of useful victories on your brows,
Square and hard torsos, precise and strong gestures,
Walks, races, halts, violences, efforts,
What proud lines of valor and glory
You tragically inscribe in my memory!
I love you, lads of blond lands, beautiful drivers
Of neighing and clear and heavy teams,
And you, red-haired woodcutters of fragrant woods,
And you, old rough peasant of white villages,
Who love only the fields and their humble paths
And who cast the seed with a ample hand
First into the air, straight before you, toward the light,
So that it may live a little, before falling to earth;
And you too, sailors who set out on the sea
With a simple song, at night, under the stars,
When the sails swell in the Atlantic winds
And the masts and clear rigging vibrate;
And you, heavy dockers whose broad shoulders
Load or unload, along the vermilion quays,
The ships that go and go under the suns
To subjugate the waves to the ends of the poles;
And you again, seekers of hallucinatory metals,
In plains of frost, on shores of snow,
In the depths of white lands where the cold besieges you
And suddenly grips you in its immense vise;
And you again miners who travel underground,
Body crawling, with the lamp between your teeth
To the narrow vein where the tottering coal
Yields under your obscure and solitary effort;
And you finally, iron beaters, bronze forgers,
Faces of ink and gold piercing the shadow and the mist,
Muscular backs stretched or crouched, suddenly,
Around great braziers and enormous anvils,
Black rollers built for an eternal work
That extends from century to century ever vaster,
Over cities of dread, misery, and splendor,
I feel you in my heart, powerful and fraternal!
O this fierce, harsh, tenacious, austere work,
On the plains, among the seas, in the heart of the mountains,
Tightening its knots everywhere and riveting its links
From one end to the other of the lands of the earth!
O these bold gestures, in the shadow where clarity,
These arms ever ardent and these hands never weary,
These arms, these hands united across spaces
To imprint nevertheless on the tamed universe
The mark of the human embrace and force
And recreate the mountains and the seas and the plains,
According to another will.
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-effort-emile-verhaeren/