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To Léon Ostrowski.
It was a proud bird, fierce and solitary,
With pale-gold hooked beak, amber feet, clear eye,
Torn alive from the rock, its lair,
From green waves, clouds, breakers, open air!
They had caught it on one of those tempest days
When Satan, on the seas, unleashes his Sabbath…
A harpoon broke its wing instead of its head
And they made it a convict!
In the depths of a courtyard with four stone corners,
They had interned it, this savage recluse,
Who remained, always its eye withdrawn under its lid,
Like a dreamer dreaming of what it no longer sees!
Oh! It, who when the sea hollowed into abysses
Would plunge into its curve and rise back to day,
How it must have suffered, this child of sublime peaks,
From the flat stones of its courtyard!
How it must have suffered on the dusty slab
Where its foot dried, still soaked in ether!
How it must have suffered from this awful life
Made of boredom of sky and boredom of sea!
How many times I saw it, bristling in its plumage,
The pallid bird, — made stone too by sorrow!
Its gray wing was like a cloak of mist
Hanging over its dreary whiteness…
It stood rigid in this deserted courtyard,
But when, by chance, someone crossed it,
Then eyes open, beak open, wing open,
Toward the passerby, the bird suddenly ran!
From its throat came a strident and raucous cry,
The whistling cry of wind in wet rigging,
And fixing this passerby with a fierce and glaucous eye
It wanted to pierce their feet!
And if it were the feet of some young girl,
Of those elegant feet, in supple boot,
That, slender and arched, molded to the ankle,
Make the teasing morocco creak as they walk,
Then… oh! then more ferocious still
The cruel one threw itself on these intoxicating feet,
As if these sweet divine feet, which man adores,
Were the horror of Gulls!
What had they done to you, these poor woman’s feet,
To enrage you at merely seeing them pass?…
What did they remind you of?… The sway of the wave
On which you once could rock yourself?
Mutilated by the harpoon, with cruel grudges,
Fallen from the airs, fallen from the peaks, fallen from the masts!
They mocked you, these feet, — you thought they were wings…
Gull, you were not dreaming!
O my old Gull, it was not a dream,
The dream of a captive driven mad by pain!
Old pirate stranded on this horrible shore,
These feet, — these charming feet that passed, — these feet of Eve
That one takes in one’s hand and puts on one’s heart,
But that do not stay there, light, swift, unfaithful,
Made to flee from us after having come to us,
O my old Gull, they were indeed wings!
And you, — you felt jealous of them!
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-old-gull-jules-barbey-d-aurevilly/