Month: April 2023

Translating French Poems: For Love

Translations of 4 French love poems from public domain poets such as Sully Prudhomme, Victor Hugo, Sophie S’Arbouville and Arthur Rimbaud.

In this post, I translate four French love poems from poets available in the public domain. The first poem called ‘Le réveil’ (Awakening) is by René-François Sully Prudhomme (1839-1907), a 19th century poet and essayist who is known for winning the first Nobel in 1901. The next by Sophie d’Arbouville (1810-1850) called ‘La grand-mère’ (The Grandmother) describes an old woman’s nostalgia for youth. The third is the well-known ‘A Une Jeune Fille’ (To a Young Girl) by Victor Hugo in which the poet gently chides a young girl for wanting to grow up before her time. The last one is Arthur Rimbaud’s lyrical ‘Sensation.’ In many cases, I have not followed a literal translation as I have preferred to render the meaning, cadence and nuance rather than just the literal sense. This has also been a great way for me to spend time reading French and catch up on beautiful poetry. The source for most of these poems has been the very resourceful Poésies Françaises.

Alors à bientôt et bonne lecture! 

Le Réveil par René-François Sully  Prudhomme (1839-1907)
Recueil : Les solitudes (1869).

Si tu m'appartenais (faisons ce rêve étrange !),
Je voudrais avant toi m'éveiller le matin
Pour m'accouder longtemps près de ton sommeil d'ange,
Egal et murmurant comme un ruisseau lointain.
J'irais à pas discrets cueillir de l'églantine,
Et, patient, rempli d'un silence joyeux,
J'entr'ouvrirais tes mains, qui gardent ta poitrine,
Pour y glisser mes fleurs en te baisant les yeux.
Et tes yeux étonnés reconnaîtraient la terre
Dans les choses où Dieu mit le plus de douceur,
Puis tourneraient vers moi leur naissante lumière,
Tout pleins de mon offrande et tout pleins de ton cœur.
Oh ! Comprends ce qu'il souffre et sens bien comme il aime,
Celui qui poserait, au lever du soleil,
Un bouquet, invisible encor, sur ton sein même,
Pour placer ton bonheur plus près de ton réveil !

Awakening by René-François Sully Prudhomme (1839-1907)
Collection : Les solitudes (1869).

If you belonged to me (let us but dream of this for a moment!)
I would like to awaken before you in the morning
To lean over and watch you awhile in your angel's sleep
Gentle and murmuring like a faraway stream.
I would go in hushed steps to pluck wild roses,
And, unspeaking, full of a joyful silence,
I would half-open your hands that find repose on your chest,
Slip my flowers into them and kiss your eyes.
And your startled eyes would come to know the earth again
In the sweetest things that God may have made,
Then they would turn their nascent light towards me,
Moved by my offering and moved by your heart.
Oh! Understand how he suffers and  feel how he loves, 
The one who will place, at the glint of dawn,
A bouquet, still invisible, on your breast,
To bring your happiness closer to your awakening!
La Grand-Mère par Sophie d'Arbouville (1810-1850)
Recueil : Poésies et nouvelles (1840).

Dansez, fillettes du village,
Chantez vos doux refrains d'amour 
Trop vite, hélas! un ciel d'orage
Vient obscurcir le plus beau jour.

En vous voyant, je me rappelle
Et mes plaisirs et mes succès;
Comme vous, j'étais jeune et belle,
Et, comme vous, je le savais.
Soudain ma blonde chevelure
Me montra quelques cheveux blancs...
J'ai vu, comme dans la nature,
L'hiver succéder au printemps.

Dansez, fillettes du village,
Chantez vos doux refrains d'amour;
Trop vite, hélas ! un ciel d'orage
Vient obscurcir le plus beau jour.

Naïve et sans expérience,
D'amour je crus les doux serments,
Et j'aimais avec confiance...
On croit au bonheur à quinze ans!
Une fleur, par Julien cueillie,
Était le gage de sa foi;
Mais, avant qu'elle fût flétrie,
L'ingrat ne pensait plus à moi!

Dansez, fillettes du Village,
Chantez vos doux refrains d'amour;
Trop vite, hélas ! un ciel d'orage
Vient obscurcir le plus beau jour.

À vingt ans, un ami fidèle
Adoucit mon premier chagrin;
J'étais triste, mais j'étais belle,
Il m'offrit son cœur et sa main.
Trop tôt pour nous vint la vieillesse;
Nous nous aimions, nous étions vieux...
La mort rompit notre tendresse...
Mon ami fut le plus heureux !

