Glimmers of the Shots – In the Cave Shelter

Poem by Guillaume Apollinaire Collection CalligrammesThemes WarPeriod 20th century

I hurl myself toward you and it seems to me too that you hurl yourself toward me
A force comes out of us that is a solid fire that welds us together
And then there is also a contradiction that means we cannot see each other
In front of me the chalk wall is crumbling
There are cracks
Long tool marks, smooth traces that seem to be made in stearine
Corners of cracks are torn away by the passing of the guys of my room
Tonight I have a soul that has hollowed itself out that is empty
You would think one falls into it endlessly and without finding any bottom
And that there is nothing to hold on to
What falls into it and lives there is a sort of ugly beings that hurt me and that come from I don’t know where
Yes I believe they come from life, from a sort of life that is in the future, in the raw future that has not yet been cultivated or
raised or humanized
In this great void of my soul a sun is missing, what gives light is missing
It is today, it is tonight and not always
Fortunately it is only tonight
The other days I hold on to you
The other days I console myself for solitude and all the horrors
By imagining your beauty
To raise it above the ecstatic universe
Then I think that I imagine it in vain
I know it through no sense
Nor even through words
And is my taste for beauty therefore also in vain
Do you exist my love
Or are you only an entity that I created without wanting to
To people the solitude
Are you one of those goddesses like those the Greeks had endowed themselves with to be less bored
I adore you O my exquisite goddess even if you exist only in my imagination

Guillaume Apollinaire

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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