Mouloudji - We have to live

Original Title: "Faut vivre"
Year: 1973

Despite the big eyes of the void
"It's to better eat you, child"
And the silences, and the rackets
We have to live...

Despite being blind on background of night
Between the infinite depths
Billions of stars laughing...
We have to live...

Despite not always being beautiful
And that we do not have our sixteen anymore
And on hope a blank check
We have to live...

Despite the heart being at sea
To the wind of love which is still blowing
And which sometimes still intoxicates us
We have to live...

Despite us not being a genius
Is not Rimbaud who can, for god's sake
And that we look for an alibi

Despite all our dead people making merry
Who wander in the streets of our heads
We have to live...

Despite us being brave and bastards
that we have complexes galore
And that we like them, that's the worst
We have to live

Despite the ideal of youth
Which has been worn out to the nerve of the time
And by others taken back while singing
We have to live....

Despite that when we turn toward the past
We are scared to admit to ourselves
That we have changed a little still
We have to live...

Despite us being on the same journey
Be it we live as mad, we live as wise
Everything will end in a wreck
We have to live...

Despite at the sky of our chests
Inside of us, asleep sentry
In a noise of factory, moans

The blind heart which walks a tightrope
On the thread of the running present
We have to live....

Despite that inside of us a dead child
Sometimes, so little, still smiles
Like an old agonising dream
We have to live...

Despite us being in the gears
of the clerks and the inheritances
Where the heart makes itself nauseus and gets bogged down
We have to live...

Despite us making dark humor
about love which will give us an hard time
Up to the moment it tells us goodbye
We have to live...

Despite that, at every horizon
Like an intergation point,
Death looks at us with a drunken eye
We have to live...

Despite all our love oaths
All our lies day after day
And despite we only have one life
A single one for eternity
Despite us knowing it's a failure

We have to live...

Léo Ferré - Paul Verlaine - Poetic art

Original Title: "Art poétique"
Text: Paul Verlaine
Year: 1964

Music before anything else
And for that prefers the irregular verse
More vague and more soluble in air
Without anything in it which weights or poses

You must not either
Choose your words without some misunderstanding
Nothing is dearest than the grey song
Where the indecisive joins the precise

It's beautiful eyes behind veils
It's the bright day shivering at noon
It's, through an autumn sky cooled down,
The blue jumble of the clear stars!

Because we want the shade again
Not the color, just the shade!
Oh the shade only marries
The dream to the dream and the flute to the horn!

Run the farthest away from the murderous point
The cruel spirit, and the impure laugh
Which make the eyes of the Azure cry,
And all that garlic of low kitchen!

Take the eloquence and break its neck!
You will do well, in energetic spirit,
To give back the tempered rhyme
If we do not pay attention, up to where will it go?

Oh who will say the wrongs of the Rhyme?
Which death child or crazy negro
Has forged us that one penny jewel
Which sounds hollow and fake under the file?

Some music still and always!
Let your verse be the flown away thing
That we feel flees from a departed soul
Toward other skies and other loves

Let your verse be the good adventure
Scattered to the tense wind of the morningv Which goes smelling of mind and thyme...
And everything else is literature.

Jacques Brel - To see a friend in tears

Original Title: "Voir un ami pleurer"
Year: 1977

Of course there are the Irish wars
And the tribes without music
Of course all that lack of tender
And there is no America anymore
Of course money does not have a smell
But no smell goes up to your nose
Of course we walk over flowers
But, but to see a friend in tears

Of course there are our defeats
And then death which is at all at the end
Our bodies already tilt the head
Surprised to still be standing
Of course, the unfaithful women
And the murdered birds
Of course, our hearts lose their wings
But, but to see a friend in tears

Of course those exhausted cities
By those fifty year old children
Our powerlessness to help them
And our loves that have toothaches
Of course, the time which is going too fast
Those subways filled with drowned people
The truth which is avoiding us
But, but to see a friend in tears

Of course, our mirrors are upright
Nor the courage to be a jew
Nor the elegance to be a negro
We think ourselves wick but are nothing but tallow
And all those men who are our brothers
So much that we are not surprised anymore
That, out of love, they lacerate us
But, but to see a friend in tears