Dansez, fillettes du village,
Chantez vos doux refrains d'amour;
Trop vite, hélas ! un ciel d'orage
Vient obscurcir le plus beau jour.

Pour moi, n'arrêtez pas la danse;
Le ciel est pur, je suis au port,
Aux bruyants plaisirs de l'enfance
La grand-mère sourit encor.
Que cette larme que j'efface
N'attriste pas vos jeunes cœurs:
Le soleil brille sur la glace,
L'hiver conserve quelques fleurs.

Dansez, fillettes du village,
Chantez vos doux refrains d'amour,
Et, sous un ciel exempt d'orage,
Embellissez mon dernier jour!


The Grandmother by Sophie d'Arbouville (1810-1850)
Collection: Poésies et nouvelles (1840).

Dance, young village lasses, 
Sing your sweet refrains of love:
Too soon, alas! a stormy sky
Will darken the loveliest of days.

Seeing you, I remember
My own joys and my triumphs;
Like you, I was young and beautiful,
And, like you, I knew it.
Suddenly my blond tresses
Showed me a few white strands
I saw, as in nature,
Winter follows spring. 

Dance, young village lasses, 
Sing your sweet refrains of love:
Too soon, alas! a stormy sky
Will darken the loveliest of days.

Naive and without experience,
I believed the sweet vows of love
And loved with abandon...
How we believe in happiness at fifteen!
A flower, picked by Julien, 
Was the pledge of his faith;  
But, even before it had withered,
The wretch no longer thought of me!

 Dance, young village lasses, 
Sing your sweet refrains of love:
Too soon, alas! a stormy sky
Will darken the loveliest of days.

At twenty, a faithful friend
Nursed my first chagrin;
I was sad, but I was beautiful,
He offered me his heart and his hand.
Too soon did age catch up with us;
We loved each other, we were old...

Death broke our tenderness...
My friend was the happier one!

Dance, young village lasses, 
Sing your sweet refrains of love:
Too soon, alas! a stormy sky
Will darken the loveliest of days.

Don't stop the dance, for me;
The sky is pure, 
The grandmother still smiled
At the bustling pleasures of childhood.
May this tear that I efface
Not dampen your young hearts:
The sun shines over the ice,
Winter preserves a few flowers yet.

Dance, young village lasses, 
Sing your sweet refrains of love:
Too soon, alas! a stormy sky
Will darken the loveliest of days.
À une jeune fille par Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Recueil : Odes et ballades (1826).


Vous qui ne savez pas combien l'enfance est belle,
Enfant ! n'enviez point notre âge de douleurs,
Où le cœur tour à tour est esclave et rebelle,
Où le rire est souvent plus triste que vos pleurs.

Votre âge insouciant est si doux qu'on l'oublie !
Il passe, comme un souffle au vaste champ des airs,
Comme une voix joyeuse en fuyant affaiblie,
Comme un alcyon sur les mers.

Oh ! ne vous hâtez point de mûrir vos pensées !
Jouissez du matin, jouissez du printemps ;
Vos heures sont des fleurs l'une à l'autre enlacées ;
Ne les effeuillez pas plus vite que le temps.

Laissez venir les ans ! le destin vous dévoue,
Comme nous, aux regrets, à la fausse amitié,
À ces maux sans espoir que l'orgueil désavoue,
À ces plaisirs qui font pitié.

Riez pourtant ! du sort ignorez la puissance
Riez ! n'attristez pas votre front gracieux,
Votre oeil d'azur, miroir de paix et d'innocence,
Qui révèle votre âme et réfléchit les cieux !

To A Young Girl by Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Collections: Odes et ballades (1826).

You, who do not know how beautiful childhood is,
Child! Envy not our age of sufferings
In which the heart takes turns being a slave and a rebel,
In which, laughter is often sadder than your tears. 

Your carefree age is so sweet that we forget!
It passes, like a breath to the vast expanses of air,
Like a fleeting joyous voice that swiftly fades, 
Like a halcyon upon the seas. 

Oh! do not hurry towards ripening your thoughts! 
Cherish the morning, cherish the spring;
Your hours are flowers intertwined one with the other;
Do not pluck them before their time.

Let the years come! Destiny will bestow upon you
Like on us, regrets, and false friendships,
These hopeless evils that pride disavows,
These pleasures that are pitiable. 

