If you go away
If you go away one day
You'll forget me.
Love words
Do not travel.
If you go away
The sea will still come towards the shore,
Wild flowers,
In the heavy wheat,
will still come...
If you go away
If you go away one day
You will forget me
Love wounds
Do not open up
If you go away
The spring will still swell the river
New loves,
Towards the summer weather,
will always go...
If you go away
If you go away, one day
Everything will end,
Love things
Do not live
If you go away
Death will always triumph over the prime of life
It's her work
Despite love
Which always dies...
If you go away
If you go away, one day
Remember
Love words
Do not fly away.
If you go away
Beyond life towards the light
Where the prayers
Do not arrive anymore
They are lost...
If you go away
If you go away one day
In those areas
We'll talk about love
Like in the old days...
If it's possible!
My mother, here comes the time
To pray for my salvation
Mathilde came back
Bougnat*, you can keep your wine
Tonight, I'll drink my sorrow
Mathilde came back
You the servant, you Maria
Maybe you'd do better to change our sheets
Mathilde came back
My friends, do not leave me, no
Tonight I return to combat
Cursed Mathilde since you are here
My heart, my heart do not race
Do as if you didn't know
That the Mathilde came back
My heart, stop repeating that
She is more beautiful than before the summer
The Mathilde who came back
My heart stop shaking about
Remember she teared you up
The Mathilde who came back
My friends, do not leave me, no
Tell me, tell me, that I shouldn't
Cursed Mathilde since you are here
And you my hands, stay calm
It's a dog coming back from the town
Mathilde came back
And you my hands, do not hit
All this does not concern you
Mathilde came back
And you my hands, do not shake anymore
Remember when I was crying on you.
Mathilde came back
You my hands, do not open
You my arms, do not stretch
Blasted Mathilde since you are here
My mother, stop praying
Your Jacques is going back to hell
Mathilde came back to me
Bougnat*, bring us wine
The one for weddings and feasts
Mathilde came back to me
You the servant, you the Maria
Go set my big bed with sheets
Mathilde came back to me
Friends, don't count on me anymore
I spit to the sky once more
My beautiful Mathilde since you are here, you are here!
*Bougnat: citizen from Auvergne who settled in Paris
Original Title: "Comme à Ostende"
Music: Léo Ferré
Text: Jean-Roger Caussimon
Year: 1960 (Ferré), 1970 (Caussimon)
We were seeing the sea horses
rushing head first
and breaking their mane
in front of the deserted casino
The barmaid was eighteen years old
and I who is old like winter
instead of drowning into a glass
I had a walk in the spring
of her almond shaped eyes
Nor grey, nor green
Nor grey, nor green
Like in Ostende
And like everywhere
When over the town
Falls down the rain
And you wonder
if it's usefull
and above all
if it's worth it
If it's worth it
to live your life
I left toward my destiny
But here a smell of beer
of fries and of mussels in white wine
lured me in a tavern
There were comic guys, all red-faced
who guffawed, who talked loudly
and the beer, it was served
way before you could ask for more
Yes, it was raining
Yes, it was raining
Like in Ostende
And like everywhere
When over the town
Falls down the rain
And you wonder
if it's usefull
and above all
if it's worth it
If it's worth it
to live your life
We went arm in arm
to the district with shop windows
full of feminine presence
you want to buy when one is drunk
But here at the very end of the road
arrived a barrel organ player
with a terrific old tune
to make you blubbe a great deal
So well that all the guys in the group
got lost
got lost
Like in Ostende
And like everywhere
When over the town
Falls down the rain
And you wonder
if it's usefull
and above all
if it's worth it
If it's worth it
to live your life
Original Title: "Les anglais bombardaient les ponts"
Year: 1970
The English were bombing the bridges
It was my father's wedding
The dance, the shouts, the wine harvests it was the war
The wedding night, on foot, exhausted very late
at the house of priest's aunt
My father who never went
to overturn girls in the vines
who looks at my mom and all the time that has passed
The straw that goes away in the Loire's current
To the bridges of Cé²
My father prepares plans
My mother claims he is mad
about an house even closer to the sun
"Your mother would be fine there on her knitting
In a garden very beautiful very sweet"
"But I do not like knitting"
My mother talks about the children
She says words about love and time
Like a cracked glass and who smiles
and living, it lasts a long time
And the father do you think to your son
with whom you talk of women
Your sister she'd better take a lover
God will forgive her the flower in the eye
We should not tell mother anything
Comon, the good lord's church is too small now
too many silences in mother's boxes
all-night vigils we'll make in two go the next moving out
It'll be a morning of fall
And rain on the yards
I'll be somewhere toward Bordeaux on a train
With strangers I talk and I'll not be home tomorrow
You are in your car, you think,
you father is alone at the rendez-vous.
