TO MONSIEUR BONAFFOS DE LATOUR
OFFICER OF THE LIGHT ARTILLERY2
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That naughty boy…..
(VIRGIL)
WHAT flattery, what wit in
your critique!
But it cannot contradict my failure.
You know, dear friend, that for me the outlook is bleak,
that the object of my pen's laudative labour
abhors both writer and lover with equal pique.
No, believe me, the lovely
Eleonore
will never accept my entreaties nor my hand;
I've dreamt indeed of that day's blessed dawn
but the light of its tomorrow is ever banned.
So why do you prate of attributes and talents
and heap torment on my already distraught heart,
salting the wound carved out by her absence
with teasing visions of a happier part?
Hapless disciple of Ovid and Tibullus,
I dared, enraptured, repeat to her their sayings:
Time, on its
perfidious wing, jealous,
will sweep away even feelings.
All our days are numbered. Life
passes by so fast.
Why waste it
in inflicting suffering?
Note,
Eleonore, this rose's example:
how she's shattering the carnations
all around
but the moment
her petals unravel
her calyx opens and
Love's kisses take the ground.
I tried to sweeten, with
this vain counsel,
the pitiful bitterness of my case,
but it would never prove exorable!3
Love is a tyrant who gluttons on our tears;
under his law none has a right to happiness,
brief pleasures and protracted agonies
the only charities we may anticipate.
Sometimes the flattering lie of self-delusion
would beguile away my wretched heart's dejection.
As I strolled along Ariege's fertile banks
fancy, soothing and obedient, would advance
to my inner eye some kindly vision.
But what if ungrateful Eleonore, far away,
blockaded by frivolity and deception,
made mockery of the fire wasting me?
My dear and faithful friend, here you behold a wretch
roundly disabused of life's illusion.
Ah, unlike him, make sure you stay out of Love's reach!
Bitter regret is the sequel to devotion.
Let Glory, the worthy prize of our warriors,
direct your steps through the fields of Batavia;
stand out among our saviours,
and circle your brow with laurels.
You manage to fight, write, conquer and charm;
may you soon, to the flowers of Anacreon,
add the noble stipend and the acclaim
granted to his men by the Great Napoleon4.
Hasten, you gallant sons of Bellona,
to subjugate his many enemies,
flooring them with your glorious emprise.
Victory is gathering you closer to her.
I, who have only to suffer,
drifting along in listlessness,
pathetic toy of hope's capriciousness,
exist but in a future of endless torture.
Today my only goal is to conclude the course
of a life woven by the grim Eumenides.
I am hanging up my lyre on the barren boughs
of the Cypress tree, a sight to sadden Love.
CONFESSION
________________________________________
OH SWEET confession that soothes my passion!
Sweet hope that breathes new life into my soul!
Eleonore approves of my obsession,
and promises to make my bliss her goal.
Two modest roses, at this avowal,
are spreading in the lily of her face;
her eyes name me the winner as they fall:
I marvel at it, marvel at my masterpiece.
Kind confession, you are soothing my soul;
kind hope, you are beguiling my passion:
Eleonore approves of my obsession;
which is to approve my love and my all.
How this confession electrified me
and amplified her beauty in my eyes!
I would see her smile every time I'd speak
lines that only Love could extemporise.
That sweet confession excites my passion,
sweet hope provokes a triumph in my heart.
Eleonore welcomes my obsession.
Soon my total happiness must be her part.
Until that day I pined away, a prey
to the dark fury of pitiless fate:
but since that day I have floated in joy,
the joyfulest of mortals you may meet.
Charming confession that calms my passion;
charming hope that exhilerates my soul:
Eleonore is touched with my obsession.
She has sworn to make me happy and whole.
TO ELEONORE
________________________________________
BUT you sighed—so that air of detachment
was simply your heart's defensive armour?
You were concealing a wary passion,
you feared and doubted me... Ah! why that fear?
How could the man who is in love with you,
and only you, cheat their faithful lover?
Betray both that surrender and their truth?
No, of husbands I shall be exemplar,
your virtue and my heart the guarantees.
Or, if untimely death is on offer,
I shall have known heaven, and die at ease.
TO ELEONORE
Painting the Rapture.
WE are all here admiring this brilliant scene
where sweet rapture is captured by your genius,
and each spectator in themselves recognises
everything your brush reveals.
COMPLAINT
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TO ELEONORE
Who, out of nicety, tried to
discourage me from becoming attached to her,
worried that she would never recover her colonial possessions.
JUST at the very moment when
hope came smiling to your lover
and he thought no more to suffer,
alas! Cupid proved impotent.
You are telling me to flee you!
commanding me to be fickle!
But my heart is intractable,
glorying in thraldom to you.
The sailor, out in the channel,
assailed by the implacable
storm, can he turn at will for home?
