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As it was the eve of the fourteenth of July
Around four in the afternoon
I went down into the street to see the acrobats
These people who do tricks in the open air
Are beginning to be rare in Paris
In my youth we saw many more than today
They have almost all gone off to the provinces
I took the Boulevard Saint-Germain
And on a little square situated between Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the
statue of Danton
I met the acrobats
The crowd surrounded them, mute and resigned to waiting
I made a place for myself in that circle so as to see everything
Formidable weights
Cities of Belgium lifted at arm’s length by a Russian worker from
Longwy
Black hollow dumbbells whose shaft is a frozen river
Fingers rolling a cigarette bitter and delicious as life
Numerous dirty carpets covered the ground
Carpets that have folds that will never be smoothed out
Carpets that are almost entirely the color of dust
And where a few yellow or green stains have persisted
Like a tune that pursues you
Do you see the thin and savage character
The ashes of his fathers came out on him as a graying beard
He thus wore all his heredity on his face
He seemed to dream of the future
While mechanically turning a barrel organ
Whose slow voice lamented marvelously
The gurglings the clinkers and the muffled groans
The acrobats did not move
The oldest wore tights the color of that purplish pink that some
fresh young girls have on their cheeks but near to death
That pink nests especially in the folds that often surround their
mouth
Or near the nostrils
It is a pink full of treachery
Did this man thus carry on his back
The ignoble tint of his lungs
Arms arms everywhere mounted guard
The second acrobat
Was clothed only in his shadow
I looked at him for a long time
His face escapes me entirely
He is a man without a head
Another, finally, looked like a hoodlum
A good apache and a scoundrel at the same time
With his baggy trousers and sock suspenders
Would he not have looked like a pimp from his
grooming
The music fell silent and there were negotiations with the
public
Which coin by coin threw onto the carpet the sum of two francs
fifty
Instead of the three francs that the old man had fixed as
the price of the tricks
But when it was clear that no one would give anything
more
They decided to begin the show
From under the organ came a very little acrobat dressed in pulmonary pink
With fur on the wrists and ankles
He uttered brief cries
And bowed, politely spreading his forearms
Hands open
One leg behind, ready for genuflection
He bowed thus to the four cardinal points
And when he walked on a ball
His slender body became a music so delicate that
no one among the spectators was insensitive to it
A little spirit without any humanity
Thought each one
And this music of forms
Destroyed that of the mechanical organ
Which the man with the face covered in ancestors was grinding out
The little acrobat turned cartwheels
With so much harmony
That the organ stopped playing
And the organist hid his face in his hands
With fingers like the descendants of his destiny
Tiny fetuses that came out of his beard
New Redskin cries
Angelic music of the trees
Disappearance of the child
The acrobats lifted the big dumbbells at arm’s length
They juggled with the weights
But each spectator sought within himself the miraculous child
Century O century of clouds
Guillaume Apollinaire
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-waves-a-phantom-of-clouds-guillaume-apollinaire/