The daylight is pale suddenly
Of your life you are ashame, a phone call
and it's not a lot
Your father is very far from his way
He walks alone and he is being talked to
He thinks about pictures where his son was there
The son, he says that he doesn't believe in god
but mother's face...
And the father so says to the good lord,
for once I agree
and if it's from you if he comes I'll not say anything
let him give me discreetly a few recent news from mother
It's a winter night very late
It's raining outside, the hotel is empty
The night manager has a very sweet smile
He says "my mother lends him her shawl"
And "What room do you want?"
From plains to forests, from small valleys to hills
From spring yet to be born to your dead seasons
From what I have seen to what I imagine
I'll never finish writing your song,
My France
To the big summer sun that bends the Provence
from the Britany's brooms to the Ardèche's heathers
Something in the air has that transparency
and that taste of happiness that makes my lip dry
My France
That tune of freedom beyond the borders
to the foreign people that gave vertigo
and from which you usurp the prestige today
She still answers to the name of Robespierre
My France
The one of the old Hugo holding from his exile
five year old children working in the mines
The one who built with her own hands your factories
The one whom Mr Tiers has said "Let's shoot her"
My France
Picasso holds the world at the end of his palette
from the lips of Eluard doves are taking off
They do not stop your artists prophets
to say that it's time that the adversity succumbs
My France
Their voices increase to only make one
The one that always pays for your crimes, your mistakes
by filling History and its communal graves
That I sing for ever the one of the workers
My France
The one that only owns in gold her white nights
For the stubbon fight of that daily time
From the newspaper that is sold the morning of a sunday
To the poster you paste at the wall of the following day
My France
Whether she comes up from the mines, goes down from the hills
The one that sings in me the beautiful, the rebellious
She holds the future tight in her slender hands
The one of thirty six to sixty eight stars
My France
With time
With the time, goes, everything goes away
We forget the face and we forget the voice
The heart, when it doesn't beat anymore, there is no point looking further
You have to let things go and it's fine
With time...
With time, goes, everything goes away
The other whom we adored, we looked for under the rain
The other we were making out at the bend of a glance
between the words, between the lines and under the blusher
Of a disguised oath which goes away to sleep
With time everything vanishes
With time...
With time, goes, everything goes away
Even the best memories it pulls one of those faces
like at the mall I rummage around the death's shelves
the saturday evening when the tenderness goes away on its own
With time...
With time, goes, everything goes away
The other in whom we believed for a cold, for a little something
The other to whom we gave wind and jewels
For whom we'd have sold our soul for a few pennies
In front of whom we dragged like the dogs drag
With time, goes, everything goes fine.
With time...
With time, goes, everything goes away
We forget about the passions and we forget the voices
that told you very low the words of the poor people
Don't come back too late, take care not to get cold
With time...
With time, goes, everything goes away
And we feel ourselves whitened like an exhausted horse
And we feel ourselves iced in a bed of fortune
And we feel ourselves alone maybe but cushy
And we feel ourselves swindled by the lost years
Then really...with time...we do not love anymore
Original Title: "Mon enfant, mon amour" or "Le petit garçon"
Year:1967
Tonight my little boy
My child, my love
Tonight, it's raining on the house
My child, my love
How you look like her!
