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To Mademoiselle Louise Read.
One evening, I stood beside a window…
Against the burning pane I pressed my brooding brow,
And I saw, far off, slowly disappearing
A misty sun that was dying without splendor!
It was an old sun of the last autumn evenings,
Globe of a thick red, exhausted of heat,
That made no one lower their gaze,
And that an eagle would have scorned!
Then I said to myself, in a bitter joy:
“And you, Sun, too, I love to see you sink!
Star uncrowned like a king of the earth,
Head of a shorn king that night will cloister!”
Tomorrow, I know it well, you will come out of the shadows!
Your golden hair will have suddenly grown back!
What does it matter! I will have believed you die when you sink!
For a moment I will have thought it!
For a moment I will have said: “It is done, he succumbs,
The luminous monster they called eternal!
He pales like us, he is dying, and his tomb
Is but a bloody mist in some corner of the sky!”
Grimace of dying! Funeral grimace!
That in a night-darkened sky each day he makes us see…
Well, it is sweet to me to feel it vulgar,
His way of dying tonight!
For I hate you, Sun, oh! yes, I hate you like
The impassive witness of the sorrows here below…
Thing of fire, heartless, I hate you like a man!
The being we love passes and you do not die!
The blue eye, the true sun that pours life into us,
One day will lose its fire, its azure, its beauty,
And you will light it with your impious light,
Insulting it with immortality!
And that, old Sun, is why my heart abhors you!
That is why I have always hated you, Sun!
Why I say, in the evening, when the day evaporates:
“Ah! if it were his death and no longer his sleep!”
That is why I say, when you rise from a dark sky:
“Bravo! his six thousand years have finally finished him!
The eye of the cyclops has therefore finally found in the shadow
The beam that will have put it out!”
And may the blood rain from it and stream down our brows,
In the place where your insolent rays fell!
And may the wound also seem eternal to us
And take six thousand years to bleed upon our brows!
We will then have only night and its veils,
No more luminous day in a sapphire sky!
But is it not enough, the fire of the stars,
To see what one loves die?…
To see the mouth on fire worn out by our lips
Say to us coldly: “It is over, leave me!!”
And to see love go out that, in our thought,
Lit a sun more brilliant than you!
To see wandering among the specters of the earth
The beloved specter that seems both living and joyful,
The night, the dark night is still too clear…
And I would tear it from the heavens!
Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly
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-hatred-of-the-sun-jules-barbey-d-aurevilly/