From our windows, from our balconies, from our brief walks and runs, we embrace the arrival of springtime in Paris despite the distance we must now keep from much of its vitality. All is not azure in the lengthening days.
Sometimes, after a neighborhood walk during which we’ve peered in at gated parks and gardens, we return home and find ourselves grazing on poetry—well, some of us do. We brush by some texts, we shrug off others, we resist veering off to news and rumors on our phones. Increasingly we linger, first on one poem, then on another, until we sink into one and it engulfs us. We stay with it. We reread it. Have we understood it correctly? We contemplate its words and its lines and its entirety. If the poem is in French then we may translate it, if perhaps too literally at first, and work on it until we are satisfied with our day.
Renouveau (Renewal) by Stephane Mallarmé (1842-1898), written in 1862, published in 1866. Translation and photos by Gary Lee Kraut, March 22, 2020.
Renouveau
Le printemps maladif a chassé tristement
L’hiver, saison de l’art serein, l’hiver lucide,
Et, dans mon être à qui le sang morne préside
L’impuissance s’étire en un long bâillement.
Renewal
The sickly spring has sadly driven away
Winter, season of calm art, lucid winter,
And in my being, where dreary blood presides,
Infirmity stretches out in one long yawn.
Des crépuscules blancs tiédissent sous mon crâne
Qu’un cercle de fer serre ainsi qu’un vieux tombeau
Et triste, j’erre après un rêve vague et beau,
Par les champs où la sève immense se pavane
White twilights go tepid beneath my skull
That an iron band tightens like an old tomb
And sad, I wander after a vague and beautiful dream,
Through fields where the immense sap struts about
Puis je tombe énervé de parfums d’arbres, las,
Et creusant de ma face une fosse à mon rêve,
Mordant la terre chaude où poussent les lilas,
Then I fall agitated by the scent of trees, weary,
And digging with my face a pit for my dream,
Biting the warm earth where the lilacs grow,
J’attends, en m’abîmant que mon ennui s’élève…
– Cependant l’Azur rit sur la haie et l’éveil
De tant d’oiseaux en fleur gazouillant au soleil.
I wait, sinking in, for my ennui to lift…
– Yet the Sky laughs over the hedgerow and the awakening
Of so many birds into flower warbling in the sun.