We are staying both
We are going to play together
We are here both
alone
Tonight she doesn't come back home
I do not know anymore, I don't know
She will write tomorrow maybe
We will have a letter
It's raining on the garden
I'm going to make some fire
I have no sorrow
We are here both
Alone
Wait, I know stories
Once upon a time
It's raining in my memory
I think, don't cry
Wait, I know stories
But it's a bit cold tonight
A story about people that love each others
A story about people that love each others
You will see
Don't go
Don't leave me
I do not know how to make fire anymore
My child, my love
I can't do much anymore
My boy, my love
How you look like her
We are here both
Lost among things
In this big room
Alone
We are going to play at war
And you'll fall asleep
Tonight she won't be here
I don't know anymore, I don't know
I don't like winter
There is no fire anymore
There is nothing else to do
but to play together
Alone
Wait, I know stories
Once upon a time
I don't have a memory anymore
I believe, don't cry
Wait, I know stories
But it's a bit late, tonight
A story of people that loved one another
And who played at war
Listen to me
She isn't there anymore
No...don't cry!
Live version:
The live version is a bit different and starts with the following words: It's not me who sings
It's the flowers I drank
It's not me who laughs
It's the wine I drank
It's not me who cries
It's my love...lost
I have seen her eyes
A beautiful pond of willow woman lost in a strange space,
the faraway dream of the countries and her lips of wet bird
So well that with my fingertips I would have liked to wipe them.
Like in the morning: a fountain, her smile of overjoyed child
Clearer than the infante Isabella and more lively than a swallow's throw
than the oriflamme of the morning, and the mirror of a mermaid,
the blond squire of spring, and the alauda of the mutineers
Is it allowed to be so blond that you make the wheat jealous
From Beauce and Brie gathered on the edge of her running path
And I hear them whisper that God has abandonned them
And I, God, I'm grateful to him for the beauty he gave me
Vivacious like a reed's thread if the wind commanded it
Or if the wind commanded it to the abandonned tenderness
Like a bouquet of shore's grasses, damp and lukewarm without talking
Damp that makes me damp, eyes between laughing and crying
And her joy with full white teeth, it's Chartres revived in the morning
Naïve and fierce street urchin, my fierce with the chin
My naïve one with her mischiefs, my flower of snow and water
My clown child, my soiled one, my freed korrigane
My blond child, my beloved
I will learn to keep quiet, I will learn to listen
to the wind passing through her lips, and I'll become light
I'll become light
And then some milky tendernesses, I will learn to soothe those worries of scared child
who is afraid of the dark and calls. And I will become shepherd
One day, we die of waiting for a day
like the one that dies out
of the long cancer of the obvious facts
in a gaze which lost its colours
where faithfulnesses cook slowly
With flies buzzing
And butter on a stall.
I want to know the fair,
the brass are burning my heart
I want the fantastic feast
which knows the departure and the blood
which knows the death which knows the sorrow
the uncertainty and the mornings
and that one never dies of sorrow
For the shapes and for the shadows
to know every colors
I'll go to the borders of doubt
look for the incredible house
for the pleasure of not knowing
to wash my gaze
with the waves of an unknown wind
At twenty years old you imagine
An amorous truth
Strong and difficult and pretty
But the female is dripping
with a laugh from the breast
with alcohol and garlick
Blood that spurts on the hands
Ten women come and kiss me
Love, frozen and without remorse
The absent body of the unfaithfuls
The cheeky female beauty
The breasts' detonation
They are undressing me and laugh
Lick me and twist my hands
I plunge and I love her and I love her
the lips of pleasure opened
with legs spread
breasts swaying upside down
Oh my desire. Oh my madness
I run with my belly cut open
I die already gnawed by worms
We do not know very well where madness starts,
where life ends
I have the eyes which are bleeding, which are laughing
I've looked too much I do not see anything
but that mad woman hugging me
with her heavy damp kiss
Stay at home, do not burn anything!
