Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
I listened long to your sweet whisperings,
Muse or demon of present days. But you lie!
Come, Nymphs, with your long tresses;
Sing, nightingales long dead in the branches,
Perfumes of before, perfumes of over there: my weariness
Wants to forget, in you, the scents of today.
Come Sylvans, come Fauns, come Dryads!
We have suffered so much from living in these bland times.
Come Dryads and Sylvans! dance in rings
On the lawns! Come, Bacchus, and we shall laugh
Come! What are you doing over there, deep in Asia?
Your drunken women, and your tigers?… fancy
Of vetiver, of musk, of betel, of sandalwood;
Those women with their metal adornments,
Those rubies, those sapphires, those flowers, poison that lulls,
Are not worth impassive and perverse Europe.
Come! Here rises the great oak, the pine;
Come to the happy land of cool wine, of good bread.
Here is Hellas! We are going to have feasts
Brighter than the fairest dreams of the prophets.
Come then see these streams, this sky, these olive trees,
These mountains whence the envied marbles were taken.
Let us walk. See then these men and these women
Whose forms and souls will forever remain;
The women, through the curtain of reeds,
Swimming, chattering louder than the birds;
The men, reciting verses beneath the porticoes,
Interrupt themselves with laughing criticisms.
They follow the path lined with tombs,
For in this country, even the dead are beautiful;
And Plato, through his beard of blond waves,
Melodiously, tells the song of the worlds.
Praxiteles goes off, over there, with Venus
Whom he sculpted and who surely owes him her bare breasts…
At the market, colored with lemons, with tomatoes,
See those vendors with straight noses, with matte pallors;
Aristophanes laughs and quarrels with
Those shameless fruit-girls in the purest Greek accent.
Enough of your sachets, girls of Thessaly!
Let us go farther, let us pass the alley soiled
By cabbage stumps and pea pods.
Let us go farther still, let us go to the places
Where the flute sighs, where the harp resounds.
Oh! it is not Orpheus, Homer nor anyone
Whom we shall be made to hear here, but songs
That one forgets and always that one will make again. Let us pass.
And these temples and these monuments of victory
Unhoped-for, which reason could not have believed!
On these amber marbles, what red words do we read?
Dead at Plataea, at Salamis, at Marathon!
These are the immortal memories of the battles
Where ten thousand Athenians – that is, ten thousand scoundrels,
Killed by chance a hundred thousand good Persians
Well armed, well fed, well arrayed, well heavy.
The Agora! how they argue there, how they bustle!
But I know this human tide all too well;
Did I dream, Bacchus? These words, these cries,
These businessmen, that reminds me of Paris.
Come Sylvans, come Fauns, come Dryads!
Come! The present days will no longer be so bland.
Put on ties, Sylvans; Fauns, put on gloves;
Dryads, show us your arrogant hats,
Let us go to supper, Bacchus! Paris is well worth Athens.
I leave without regrets my distant visions.
Oh! Lull me still with your whisperings,
Muse or demon of present and charming days.
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-evocation-charles-cros/