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You know love and its intoxication,
You know love and its battles;
You know a voice that addresses you
With those words of ineffable tenderness
That are spoken only in a whisper.
On a fair breast, your wandering mouth
Has finally been able to rest,
And on a dying lip
To feel the intoxicating sweetness
That a first kiss holds…
Master of those envied goods,
Your heart is pure, your days are full!
A slave subservient to your wishes,
Fortune embellishes your life;
You know you are loved, and yet you complain!
And you complain! and you exaggerate
Those vague troubles of a moment,
Those sorrows, those light griefs,
And those pains so fleeting
That one can suffer only in loving!
And you weep! and you regret
That amorous outpouring!
Why these ills you bring upon yourself?
Keep those indiscreet complaints
And those tears for the unfortunate!
As for me, whose withered soul
Has never received an oath,
Like an exile without a homeland,
For me, whom no tender voice
Has ever gently named,
No one who deigns to hear me,
To join my bleeding fate,
And ask me with a tender air
Why I made them wait
A whole day without coming.
No one who urges me
To stay only a few moments
Away from home; who scolds me
When I return and asks me
Where I have been so long.
Never a caressing breath
That, at night, comes to perfume me;
No one whose pressing hand
Seeks mine, and whose arms I feel
Close around my heart!
Once, however – would four years
Have thus erased
What those fortunate hours
Surrounded by illusions
Left deep in my soul?
Oh! it is that she was so pretty!
Whether she opened her eyes so wide,
Or whether her weakened eyelid,
Like a veil that unfolds,
Dimmed her dying gazes!
– I dared to conceive the hope
That the fates, less hostile,
Taking pity on my suffering,
Would come to give me the assurance
Of a happiness they would have permitted:
The hour I had awaited,
The happiness I had dreamed
Fled from my distraught soul,
Like a suspended note,
Like an unfinished smile!
She did not remember
The world that did not see her;
Nothing marked her coming,
She passed, humble, unknown,
Without leaving a trace of her steps.
Since then, sad and monotonous,
Each day begins and ends:
Nothing moves me, nothing astonishes me;
Like a last autumn ray
I see my brow turning yellow.
And far from everyone, when the mystery
Of the future has closed again,
I flee, a voluntary exile!
– There is but one happiness on earth,
That of loving and being loved.
Arvers Félix
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-to-my-friend-arvers-felix/