I know there is nothing to see
The madwoman bursted my eyes
But I have the most beautiful eyes in the world
And all of you are evading my gaze
Louvigné-du-désert: Let's stop, we will drink
in a small café open to the first colds of my memory
To the vanished friends, already lost among the shadows
To those I loved so much I believe and I forgot
I'd invite a few poets to make a nice funeral
A few octosyllables and I'm alone to drink to the event
We would tell eachother while talking a bit slowly the story
of the time going away, of oblivion that makes the music in front of us
And then we would content ourselves with a few things, a little wine
a word that grazes the grass of the sun and it's in vain
I only have poets as friends and I'll go back home by the pathways
like an extinguished cigarette, relit and that is going off
Original Title: "Ce soir mon amour"
Text: George Moustaki
Year: 1973 (Reggiani's album), 1974 (Moustaki's album)
This evening my love, I do not love you anymore
You are further than the distance between us
And even more absent because you are nowhere
More a stranger than the first to come along
This evening my love I do not look for you anymore
Among my memories at the bottom of my memory
I do not wait for you anymore on the platform of any station
I barely remember having waited for you there
I know that we were drinking wine after love
That our nights started when the day rose
Like a torrent of ebony your hair on your neck
And your hurt gaze when you make sheep eyes
This evening my love I do not cheat on you anymore
with that girl sleeping by my side
I was alone I asked her to stay
I'm alone very often and I get used to it
This evening my love I do not miss you anymore
I do not miss you. I miss loving
not being useless, inanimate
having nothing to lose and having lost everything
I know your madness I know your modesty
I know that we look alike like brother and sister
I know your smell, I know your perfume
I know you by heart and I do not know anything nomore
About you my love whom I do not love anymore
without succeeding to finally feel free
Alike to a dancer who would lose balance
Like a prince into disgrace, like a fallen angel.
Let's drink quickly
and give the same again please!
You still have the enormous laugh
And the way of the soldier
You know that somewhere
A girl is calling for you
And almost naked already
with sovereign hips
In linen and horses processions
and emblems
You go up the stairs
Everything goes quiet
we hear your steps
But the night, sometimes,
The night when you wake up
It's like in the cinema
Everything would stop
The theater lights up again
And you are scared
The light is of the world's end
And you stood up
With a dreadful laugh
that the audience does not hear
You suffocate, you stick to the window
the arms stretched out sideways
One day and with a sharp knock you break the window
you hang yourself from it
The man who was laughing he knew
Everything is absence
The crowd withdraws and doesn't dare to cry
There are eskimo pie papers in the aisles.
Original Title: "Le bateau ivre"
Text: Arthur Rimbaud (1871)
Year: 1982, 1992 (Léotard's version)
As I was going down impassive rivers
I felt I was no more guided by the haulers
High pitched red Indians had targetted them
Having nailed them naked to the colored posts
I was uncaring of all the crews
Carrying flemish wheats or english cotons.
When, with my hauleurs, they had finished kicking a racket
The rivers let me go down where I wanted.
In the furious lapping of the tides
Me, that other winter, more deaf than children's brains
I ran! And the started peninsula,
never lived more triumphing hubbub
The tempest blessed my maritime awakenings.
Lighter than a cork I dansed on the floods
named eternal rollers of victims
Ten nights, without regretting the silly eye of the lanterns
As I was going down impassive rivers
I felt I was no more guided by the haulers
High pitched red Indians had targetted them
Having nailed them naked to the colored posts
I was uncaring of all the crews
Carrying flemish wheats or english cotons.
When, with my hauleurs, they had finished kicking a racket
The rivers let me go down where I wanted.
Sweeter than to the children the flesh of the sour apples
The green water penetrated my fir hull
And of blue wine stains and of vomits
washed me, scattered rudder and grapplings
And then, I had a bath in the poem
of the sea, instilled with stars, and milky
devouring the green azures where, wan waterlines
and delighted, a thoughtful drowned person sometimes goes down
Where suddenly dying the made blue, delirium
And slow rythms under the day's gleams
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres
ferment the biter freckles of love.
