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My dwelling is built on the edge of the gray sea;
The grebes, the petrels and the white gulls
Intersect their flights among its weathervanes
Whose iron arrows creak in the north wind;
On the sea side, lichen covers it;
Ivy clothes it on the land side;
From my door I see the moor, harsh and severe;
But it is onto the great waves that my window opens.
If sometimes I gaze, for a brief moment, at the expanse
Dotted with dolmens, dominated by calvaries,
Where, among the endless broom and the heather,
Here and there a grove of oaks gathers;
If I listen, for a moment, to the faint sound of bells
Reaching me from an invisible village,
In the days of soft mist when the sea, more peaceful,
Has suspended its fierce noise among the rocks;
I spend long days and nearly whole nights,
Leaning on the balcony from which I glimpse the swell,
Whose restless undulation unrolls,
Beneath heavy clouds or light gleams.
I see the harsh combat of winds against the waves,
The waves rising, curving and shining,
Currents of pale green where silver stretches,
And gray billows playing with billows of flame;
I listen to an incessant and deep music,
The slow sighs trailing and dying on the shore,
The wrath that the crash of cliffs stirs up,
And the emotion with which the sea envelops the world.
And above all I watch, on the horizon, the sails
That pass, streaking the sky with their rigging,
O sails, are you returning from your distant voyages?
Are you speeding toward skies sown with other stars?
And, always leaning on the solitary balcony,
My heart lives in the mist where the horizon expires,
For the one I await departed on a ship,
And will not return from the land side.
Auguste Angellier
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-the-balcony-over-the-sea-auguste-angellier/