Translation of Arthur Rimbaud
As I descended rivers impassive
I no longer sensed myself guided by haulers:
The crying Redskins had taken them for targets,
Had nailed them naked to colorful poles.
I was insouciant towards all the crews,
Carrying Flemish wheat and English cotton.
When my haulers had finished their dins,
The rivers let me descend where I wanted.
In the furious lapping of tides
I, the other winter, deafer than a child's mind,
I ran! And the Peninsulas unmoored
Have not undergone a more triumphant hullabaloo.
The tempest blessed my maritime awakenings.
Lighter than a stopper I danced on the waves
That they call the eternal rollers of victims,
Ten nights, without missing the denied lantern eye!
More sweet than to children are the flesh of sour apples,
The green water penetrated my hull of fir pine
And the spots of blue wine and vomit
Washed me, dispersing rudder and hook.
Consequently, I bathe myself in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars, and lactescent,
Devouring the green azures; where, floating pale
And ravished, the pensive drowned sometimes descend;
Where, dyeing all at once the blues, delirious
And slow rhythms under gleams of day,
Stronger than alcohol, more vast than music,
Ferment the bitter rednesses of love.
I know the skies bursting in flashes, and the waterspouts
And the undertows and the currents: I know the evening,
And Dawn rising up like a flock of doves,
And I’ve seen, at times, what men believed to see!
I saw the low sun, stained with mystical horrors,
Illuminating long fixed violets,
Like actors from very ancient dramas
The tide rolling in the distance its shiver of shutters.
I dreamed the green night with dazzled snows,
A kiss lifted slow to the eyes of the seas,
The circulation of undreamed-about flows,
And the yellow and blue awakening of phosphorus singers!
I’ve followed, for whole months, like cruel hysterical
Jokes, the swell of the assault on the reefs,
Without dreaming that Mary’s luminous feet
Could force the muzzle of the wheezing Oceans!
I’ve hit, you know, on incredible Floridas
Where flowers mingle with the eyes of panthers
In human skins! Rainbows stretched like bridles
Under the seas' horizon, with dull-teal herds!
I saw fermenting the enormous marshes, nets
Where in the rushes a whole Leviathan rots!
Water collapsing in the midst of calms,
And the distances cataracting towards abysses.
Glaciers, silver suns, pearly waves, ember skies!
Hideous beachings at the bottom of brown gulfs
Where giant snakes devoured by insects
Fall, from twisted trees, with black perfumes!
I would have liked to show to children these porgies
Of the blue tide, these gold fish, these fish singing
-- These flowers of foam that lulled my driftings
And ineffable winds that gave me instant wings.
Sometimes, martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea whose sob made my rolling soft
Showed me its shade blooms with yellow suckers
And I remained, like a woman on her knees…
Almost island, listing the quarrels on my slip
And the droppings of gossiping birds with pale eyes
I sailed, when through my frail lines
The drowned descended to sleep, backwards!
But I, boat lost under the hair of coves,
Thrown by the hurricane in the aether without birds,
I, who Monitors and Hanse schooners
Would not have fished out the carcass drunk with water;
Free, smoking, assembled from violet fogs,
I, who pierced the reddening sky like a wall
That bears, exquisite jam of good poets,
The lichens of sun and the snots of azure;
Who ran, stained with electric moonlets,
Insane plank, with black seahorse escort,
When Julys made collapse with cudgel blows
The skies of ultramarine into raging funnels;
I, who trembled, feeling a moan from fifty leagues
Of horny Behemoths and Maelstroms thick,
Eternal spinner of blue immobilities,
I miss Europe with its ancient parapets!
I saw sidereal archipelagos! And islands
Whose delirious skies are opened to the sailor:
- Is it in these bottomless nights you sleep and are exiled,
Million birds of gold, O Life Force of the future?
But, it's true, I too much cried! The Dawns are dreadful.
Any moon is atrocious and any sun bitter:
Acrid love has swollen me with drunken torpors.
O how my keel explodes! O that I go to the sea!
If I desire any water in Europe, it's the pool
Black and cold where towards sunset
A child full of sadness, crouching, releases
A frail boat like a May butterfly.
I can no longer, bathed in your langours, O waves,
Enter the wake of the cotton carriers,
Neither to cross the pride of flags and blazing pennants,
Nor swim under prison barges' horrible eyes.
