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After washing the powerful russet snouts
Of her cows, cleaning the gutter and the litter,
Tucking up her loose skirt to the height of her knees,
Opening, at daybreak, a door with a cat flap,
Kato, the plump child, the clumsy one, sits down,
A big worn handkerchief covering the nape of her neck,
On the old stool that stands on only one leg,
In the dense shadow, where a glowworm still shines.
The rough leather apron serves as a thigh guard;
Her feet are bare in clogs. Here is her pose:
The pail in her lap, her legs spread apart,
Her five grabbing fingers stretching the pink udder.
It is her task at dawn, at evening, in the heart of the day,
To come milk and cheerfully jostle her beasts,
While dreaming with a vague eye of love’s feasts,
Of her boy’s kisses in the carnal celebrations,
Of her boy, the miller, a big, stocky lout,
With blocks of flesh bulging his frame,
Who watches for her at the mill while tending the wheat,
And stuffs her with greasy kisses as soon as she passes.
But her stable with its cows holds her back;
They are there, ten, twenty, thirty, heavy with fat,
Their rumps raised in a stiff bearing,
Their long tails, close to their flanks, swinging at ease.
Clean? Nothing shines like the hair of their skin;
Strong? Their enormous thigh is swollen with muscles;
Their great breath, in the filled trough, stirs the water,
Their horn thrust smashes a partition, at once.
They chew everything with a gluttonous appetite:
Acorns, carrots, turnips, clovers, sainfoins, flours,
Their necks stretched straight and their velvety snouts,
With satisfied snorts from their nostrils,
With tooth strikes aimed toward the basket
Where Kato drops the turnips she trims,
With gentle looks fixed on the hayloft
Where the hay, through the holes, lets its beard float.
The stable is built of solid cob. The roof,
Very old, very heavy, covered with thatch and branches,
On its high frame strangely settles
And extends its plucked wings all the way to the walls.
The skylights in the back allow the sun
To shine through their spiderwebs,
And, in the evening, to strike with a vermilion lash
The white and russet marbles of the aligned rumps.
But, inside, a furnace heat stirs
Rising from mash tubs, bellies, and layers
Of dung piled up, while all around
Hums the black and sonorous swarm of flies.
And it is there she lives, the clumsy one, far away
From the priest who sermons and the farmer who rages,
That she has her corner of love in the hayloft,
Where her miller boy rolls her and ravages her
When the deep stable is carefully closed,
That night around them spreads its drowsiness,
That nothing is heard, except the heavy chewing
Of a beast awake in the depths of the great silence.
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-kato-emile-verhaeren/