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To Paul Léautaud
And I sang this romance
In 1903 without knowing
That my love, like
The beautiful Phoenix, if it dies one evening
The morning sees its rebirth.
One evening of half-mist in London
A ruffian who resembled
My love came to meet me
And the look he cast at me
Made me lower my eyes in shame
I followed this bad boy
Who whistled with hands in his pockets
We seemed between the houses
An open wave of the Red Sea
He the Hebrews, I Pharaoh
Where fall these waves of bricks
If you were not well loved
I am the sovereign of Egypt
Her brother-spouse, her army
If you are not the only love
At the turn of a street burning
With all the fires of its façades
Wounds of the bloody fog
Where the façades lamented
A woman resembling him
It was his inhuman gaze
The scar on his bare neck
Came out drunk from a tavern
At the moment when I recognized
The falseness of love itself
When he had finally returned
To his homeland, the wise Ulysses
His old dog remembered him
Near a high-warp tapestry
His wife waited for him to come back
The royal spouse of Sacontala
Weary of conquering rejoiced
When he found her again paler
From waiting and love, eyes paled
Caressing his male gazelle
I thought of these happy kings
When false love and the one
Whom I still love
Striking their unfaithful shadows
Made me so unhappy
Regrets on which hell is founded
May a sky of oblivion open to my wishes
For her kiss the kings of the world
Would have died, the poor famous ones
For her would have sold their shadow
I wintered in my past
May the sun of Easter return
To warm a heart more icy
Than the forty of Sebaste
Less than my life martyred
My beautiful ship, O my memory
Have we navigated enough
In a wave bad to drink
Have we wandered enough
From beautiful dawn to sad evening
Farewell false love confused
With the woman who moves away
With the one I lost
Last year in Germany
And whom I will never see again
Milky Way, O luminous sister
Of the white streams of Canaan
And of the white bodies of lovers
Dead swimmers, shall we follow with gasps
Your course toward other nebulae
I remember another year
It was the dawn of an April day
I sang my joy, beloved
Sang love in a virile voice
At the moment of love of the year
Guillaume Apollinaire
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-la-chanson-du-mal-aime-guillaume-apollinaire/