Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
When the great Byron was about to leave Ravenna,
And seek upon the seas some distant shore
Where he might end as a hero his immortal ennui,
As he sat at the feet of his mistress,
Pale, and already turned toward Greece,
The one he then called his Guiccioli
Opened one evening a book in which he was spoken of.
Have you kept the memory of that time,
Lamartine, and those verses to the prince of the proscribed,
Do you still remember who had written them?
You were young then, you, our dear glory.
You had just tried for the first time
That beautiful tearful lute that vibrates beneath your fingers.
The Muse whom heaven had betrothed to you
Upon your dreaming brow sought your thought,
Still a timid virgin, a lover of laurels.
You did not know, noble son of France,
You did not know, except through his suffering,
That sublime proud one to whom you were writing.
By what right did you dare approach and pity him?
What eagle, Ganymede, bore you to that God?
Did you sense that one day you might reach him,
He who from so high then listened to you?
No, you were twenty, and your heart was beating.
You had read Lara, Manfred and the Corsair,
And you had written without drying your tears;
Byron’s breath lifted you from the earth,
And you went to him, carried by his sorrows.
You called from afar that desolate soul;
However great he seemed to you, you felt him a friend
And, like the torrent in the green valley,
The echo of his genius had groaned within you.
And he, he whose Europe, still all in arms,
Listened trembling to his savage concerts;
He who for ten years had fled his renown,
And with his solitude filled the universe;
He, the great inspired one of Melancholy,
Who, weary of being envied, turned into a martyr;
He, the last lover of poor Italy,
Preparing to depart for his final exile;
He who, surfeited with human greatness,
Like a swan sensing its approaching death in its song,
Sought upon earth around him for whom to die…
He listened to those verses his mistress was reading,
That gentle distant greeting from an unknown young man.
I do not know if he understood the richness of the style;
He let his sadness smile in his eyes:
What came from the heart was welcome to him.
Poet, now that your faithful muse,
By your modest love sure of being immortal,
Has crowned your brow with flowering verbena,
In your turn, receive me as the great Byron did.
Of ever equaling you I have no hope;
What you hold from heaven, no one has promised me,
But from your fate to mine the distance is greater,
Better will be the God who can make us friends.
I do not address useless praises to you,
And I do not dream that you will answer me;
To be proposed, these illustrious exchanges
Must be signed with a name I do not have.
I long believed that I was weary of the world;
I said that I denied, thinking I had doubted,
And I took, before me, for a deep night
My shadow passing by, full of vanity.
Poet, I write to you to tell you that I love,
That a ray of sun has fallen down to me,
And that on a day of mourning and supreme sorrow
The tears I shed made me think of you.
Which of us, Lamartine, and of our youth,
Does not know by heart that song, adored by lovers,
Which one evening, by a lake, you sighed to us?
Who has not read a thousand times, who does not reread ceaselessly
Those mysterious verses where your mistress speaks,
And who has not sobbed over those divine sobs,
Deep as the sky and pure as the waves?
Alas! those long regrets of deceitful loves,
Those ruins of time found at every step,
Those infinite furrows of ephemeral gleams,
Who can call himself a man and not know them?
Whoever has ever loved bears a scar;
Each has it in his breast, always ready to open;
Each keeps it within himself, dear and secret torment,
And the more he is struck, the less he wishes to be healed.
Shall I tell you, to you, singer of suffering,
That your glorious ill, I too have suffered it?
That for a moment, like you, before that immense sky,
I clasped in my arms life and hope,
And that like yours, my dream fled?
Shall I tell you that one evening, in the scented breeze,
Asleep, like you, in the peace of happiness,
To the celestial accents of a beloved voice,
I thought I felt time stop within my heart?
Shall I tell you that one evening, left alone on the earth,
Devoured, like you, by a dreadful memory,
I was astonished at my own misery,
And that a child can suffer without dying?
Ah! what I felt in that terrible instant,
Shall I dare complain of it and recount it to you?
How shall I express an unspeakable pain?
After you, before you, can I still attempt it?
Yes, of that fatal day, full of horror and charms,
I wish faithfully to give you the account;
These are not songs, these are not tears,
And I shall tell you only what God told me.
When the plowman, returning to his cottage,
Finds in the evening his field shorn by lightning,
He first believes a dream has fascinated his eyes,
And, doubting himself, questions the heavens.
Everywhere the night is dark, and the earth aflame.
He searches around him for the accustomed place
Where his wife waits for him on the half-open threshold;
He sees a little ash in the midst of a desert.
His half-naked children come out of the heather,
And come to tell him how their poor mother
Died beneath the thatch with frightful cries;
But now far off everything is silent.
The wretch listens and understands his ruin.
He clasps, desolate, his sons to his breast;
There remains to him no more, if he does not stretch out his hand,
Than hunger for this evening and death for tomorrow.
Not a sob comes from his oppressed throat;
Mute and staggering, without strength and without thought,
He sits apart, his eyes on the horizon,
And watching his burned harvest flee,
In the black whirlwinds of thick smoke
The intoxication of misfortune carries away his reason.
Thus, when abandoned by an unfaithful lover,
For the first time I knew sorrow,
Pierced suddenly by a bloody arrow,
Alone I sat down in the night of my heart.
It was not by a lake with limpid waves,
Nor on the flowering grass on the slope of hills;
My eyes drowned in tears saw only the void,
My stifled sobs awakened no echoes.
It was in a dark and winding street
Of that immense sewer called Paris:
Around me cried that mocking crowd
Which never hears the cries of the unfortunate.
On the blackened pavement the pallid lanterns
Shed a doubtful light sadder than night,
And, following at random those vague and dim fires,
The man passed in the shadow, going where noise goes.