I! that I should subject myself
to the pangs of a new passion!
I! be the one to turn faithless !!!....
Who else could match your loveliness?
with whom else could I be happy?
Forget this troublesome dismay.
What is it you think you lack? Gold?
Your virtues are my treasured hoard;
no fortune else will do for me.
Ah! Come the day when we bold French
whom victory always follows
for gain and for glory's laurels
wrench your island from the English,
then I shall welcome, Eleonore,
the gifts you would confer on me.5
But please don't confiscate the joy
of spoiling the one I adore.
Ambitious am I not at all.
Yes, even if the gods should will
my services to the empire,
to love you is what I'd prefer,
and to inform you so in full.
May this modest sanctuary,
scene of my happiest moments,
transform into a heavenly
abode, simply through your presence!
You'll find within my hideaway
useful leisure, a library,
groves, genial tranquillity,
and a love enduringly yours.
Gladly shackled in golden chains,
I'll take up the troubadour's lyre
to rehearse the tale of my pains.
I'll sing of Ariege's course,
of magnificent embankments
beneath bright, cloudless heavens,
about nooks in the tangled woods,
private, where Cythera's goddess
within freshness and shade presides
over secret, permitted thefts,
instruments of her mysteries.
Give way now to my honest suit;
let's quit Toulouse and the Garonne.
At home my loving mother waits
to embrace the bride I have won.
TO ELEONORE
Message with a Rose
TAKE the transmigration of
souls—
Why should I not adopt this intriguing system
and offer myself to you in a flower's form?
Which would make your lover the rose
you hold so close, as though from harm.
TO ELEONORE
IMITATION OF CATULLUS
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LET'S live to love each other, my dear Eleonore:
the season for loving, all too soon, will be gone.
Those aged frigid-talking ones
and my rivals—let's make them taste the gall
of knowing that this troubadour
is happiest of all men born.
The burning star that
disburses its light
resumes its distant course each break of day.
Inescapably our youth will wither away
like the roses of springtime that shrivel and rot.
Pleasure agrees with us just as much as reason;
come, follow my lead through this dark thicket
whose shadow will shield those kisses
promised us ad infinitum.
Grant them and don't count them! The number's factitious.
At harvest do we itemise each ear of corn?
or compute the flowers growing?
or tally the bounty of Bacchus?
Well, I have a thousand surplus owing…
So don't steel those lovely eyes with blankness.
Loving is living, oh my
Eleonore.
Yield to Love, be pinned by its darts;
surrender to your ardent lover, without fear,
those heavenly lips and delicious girlish charms.
TO ELEONORE
SENT WITH THE WORKS OF TASSO
________________________________________
ONCE Petrarch sighed for forbidden Laura
and the gods never eased his affliction.
Tasso loved; was even unhappier,
a dark dungeon all he got for his pain,
which caused another Eleonore to swoon.
You, more sensitive, beauty I adore,
read his laments and grieve his misfortune.
Like him I was victim of my passion,
venom pumping in and out of my heart.
If your soul had remained cold to my suit
I would have lost my enfeebled reason.
I was losing it: brought to my grave's edge,
ready to die for the lack of your charms,
tears all I could dredge for my empty arms,
last resort of a lamentable wretch.
ABSENCE
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WHEN, at the mercy of
Neptune's fury,
the pale pilot anticipates imminent death,
he is alive with the urge to return to berth;
so, in this turn of my story,
driven too often by fate onto a hard path,
I weep over my leaving and curse destiny.
How absence dismantles the peace of a lover!
Deprived of his mistress, distraught, he lolls and sighs
and if, miserably languishing far from her,
he dreams of the bliss to which his passion would rise,
he cannot escape the relentless taunt of fear.
Deep in diversions, does my
Eleonore
spare a thought for her lover's despondency?
Since I parted from that girl whom I am mad for
many a time my heart has lost its beat.
Eleonore is young, kind and beautiful…
attributes which put my beloved at some risk!
Oh why did that horrible news come to meddle
and wrest this honest troubadour from gentle trysts,6
in which I'd whisper melancholy lays
sweetly to beguile the length of our passing hours?
And I've left her!... How can I know, so far from me,
where the cruel mode in those high glittering halls
has made a mandate of inconstancy,
whether she sighs too, bereft and faithful?
and whether, like the delicate gazelle
who from the hunter's menace shies away
she, impelled by feeling, flees it all
to save for me her heart and her good faith?
I shall return: don't doubt it. What could thwart
my course?
Philomela would forget about her sorrows,
tributaries would reascend to their source,
Spring would be denuded of its flowers
before some other passion
should set my soul ablaze again
to assault it anew with fresh tortures.
RETURN
________________________________________
THE fair dove, Aphrodite's bird, can't thrive alone,
and I was dying, cut apart from Eleonore.
