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OCEANO NOX
Saint-Valery-Sur-Somme.
Oh! how many sailors, how many captains
Who set out joyful on distant voyages,
Have vanished in that gloomy horizon!
How many have disappeared, hard and sad fortune!
In a bottomless sea, on a moonless night,
Beneath the blind ocean forever buried!
How many masters dead with their crews!
The hurricane of their life has taken all the pages
And with one breath scattered everything on the waves!
No one will know their end plunged into the abyss.
Each wave in passing has taken on some plunder;
One seized the skiff, another the sailors!
No one knows your fate, poor lost heads!
You roll across the dark expanses,
Striking with your dead brows unknown reefs.
Oh! how many old parents, who had only one dream left,
Have died waiting every day on the shore
For those who have not returned!
People speak of you sometimes at evening gatherings.
Many a cheerful circle, seated on rusty anchors,
Still mingles for a while your names covered in shadow
With laughter, with refrains, with tales of adventures,
With kisses stolen from your beautiful future brides,
While you sleep in the green seaweed!
People ask: — Where are they? are they kings on some island?
Have they abandoned us for a more fertile shore? —
Then even your memory is buried.
The body is lost in the water, the name in memory.
Time, which pours a darker shadow over every shadow,
Over the dark ocean casts dark oblivion.
Soon from all eyes your shadow has disappeared.
Does not one have his boat and another his plow?
Alone, during those nights when the storm is victor,
Your white-browed widows, weary of waiting for you,
Still speak of you while stirring the ashes
Of their hearth and of their heart!
And when the tomb at last has closed their eyelids,
Nothing knows your names anymore, not even a humble stone
In the narrow cemetery where the echo answers us,
Not even a green willow that sheds its leaves in autumn,
Not even the naive and monotonous song
That a beggar sings at the corner of an old bridge!
Where are they, the sailors sunk in the black nights?
O waves, what mournful stories you know!
Deep waves dreaded by kneeling mothers!
You tell them to one another as the tides rise,
And that is what gives you those desperate voices
That you have in the evening when you come toward us!
July 1836.
Victor Hugo
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-oceano-nox-victor-hugo/