I know the skies bursting in lightnings, and the waterspouts
And the undertows, and the currents, I know the evening,
The exalted dawn like a dove people
And I've seen a few times what man thought seeing
And I've seen a few times what man thought seeing
And I've seen a few times what man thought seeing
As I was going down impassive rivers
I felt I was no more guided by the haulers
High pitched red Indians had targetted them
Having nailed them naked to the colored posts
I was uncaring of all the crews
Carrying flemish wheats or english cotons.
When, with my hauleurs, they had finished kicking a racket
The rivers let me go
The rivers let me go down where I wanted.
I've seen the low sun, stained with mystical horrors,
Illuminating long purple freezings,
Like actors of very antique dramas.
The floods rolling their shutter's shudders in the distance
I've dreamt the green night about the dazzled snows
Kisses slowly rushing to the eyes of the seas
The circulation of the unprecedented saps
And the yellow and blue awakening of the singing phosphorus !
As I was going down impassive rivers
I felt I was no more guided by the haulers
High pitched red Indians had targetted them
Having nailed them naked to the colored posts
I was uncaring of all the crews
Carrying flemish wheats or english cotons.
When, with my hauleurs, they had finished kicking a racket
The rivers let me go down where I wanted.
I've followed for full months, alike the nasty remarks
hysterical, the swell setting out to conquer the reefs
Without thinking that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could force the muzzle to the wheezy Ocean !
I've knocked, you know, incredible Floridas
Mingling to flowers eyes of panthers with skins
Of men! Rainbows braced like bridles
Under the seas horizon, to dreary herds!
I've seen the huge swamps fermenting, creel
Where rotens in the rushes a whole Leviathan!
Collapses of water in the middle of lulls
and the faraway's toward the cataracting abysses!
Glaciers, silver suns, mother-of-pearls waves, fiery skies!
Hideous groundings at the end of the brown gulfs
where the giant snakes devoured by water sticks
cherish crooked trees with black perfumes!
As I was going down impassive rivers
I felt I was no more guided by the haulers
High pitched red Indians had targetted them
Having nailed them naked to the colored posts.
I was uncaring of all the crews
Carrying flemish wheats or english cotons.
When, with my hauleurs, they had finished kicking a racket
The rivers let me go down where I wanted.
I'd have liked to show to the children those sea breams
of the blue stream, those golden fishes, those singing fishes
Flowers' foams have cradled my departures from harbours
And ineffable wings have winged me at times.
Sometimes, martyr weary of the poles and of the zones,
the sea whose sobbing was making my rolling sweet
was coming in toward me her shadow flowers with yellow suction pads
and I was staying like a woman on her knees...
As I was going down impassive rivers
I felt I was no more guided by the haulers
High pitched red Indians had targetted them
Having nailed them naked to the colored posts.
I was uncaring of all the crews
Carrying flemish wheats or english cotons.
When, with my hauleurs, they had finished kicking a racket
The rivers let me go down where I wanted.
Peninsula, tossing on my tacks the quarrels
and the droppings of the gossiping birds with blond eyes.
And I was sailing when through my frail bounds
drowned persons came down to sleep, backwards!
Now I, lost ship under the hair of the coves
threw by the hurricane in the birdless ether
I whose the Monitors and the Hansa sailing ships
wouldn't have recovered the drunken from water skeleton
Free, smoking, riden by purple fogs
I who was making a hole through the reddening sky like a wall
who is carrying, exquisite jams to the good poets
sun lichens and azure mucus
Who was running, stained of electric half-moons
Mad plank, escorted of the black seahorses
When the july's were bringing down with cudgel hits
the ultramarine skies with burning funnels
As I was going down impassive rivers
I felt I was no more guided by the haulers
High pitched red Indians had targetted them
Having nailed them naked to the colored posts.