But, like the slave whose master frees him from his yoke,
a fate for which experience could not prepare,
I know a rapture beyond anything I've dreamt.
My duty is discharged; I'm coming back to you
to hush the suffering of too long a torment,
to swear my devotion to you and prove my truth.
As I rendezvous with your charms, dear Eleonore,
I'll forget my troubles in a glut of pleasure,
careful not to burden you with my misfortune,
your tears being the worst thing I could imagine.
Grief, I know, can ravage like a merciless storm
withering the hedgerow roses before they bloom.
Let's banish sad memories to the dim distance.
The urn, the cypress tree—begone gloomy emblems,
never to disenchant our blessed existence.
I shall take possession of you, my Eleonore,
by yielding to you and to love, with my whole soul.
Fly, dawdling stallions, fly and outrun the dawn!
I have not a moment to lose in coming home.
I have what I want. Let others burn for glory,
propitiating the daughters of Memory
with incessant prayers and tributes of incense;
let them hanker after Croesus' embarrassments;
let them, avid for the hurrahs of history,
ape the exploits of the sons of Victory.
Neither gold, begetter of so many evils,
nor war's glory, nor even you, my faithful lyre,
will find itself the object of my chief desire.
Peace is what I choose, a sweet, familiar idyll,
over the applause of a besotted horde.
The latter flatters but also kindles hatred.
Should that make me happy? What, then, do I require?
A tranquil sanctuary, a beloved wife,
to amplify the delight of every pleasure
and help to carry the weight of the pains of life.
SICKNESS
________________________________________
AT last I was about to meet that shining hour,
the crowning moment of my heart's campaign,
when lovely Eleonore, at the marriage altar,
would make her luckiest suitor her mate.
Oh lying hope! Oh passion futile and barren!
Everything has changed: invidious fate
sees fit to halt my flight of joyous delusion
with a bitter jolt of turmoil and pain.
Daughter of Styx, Echidna the implacable,
the scalding, gaunt, haggard-eyed fever,
swoops down on Eleonore, and into her evil
clutch, despite my cries, envelops her.
Cupid, will you suffer such a brazen assault
to rob you of a thing so beautiful?
Hymen, will you suffer a funeral torch
to stand in place of your wedding candle?
No. Cupid, Hymen, look kindly on my prayers
and rise against this murderous monster;
conceal that breast with a shield of woven flowers,
and unseal for us the path of pleasure.
Save her, benevolent gods, save my Eleonore;
let your sublime might bestow a blessing,
that the light of happiness may pierce through despair
and my love and my hope be protected.
May heaven, which favours the innocent, swiftly
deliver me from terror for her fate;
and, serving both of us with her recovery,
save me too from falling through that dark gate.
RECOVERY
________________________________________
GRACES, time to dry up your
tears,
dismiss your uneasy alarms.
Heaven, moved by our weeping hearts,
now decrees an end to torture:
the loveliest of your sisters
is delivered from that dark realm.
Delicious schemes, unseated by my fright,
find your way back to my too-long distracted mind!
My Eleonore is restored to life and to health
as beneficent Hygieia looks on and smiles.
In the land where Virginie was born and died,
she whose name Bernadin consigned
to immortality in his brilliant lines;
in that colony so rich and fertile
where the stolen black African so long a time
submitted to our laws his vigour and his life,
in that climate where winter is a dream,
glorying in Flora's empire,
in the guise of Aphrodite
was born my dearest Eleonore.
That happy hour has come again today.
To escape the tomb, is that not to be reborn?
Yes, health already is restoring her beauty;
her eyes are brighter and her complexion lucid.
Ah, for me, what bliss lies
in store,
when I usher my unassuming prize
with never a blush to Venus's altar
and having crushed all denials
exult in having vanquished her.
DISTICH
Inscribed beneath
Eleonore's Portrait.
MUSE and Grace, two words to epitomise her.
Muse, our inspiration; Grace, our pleasure.
ANOTHER DISTICH
Inscribed under the same Portrait.
BEAUTIFUL she is: her face transfixes the eye,
but artless too, and that's what makes her beauty shine.
JEALOUSY7
________________________________________
I am jealous of the clothing
my lover slips upon her skin;
jealous of the smile, so charming,
that idles with her pretty lips,
voluptuous and wandering.
I'm jealous of the looking-glass
that holds her face, and of the air
softly displaced as she walks past,
and of the pencil that draws her,8
and of the fan wafted with grace
by her hand, coming and going,
and of myself and my poems.
Jealous of every single thing,
all challenges to my passion;
I would even be the shoestring
that tangles about her ankle;
or the clean water from the spring
trickling through her fingers, laving
the lovely paleness of her face;
I would be the grass indenting
as her tread tramples its freshness;
above all, this gauzy thinness
obscuring the throb of her breast,
tenuous, transparent hindrance
set by Love to the lover's quest.
