Vendémiaire

From the French of Guillaume Apollinaire

Men of the future remember me

I lived at the finale of the era of kings

One by one they died silent and sad

And courageous thrice-blessed Trismegistists

Paris was sublime at September’s end

Every night a grapevine where runners spread

Lucidity over the city and ripe stars above
Were pecked by the drunken birds of

My brilliance that waited for the harvest of dawn

Passing one evening the dark and deserted quays

On the return way to Auteuil I heard a voice

That grievously sang and kept sometimes quiet

To let the lament of distant other voices

Reach clear to the banks of the Seine

And I listened long to all those moans and cries

That awakened in the night the song of Paris

All the thirsting cities of France and Europe and the world

Have tumbled down my yawning maw

I live already drunk among the Paris vines

To harvest the sweetest grapes on earth

The miracle spheres that sang on the arbors

And Rennes answered with Quimper and Vannes

Here we are in Paris Our houses our inhabitants

These grapes of our senses that the sun holds too greedily

Are sacrificed to quench the marvel of your thirst

We bring you the skulls the graveyards the walls

Cradles full of cries that you won’t hear

And upstream or down pour our thoughts O rivers

The schools are ears and our hands clasped together

Extend our fingers into a steeple

And we bring you too this pliable reason

May the mystery close like a door seals the house

This courteous mystery of gallantry

This fatal fatal mystery of another life

Double reason that is beyond beauty

That Greece has not known nor the East

Double reason of Breton where slice by slice

The ocean slowly neuters the ancient continent

And the northern cities gaily respond

O Paris we are living drinks

The virile cities where the holy metals

Of our saintly factories jabber and sing

Our chimneys in the sky impregnate the clouds

As once the mechanical Ixion did

And our countless hands

Manufacture hands in fabricating plants

Where the workers are as naked as our fingers

Make what is real at so much per hour

We give you all of this

And Lyon replied while the angels of Fourvières

Wove a new sky with silks of prayer

Quench your thirst Paris with the sacred words

May the Rhone and Saone my lips murmur

Always the same cult of his death reborn

Divides the saints and makes blood rain

Happy rain O warming drops O pain

A child regards the open windows

And the grapes of drunken birds head off to offer themselves

The cities of the South responded then

Noble Paris the only idea still alive

Who determines our mood in accordance with your fate

And you who have withdrawn Mediterranean

Do you share our bodies as we break the host

These lofty loves and their orphan dance

Will Paris become the pure wine that you adore

And from Sicily came an infinite rattle

That disclosed these words in a flutter of wings

The grapes of our vines were harvested

And those clusters of the dead whose tumid bodies

Have the flavor of the blood of the earth

And salt for your thirst O Paris here below the sky

Obscured by parch starved clouds

That caress Ixion the asymmetrical creator

And all the crows of Africa born on the sea

O grapes And those dull eyes and family

Bored with the life in these trellises and the future

But where is the bright siren stare

That beguiled the sailors loved by these birds

He will turn no more to the reef of Scylla

Where the three sweet serene voices sang

The face of the strait suddenly changed

Faces of flesh in the waves

Everything imaginable

You’re but masks on faces masked

He smiled the young swimmer between shores

As the drowned floated out on his new wave

To flee the plaintive singers who followed

They bid farewell to the gulf and the coral

To their pale husbands lain on the terraces

Having taken their flight to the burning sun

That followed on the waves where the stars dissolved

When the night came back with opened eyes

To wander to the site where the hydra hissed this winter

And I heard all at once your imperious voice

O Rome

Curse at a stroke my old theories

And the sky where love guides destinies

The stripes pushed back on the tree of the cross

And even the fleur-de-lis withered in the Vatican

Macerates in the wine that I offer you and that

Has the savor of the pure sanguine blood of the one who knows

Of another vegetal freedom of which you don’t know

That she is the supreme virtue

The crown of the hierophant fell on the slabs

She was trampled under the hierarch’s sandals

O democratic splendor pales

The royal night comes where the beasts are killed

The lion with the lamb the eagle with the dove

A host of cruel and hostile kings

As thirsty as you on the eternal vine

Who will rise from the earth and arrive in the air

To imbibe my two millennia wine

The Moselle and Rhine join in silence

Europe prays night and day in Koblenz

And I who lingered on the deck at Auteuil

When the hours sometimes fell like the leaves

From the vine when it's time I heard the prayer

That joined these clear rivers

O Paris your local wine surpasses the one

That grows on our shores but with northern vines

All the fruit has matured for this terrible thirst

My clusters of strong men bled in the press

You will drink all the blood of Europe

Because you are beautiful and only you are noble

Because it's in you that God can become

And all my vintners in these beautiful houses

Whose fires reflect in our two waters at night

In these beautiful houses sharp white and black

To sing of your glory without knowing that you are the reality

But we join liquid hands in a prayer

We lead the adventurous waters to salt

And the city between us like scissors

Reflects no fire as it sleeps in two waters

Whose distant whistling sometimes leaps

To trouble the sleep of Koblenz girls

The cities now responded by the hundreds

I could not distinguish their distant words

And Trier the ancient city

Mingled its voice with his

The universe entire was concentrated in this wine

That contented the seas the animals plants

The destinies of cities and the singing stars

Men kneeling on the shores of the sky

And the docile steel our good companion

The fire you must love as yourself

All the proud dead who are one below my forehead

The lightning bright as an incipient thought

All names six by six numbers one by one

Kilos of paper twisted like flames

And those who will know how to whiten our bones

Immortal worms who are patiently bored

Armies ranged in battle

Crucifix forests and my cabins on the lake

At the edge of the eyes of the one that I love

The flowers that cry out of mouths

And all that I don’t know how to say

All I will never know

All of it changed in this pure wine

What Paris thirsted for

I was soon introduced

Actions beautiful sleep terrible days

Vegetation Couplings eternal music

Movements Adorations divine pain

Worlds that you resemble and resemble us

I drank you and was not slaked

But I’ve learned since then what the universe tastes like

I'm drunk having downed the universe whole

On the dock where I saw the boats sleeping on the waves roll

Listen to me I am the throat of all Paris

And I will drink the universe again if it pleases me

Listen to my songs of universal inebriety

And the September night ended slowly

The red bridge lights went out in the Seine

Stars were dying the day was barely born