Laugh nevertheless! ignore the power of your fate.
Laugh! do not sadden your gracious brow,
Your azure eye, a mirror of peace and innocence, 
which reveals your soul and reflects the skies!
Sensation par Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
Recueil : Poésies (1870-1871).

Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue :
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien:
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature, - heureux comme avec une femme.


Sensation by  Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
Collection: Poésies (1870-1871).

In the summer-blue evenings, 
I will go to the paths,
Prickled by the wheat, to tread upon the fine grass:
Dreamer, I will feel its freshness beneath my feet.
I will let the wind bathe my bare head.

I will not speak, I will think of nothing:
But infinite love would ascend in my soul,
And I will go far, quite far, like a bohemian,
By Nature,- happy as with a woman.

El Supplente (The Substitute) and What is Literature For?

I resurface on this blog after an eternity. But I saw a film recently that made me want to sit up and write. Since many months, and through the course of my own teaching, I have felt that literature as a discipline and the humanities more generally are dying a slow death. This may be a controversial statement and there could be many to contest it, but the way we read and consume literature is not the same as we used to even a decade back. With the advent of the Kindle and social media and ubiquitous gadgets and the insta culture, we no longer have the leisure or the capacity to read, to savour an experience and to even tell or listen to stories the way we used to. Students just don’t read anymore. This has been extensively written about in the US and maybe here in India reading is not that easily done away with but certainly one sees a change in attention spans. But my concern here is not only reading but specifically the role of literature as a discipline. It seems to me that now more than ever we are called to justify its purpose in a social environment and culture where it appears to be increasingly obsolete.

In one of the scenes of the Diego Lerman-directed Argentinian film El Supplente (The Substitute, 2022), a sophisticated literature professor Lucio finds himself in the daunting task of teaching a class of disinterested and irreverent students in dusty, suburban Buenos Aries. “What is literature for?” He asks his students on his first day of class. “To make us sleep” says one adolescent, while another dozes at the back. “I don’t read” confesses another. “To tell stories.” “Literature is of no use to us.” The look on the professor’s face tells us how difficult it is for him to circle back to a question that he has taken for granted in his intellectual pursuits. His plight in bridging this gap also becomes the journey that he embarks on in connecting with his students and understanding the context of their difficult lives- lives that are caught in the crossfire of state violence and local druglords (reminiscent of Freedom Writers in so many ways). “What is literature for” seems even more difficult to answer when schools are unsafe spaces, where police machinery can barge in to do drug checks and arrest minors without following protocols of minor rights, where hospitals are unsafe and patients who seemed to be doing well, mysteriously deteriorate and even die. What use of is literature in places wired for survival, surveillance and violence? Can one have the leisure to sit and read and talk about feelings? To talk about the nuances of paradox, metaphor and simile? To discuss genres, styles and canon? It seems a tasteless luxury, an outlandish hobby.

Although I am fortunate enough to not face the perilous environment of Lucio and his students, the question “What is literature for”? is still not easily answered. More so, when people still look for tangible results, concrete life-changing metrics and quantifiable returns. Literature is of no use in that sense. Justifying the discipline at the level of an educational set-up especially when competing with other quantifiable disciplines is one thing. But increasingly one finds that there is a dissociation between discipline and the values that were once taken for granted to be a part of it. Literature was for building character, for cultivating human values and empathy, for understanding the human condition in its beauty and terror, for making sense of one’s own journey, for understanding the frailty of human morality, the violence of the human heart and mind. To understand the expanse of that endeavour, required if not leisure at least deliberate thought, pause and reflection. This was certainly not a luxury. It was the characteristic of an inquisitive and balanced mind. But today being called to justify the purpose of this discipline speaks both of the erosion of those values as well as the changing cultures of intellect and what we hold in prestige today.

As Lucio becomes more and more a part of his community, shares the grief of losing his father, saves one of his students from a druglord, he becomes less interested in asking his students what literature is for. Instead in one of the final scenes, he brings a chart with the figure of the human body and asks the students to identify different parts. Once they do that, he points: “Now show me where the soul is” The students reply that it is not visible. “When we use phrases like ‘It hurts my soul’ what do we mean?” asks the professor. “It hurts in places you cannot see.” says one student. “that feeling is beyond pain,” offers another. “It hurts me to pieces.” “I love you with my soul.” “It is underlying, inexplicable.” The dozing kid is wide awake now. The question ‘What is literature for?’ is suddenly redundant.