TO ELEONORE
Who was afraid of Thunder.
LET the lightning lance the darkness
flashing its blades above our heads:
harbinger of the storm's carnage,
is it a presage of our death?
Take courage, Eleonore: thunder
shakes its fist at the distant stars;
we are the ones who should shudder
for you waken storms in our hearts.
DREAM
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TO ELEONORE
THE NIGHT BEFORE MY WEDDING
HAIL to you, lyrical night, who during my sleep
brought the shape of Eleonore to my dreaming eyes;
and you, magical day, who hold her in your keep
for my waking self, you too I shall praise.
Oh what a marvellous dream,
Eleonore!
I seemed, simply through tender attentions
that quickened the sweetest rapture
to disarm at last that cruel prudence.
I was a husband in that blessed hour.
In what a rhapsody I devoured you!
You were crying and I was heedless of your tears.
You implored me and in your arms
overwhelmed with wanting I wasn't hearing you.
Those cries, those tears, those timid misgivings
were only tightening the pull of your body.
Such spoils! The lilies! The
roses!...
Soon, wed, I'll have them in my custody.
In vain you keep resisting my wishes;
Love approves them and grants your hand to me.
Tomorrow, adorable mistress, on my knees
at the Father's feet, I must take the oath
to be yours, to love you always,
to stand your defender, friend, lover and hero.
Sleep entangles us in sweet fantasies.
No more shall I have need of them.
My happiness, when I become
her husband, will no longer be a dream.
THE DAY AFTER
TO MY WIFE
________________________________________
IN the midst of our chaste throes, shy,
swaying between pleasure and doubt
you tried to hide your discomfort
and the secrets of your body.
Timorous, a-tremble, distraught,
I saw your soul hesitating,
tossed between love and modesty,
until a burning kiss from me
bore you into bliss, all willing.
Oh the divine might of Hymen!
You went from turmoil to desire
and from desire to intention,
then a forgetting of presence
from which slipped a cry of pleasure,
the signal of your innocence
gasping its last breath.
Yielded to my fierce tenderness,
flushing, you were at my mercy;
pleasure being now a duty
its rush could not be held in check.
See this bud, sprout of the rose-bush,
thankless of the hand that slakes it:
does it find fault with the grower
when it unfolds into a rose?
CREATION
GOD took six days to engineer the world;
then, to regulate its jostling forms,
constructed man in his own dread image.
Surveying all, he found it good—mostly.
One last part was needed, the crowning touch:
woman, completion of the masterpiece.
TO MONSIEUR DEGUERLE
Regarding several epic
fragments, published under his name in the newspapers.
________________________________________
CAN it be true, our new
Gallus,
that you, who with enchanted pen
rendered for us the spurnings and the surrenders
a skilful mistress deploys against hapless men,9
are abandoning your songs to Venus?
Would you forsake love's youthful dalliance
and the tender errors of inexperience
to hymn the horrors of combat,
of Pyrrhus and his bitter victories,
and Paris reaped by death, and in death dishonoured?10
No, go back to those merciful verses
where you exalted the grace of Thais,
to those simple, sylvan spaces,
to those sweet nothings beloved in Parnassus
and echoed by all our shepherdesses.
These lofty rhymes of yours, will they ever equal
those lovely lines, those effortless couplets
which paved for you the paths that led to glory
and rivalled the verse of Bertin?
Many win seats in the Temple of Memory;
a successful ascent can take more than one trail.
Wreathes of both myrtle and laurel
girdle more than one brow hallowed in history.
This hour Anacreon is yet alive:
Anacreon, who only loved and drank
and sang of nothing but his Love.
REPLY
TO MONSIEUR DE LABOUISSE
________________________________________
THIS noble name I've been given,
Gallus, my friend, is truly yours,
our new Eleonore's troubadour.
Many are called, but few chosen.
Your muse, so sweet and courteous,
flatters my vanity in vain,
for Lydia and Lycoris
will not see their lover again.
Give me Virgil's effortless grace,
his flawless lines, gentle sorrows;
give me the talisman of tears
that springs at the catch of his verse;
and perhaps I might treat again
of the Love-God, that flighty child,
laughing, sinless tears in his eyes,
the gladness of the golden age.
Upon my desk, inside my cell,
you'll still find Ovid and Tibullus,
but without the hand of Cupid
their presence is of small avail.
It is up to you, sweet rhymer
of so many artful trifles,
it's yours to hymn the beautiful
in the lightness of your springtime.
An eminent lute, deft and sure,
has resounded to your glory11
and Poetry's new Eleonore
can love in you a new Parny.
MONSIEUR DEGUERLE.
TRANSLATION
Of an Inscription in English.
THE loveliest of knots that nature weaves
once undone is forever broken,
when melancholy cypress must let down its leaves
to darken the place eternal peace has taken.
E N D
