Lento

Poem by Charles Cros Collection The Sandalwood CasketPeriod 19th century

I want to bury in the shroud of rhyme
This memory, immense unease that weighs on me.

When I have written these verses, when all have read them
My malady, made common, will pursue me no more.

For this ill is too great for me alone to keep
So I open my soul to the clamorous crowd.

Besiege the retreat of my departed dreams,
And scatter what remains of perfumes there.

Trample the soft nest of silk and fur;
Melt down the gold, tear out the stones from the ornaments.

Dishonor the instruments. Clog the paneling;
And sell at auction what you have taken.

So that, if some evening the obsession too strong
Brings me back, nothing there speaks of the dead woman.

May no corner remain intimate, undeflowered.
Perhaps only then will I be healed.

POEMS
(With slow rhythms, I lull my reverie
As a mother does her crying child.)

One day, I placed my heart in her little hand
And, all in bloom, my dear hopes of tomorrow.

Love pays so well for the treasures one gives it!
And the loving woman was so frail, so dainty!

So dainty that one would have taken her for a child
Too early beautiful and defended by her innocence.

But she delivered to me her woman’s breast,
Whose heavings seemed to betray a soul.

She bathed my eyes in the light of her eyes,
And my lips in her delicious kisses.

(With soft rhythms, I lull my reverie
As a mother does her crying child.)

But one must not believe in the soul of contours,
In the thought enclosed in two velvet eyes.
For one morning, I saw that my dear lover
Hid a great disaster in her hollow breast.

I saw that her youth was a false exterior,
That the soul was worn and the sweet dreams dead.

I felt the stupefaction of a greedy possessor
Who finds, on waking, his house bare and empty.

I searched for my treasures. All stolen or broken!
All, even the memory of our first kisses!

In the garden of hope, the harsh devastator
Left nothing, wanting nothing there to bloom again.

I picked up my heart, half-gnawed in a corner,
And I went away I know not where, far away.

(With dull rhythms, I lull my reverie
As a mother does her crying child.)

It was proudly, at first, that I went away
Thinking that with the first cold, I would be consoled.

Simulating carelessness, I walked through the streets.
All of them, we had traveled together!

I did not even dare flee the evil in the woods.
We kissed there so much in the past!

Close my eyes? Dream? I had not in my soul
A corner that had not kept the scent of that woman.

So I wanted, feeling my reason collapse,
To see her again, without concern for her deflowering.
But I found no one anymore in her form.
Then despair took me, heavy, dull, enormous.

And I endured that for months, for very long months,
So strongly that, in speaking too much of it, my voice trembles.

Now it is finished. Memory that oppresses me,
You will remain, frozen, under your shroud of rhymes.

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-lento-charles-cros/