Everywhere echoed as if a strange joy;
It was in February, in carnival time.
The wine-soaked masks, crossing in the mire,
Accosted one another with an insult or a banal refrain.
In an open carriage a crowded troop
Appeared at moments beneath the rainy sky,
Then was lost in the distance in the senseless city,
Howling an impure hymn beneath the burning resin.
Meanwhile old men, children and women
Smeared themselves with dregs in the depths of taverns,
While from the night the infamous priestesses
Paraded here and there their troubled specters.
One would have said a portrait of ancient debauchery,
One of those famous evenings, dear to the Roman people,
When from secret temples impudent Venus
Came out disheveled, a torch in her hand.
Just God! to weep alone on such a night!
O my only love! what had I done to you?
You could leave me, you who swore the day before
That you were my life and that God knew it?
Ah! did you know it, cold and cruel friend,
That through this shame and this darkness
I was there, watching from your cherished lamp,
Like a star in the sky, the trembling light?
No, you knew nothing of it, I did not see your shadow,
Your hand did not come to half-open your curtain.
You did not look to see if the sky was dark;
You did not seek me in that frightful tomb!
Lamartine, it is there, in that dark street,
Seated on a stone, at the corner of a crossroads,
Both hands on my heart, and pressing my wound,
And feeling an invincible love bleed there;
It is there, in that night of horror and distress,
Amid the transports of a furious people
Who seemed as they passed to cry to my youth,
“You who weep tonight, did you not laugh like them?”
It is there, before that wall, where I struck my head,
Where I twice placed the blade on my bare breast;
It is there, will you believe it? chaste and noble poet,
That I remembered your divine songs.
O you who know how to love, answer, lover of Elvira,
Do you understand that one leaves and says farewell?
Do you understand that the hand can write that word,
And the heart sign it, and the lips say it,
The lips, which a kiss has just united before God?
Do you understand that a bond which, in the immortal soul,
Each day deeper, forms unknown to us;
Which uproots in us the rebellious will,
And attaches to the heart its marvelous tissue;
An all-powerful bond whose knots and web
Are harder than rock and than diamonds;
Which fears neither time, nor iron, nor flame,
Nor death itself, and which makes lovers
Even in the tomb love each other’s bones;
Do you understand that ten years this bond entwines us,
That for ten years it makes one single being of two,
Then suddenly breaks, and, lost in space,
Leaves us terrified at having believed we lived happy?
O poet! it is hard that human nature,
Which walks with measured steps toward a certain end,
Must still drag itself there carrying a cross,
And that here below one must die more than once.
For by what other name can be called on earth
This necessity of changing misery,
Which makes us, day and night, take everything and leave everything.
So that our time is spent in coveting?
Are they not deaths, and frightful deaths,
So many changes of beings so variable,
Who always say they are tired of hoping,
And who are always ready to be transfigured?
What a tomb the heart is, and what solitude!
How does passion become habit,
And how does it happen that, without stumbling over it,
Man can walk upon his own debris?
Yet he walks there; it is God who invites him.
He goes sowing everywhere and lavishing his life:
Desire, fear, anger, restlessness, ennui,
All passes and disappears, all is phantom in him.
His miserable heart is made in such a way
That he ceaselessly flees so that a ruin may come out of it;
That death be his end, he does not ignore it,
And, walking toward death, he dies at every step.
He dies in his friends, in his son, in his father,
He dies in what he mourns and in what he hopes;
And, not to speak of the bodies that must be buried,
What then is forgetting, if it is not dying?
Ah! it is more than dying, it is surviving oneself.
The soul returns to heaven when one loses what one loves.
There remains of us only a living corpse;
Despair inhabits it, and nothingness awaits it.
Well then! good or bad, inflexible or fragile,
Humble or proud, sad or gay, but always groaning,
This man, such as he is, this being made of clay,
You have seen him, Lamartine, and his blood is your blood.
His happiness is yours, his sorrow is yours;
And of the ills that here below he must endure
Not one that does not touch you and does not belong to you;
Since you know how to sing, friend, you know how to weep.
Tell me, what do you think of it in your days of sadness?
What has misfortune told you, when you consulted it?
Deceived by your friends, betrayed by your mistress,
Did you ever doubt heaven and yourself?
No, Alphonse, never. Sad experience
Brings us ashes, and does not extinguish the fire.
You respect the evil done by Providence,
You let it pass, and you believe in your God.
Whatever he may be, he is mine; there are not two beliefs
I do not know his name, I have looked at the heavens;
I know they are His, I know they are immense,
And that immensity cannot belong to two.
I have known, still young, severe sufferings,
I have seen the woods turn green, and I have tried to love.
I know what the earth swallows of hopes,
And, to harvest there, what must be sown.
But what I have felt, what I want to write to you,
Is what the angels of sorrow have taught me;
I know it still better and can tell it to you better,
For their sword, entering, engraved it in my heart:
Creature of a day who stirs for an hour,
Of what do you come to complain and who makes you groan?
Your soul troubles you, and you think it weeps:
Your soul is immortal, and your tears will dry up.
You feel your heart seized by a woman’s whim,
And you say it breaks from suffering.
You ask God to relieve your soul:
Your soul is immortal, and your heart will heal.
The regret of an instant troubles and devours you;
You say the past veils the future from you.
Do not complain of yesterday; let the dawn come:
Your soul is immortal, and time will flee
Your body is cast down by the ill of your thought;
You feel your brow weigh and your knees bend.
Fall, kneel down, senseless creature:
Your soul is immortal, and death will come.
Your bones in the coffin will fall to dust
Your memory, your name, your glory will perish,
But not your love, if your love is dear to you:
Your soul is immortal, and will remember it.
Alfred De Musset
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-letter-to-m-de-lamartine-alfred-de-musset/