The young man whose eye is bright, whose skin is brown,
the handsome twenty-year-old body which should go naked,
and which, its brow circled with copper, under the moon,
would have been worshipped in Persia by an unknown Genie;
impetuous, with a softness both virginal
and dark, proud of his first obstinacies,
like the young seas, tears of summer nights,
turning on beds of diamonds;
the young man face to face with the ugliness of this world,
shudders in his heart, generously provoked;
and, filled with the deep unhealing wound,
begins to desire his sister of charity.
But O Woman, heap of bowels, sweet compassion,
you never are the Sister of charity, never:
neither your dark look, nor your belly where sleeps a russet shadow,
nor your light fingers, nor splendidly shaped breasts.
Blind one, unawakened, with enormous irises,
the whole of our union is only a questioning;
it is you who hang on us, O bearer of breasts;
it is we who nurse you, charming, grave Passion.
Your hatreds, your unmoving torpors, your failings,
and your brutalizations suffered long ago,
you give everything back to us, O Night still without malevolence,
like an excess of blood which is shed every month.
- When Woman, taken on for an instant, terrifies him;
love, the call of life and song of action;
they come, the green Muse and burn-ing Justice,
to tear him to pieces with their august obsessions.
Ah! thirsting without cease for splendours and calms,
forsaken by the two implacable Sisters, whimpering
fondly after knowledge whose arms are full of nourishment,
he brings to nature in flower his forehead covered with blood.
But dark alchemy and sacred study
are repugnant to the wounded one, the sombre scholar of pride;
he feels marching towards him atrocious solitudes.
Then, and still handsome, without disgust of the coffin,
he must believe in vast purposes, in immense Dreams or
Journeys across the night of Truth,
and he must call you in his soul and sick limbs,
O mysterious Death, o sister of charity!
Texte from RIMBAUD : COLLECTED POEMS
translate by Oliver Bernard
Penguin Classics 1962, revised edition 1997, page 40
Copiright © Oliver Bernard, 1962, 1997.
