ARTHUR RIMBAUD
(Roman – Arthur Rimbaud – English translation)
NOTE: This translation tries to preserve the meter & rhyme scheme found in the original poem.
I
You aren't too serious, not when you're seventeen.
– A fine dusk; and to Hell with bock and lemonade,
With garish coffee shops in such a glaring sheen!
– You walk beneath green lindens down the promenade.
How good the lindens smell in June; good dusks these are!
The air's at times so sweet it lulls your eyelids closed:
The wind's all charged with noise – the city isn't far –
Perfumed with vines, with beers, into perfumes transposed...
II
– And there, you glimpse so very small a strip in sway,
Its darkened azure hitched at a small branch's height,
Pricked through by an appalling star that melts away
In tender quivers, so small and so very white...
O June night! Seventeen! – You're glad to be a sot.
The sap's made of champagne that hunts your wits for loot...
You ramble; and you feel the kiss your lips have caught
Still palpitating there, as though some little brute...
III
The mad heart Robinsons throughout each novel's dares,
– When, under the lucidity of streetlights pale,
A young girl passes with such charming little airs,
Beneath her father's dread faux-collar's umbral veil...
And, since she finds your own naivety immense,
While trotting with her little boots about her feet,
She turns around, alert and in a movement tense...
– Thus they die: cavatinas at your lips' seat...
IV
You are in love. And rented out till August hence.
You are in love. – Your sonnets gain Her laughter, too.
All of your friends have gone now; you've too little sense.
– Then your beloved, one night, deigned to write to you! ...
– That night..., – you join again the glaring coffee shops,
You order up on bock or on some lemonade...
– You aren't too serious, aged seventeen at tops,
With lindens green that grow along the promenade.