I was uncaring of all the crews
Carrying flemish wheats or english cotons.
When, with my hauleurs, they had finished kicking a racket
The rivers let me go down where I wanted.
I who was trembling, feeling the moans from fifty leagues
the rut of the Behemots and the thick maelstroms.
Eternal spinner of the blue immobilities
I look back at Europe with its ancient parapets.
I've seen sidereal archipelagoes and islands
whose delirious skies are opened to the sailors :
— Is it during those bottomless nights that you sleep and go into exile,
Millions of golden birds, O future vigour ?
But, true, I've cried too much! The Dawns are distressing.
Every moon is dreadful and every sun bitter :
The acrid love swelled me with intoxicating torpors.
O let my keel burst! O let me go to the sea !
If I desire a water from Europe, it's the puddle
Black and cold where toward the balmy dusk
A squatting child, full of sadness, let go
a frail ship like a butterfly of may.
I'm not bathed of your languidnesses, anymore O waves,
take away their trail to the coton carriers,
Neither crossing the pride of the flags and flames,
Nor swimming under the horrible eyes of the pontoons
Original Title: "Les hauts quartiers de peine"
Year: 1995
For once, peaceful, determined
Step by step we go back to the
The high districts of sorrow. Did we leave them?
The hardest is coming to an end, you see me
Sorry about that
All the way down below, we stooped to
believing those high districts were
far from us even when we never stopped thinking about them
A single misstep and no other choice
but to go back there
For once, peaceful, determined
Step by step we go back to the
The high districts of sorrow. Did we leave them?
Barely there you already talk about
going back down
Going back down is complicated
I've acquired a taste for those high districts
Those high places without relief, those firm outlines
When down below so many struggle to love one another
then go back up
Friends always be those trembling night lights
This fever in the air like a passing wave
Let the ashes of the words smoke for a long time
Never double-lock life
I'm here heart beating in some summer evenings
Imagining you, re-inventing you
Friends always be those voices on the other shore
that are lengthening in me the party and the fervor
Sometimes you know it, it's still so cold
The journey is so long to the promised lands
I'm here heart beating in all the night trains
Crossing, like you, so many empty stations
Friends always be the shadow of a drunk ship
That old stubborn dream that held us standing
Maybe will we live shreds of future
And then we'll grew old as is customary
I'm here heart beating in all crossroads
Stretching hands to you in the axis of the sun
Original Title: "A la pointe nue de l'averse"
Year: 1970
At the naked point of the downpour
There is my love
She is more beautiful than the downpour
And than the water on earth
Comes the wind naked on his horse
And he finds her beautiful
The wind throws her his net
He bends down and talks to her
The wind takes her away in his night
He wants her for his wife
Of all the whiteness of the nights
My love is whiter
The wind lays her in the morning
Between the grey and the grass
Ahead of the morning, standing up,
My love is more beautiful.
More beautiful with grass and water spattered
The night in her gaze
The wind is going away. For my love
The suns are going to fight.
Original title: "Aimer à perdre la raison"
Text: Aragon (1963)
Year: 1971
To love to the point of losing one's mind
To love to the point of not knowing what to say
To the point of having nothing but you as horizon
And only experience seasons
Through the pain of departure
To love to the point of losing one's mind
Ah it's always you that is being hurt
It's always your broken mirror
My poor happiness, my weakness
You who is being insulted, and is being neglected
Tormented in every flesh
To love to the point of losing one's mind
To love to the point of not knowing what to say
To the point of having nothing but you as horizon
And only experience seasons
Through the pain of departure
To love to the point of losing one's mind
Hunger, tiredness and cold
All the world's miseries
It's through my love that I believe in them
In them I carry my cross
And from their nights my night founds itself
To love to the point of losing one's mind
To love to the point of not knowing what to say
To the point of having nothing but you as horizon
And only experience seasons
Through the pain of departure
To love to the point of losing one's mind
