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With anger, with distress,
With its quadrille refrains,
Hopping along on their crutches,
The vulgar and heavy organ,
At the back of the village,
Grinds out the kermesse.
A few stalls at the corner of the boundary stones,
And a few old people,
On the threshold of a dreary portal.
With anger, with distress, with blasphemy,
But, toward the fair,
All the same,
The organ persists.
Its music of uproars
Breaks apart, in brawls
Of green copper and tinplate,
And cries and grates in the void,
Stubbornly,
Its acid note.
On the square, the church,
Beneath the coffin of its great roofs
And the shrouds of its straight walls,
Silences the reproaches
Solemn of its bells;
A charlatan, on a trestle stage,
Red trousers and green cloak,
Sells, at the top of his voice, life;
Then exchanges, for pennies,
His remedy for werewolves
And the story followed point by point,
On his placard,
Of a black hunchback whom he delivered from quartan fever.
And the organ rages
Its savage quadrille.
And no one, from the nearby hamlets,
Has come running;
Empty the stables, empty the pockets,
And nothing but death and hunger
With which the bread cupboard is populated;
In the misery that welds them together
One feels that the hamlets sulk at one another,
That between girls and boys in love
Poverty unstitches the alliances
And that the days following the days
Each of the villages
Makes its silence with its distrusts.
The organ grating and false,
From the depths of its cupboard
Of ostentatious architecture,
Screams a noise of scythes
And shears.
In the hall of raw plaster,
Where its twisted and discordant cries, thick,
Against walls of lath
Burst forth,
Columns of glass and turning sticks
– Tinsel and gold – decorate its pediment;
And the crushing noises of horns and trumpets
And the fifes, like gimlets,
Whip and pierce the cabaret
With their storms
And go over there
Against a gable, with a crash,
To crush the echo of the main street.
And the organ with its rage
Rouses itself one last time and kicks
With all four hooves of its din
As far as the enclosures and as far as the fields,
As far as the roads, as far as the ponds,
As far as the stacks of maslin,
As far as the sun;
And alone dance at the crossroads,
Petticoats swollen and heavy clogs,
Two poor madmen with two madwomen.
Emile Verhaeren
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-kermesse-emile-verhaeren/