Léo Ferré - Paul Verlaine - Moonlight

Original Title: "Clair de lune"
Text: Paul Verlaine
Year: 1964

Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where goes charming Masques et Bergamasques*
Playing some luth and dancing and almost
Sad under their weird disguise

While singing on the minor mode
The victorious love and the opportune life
It does not seem like they believe in their happiness
And their song mixes with the moonlight

Under the clam moonlight, sad and beautiful,
Which makes the birds dream in the trees
And the water jets sob of extasy

The big water jets svelt among the marbles

*Opera by G. Fauré

Other version:

Frehel - Tender song

Original Title: "Chanson tendre"
Text: Francis Carco
Year: 1935

At the memory of our twenties
By this fine morning of spring
I wanted to see again all over there
The inn surrounded by lilacs
We were hearing in the branches
The birds singing Sunday
And your chaste white dress
Seemed to be guiding my steps

Everything looked at its place
Even your name on the mirror
Right at the place where fades,
No matter what we do,
All traces.
And almost believed I was hearing
You tender voice whisper
“Come closer”

I was moved like in the past
In that inn in the deep of the woods
I had tears in the eyes
And I was finding that wonderful
For the whole day,
In your abandonned bedroom
After so many years
I saw us both again

But nothing was at his place
I remained, head lowered,
To pucker at myself in the mirror
Face to face
Grimacing...
Finally I pushed the door
What do I care
N.I. NI
It's over.

Yet when the evening came down
I went alone to sit down
On the worm-eaten woodbench
where you never came back
You looked to me more beautiful
More charming, more cruel
Than any of all those
For whom my heart has beaten

Everything looked at its place
Even your name on the mirror
Right at the place where fades,
No matter what we do,
Every trace.
Then with a poor laughter
I believed I read:
"After all,
We do not care"

Charles Dumont - The Impossible Loves

Original Title: "Les amours impossibles"
Year: 1978

We carry them with us
From the depth of childhood
A secret, an agitation,
A tender hope
We carry them in our heart
Without being able to speak about them
Those strange happiness’s
That we'll never live

The impossible loves
Forever vanished
The impossible loves
Forever forbidden
The impossible loves
Outside of life
The impossible loves
Come back to us without noise

In the heart of summer
At the bend of a glance
In an insane dream
On the platform of a station
A face you get a glimpse of
A few exchanged words
A moment nothing more
We have met them

The impossible loves
Forever vanished
The impossible loves
Forever forbidden
The impossible loves
Outside of life
The impossible loves
Come back to us without noise

You know it well
That pinch of the heart
That desire, that need
Of something, of elsewhere
This call to destiny
That we could not understand
Which leaves you in the morning
With a taste of ashes

The impossible loves
Forever vanished
The impossible loves
Forever forbidden
The impossible loves
Coming from the bottom of the nights
The impossible loves
Are truer than life

Henri Gougaud - The assassinated poets

Original Title: "Les poètes assassinés"
Year: 1976, 1989 (Bertin's version)

"Between the teeth of the days a rose sparkles
In Praha with fingers of rains"
Nezval was saying that

It was in Nineteen thirty-six, in those times
Nazim Hikmet, the man from Orient, daffodil yellow hair
In Istambul was entering prison for thirty years
Lorda was losing his blood horns of moon at the forehead
And Desnos, mourning for mourning, like a very sweet bull
was on watch at the Pont au Change and have a foreboding of the wolves

"Between the teeth of the days a rose sparkles
In Praha with fingers of rains"
Nezval was saying that

And Miguel Hernandez in the penal colony of Alicante
was kissing the empty shoes and the dead people on the eyes
"We do not belong to a people of oxen"
Was he saying. He was singing some innocent splendor
He was singing for his son who had died of hunger at ten months
And on the rusty blood, wind of the people, his voice
was the rose with the hundred leaves to the peak of the mounts
Which was calling you with pride "Revolution"

"Between the teeth of the days a rose sparkles
In Praha with fingers of rains"
Nezval was saying that

One day, when the enormous belly of the facisms
Will be dry and infertile, another time will come
And the deads who do not rot will return
They will come down of the train, they will shake the ash
Of their seasoned old-fashioned clothes one morning
They will cry of joy in some spray of hands
Among the workers at the barely hatched dawn
With, in their blue fist, the vertical sun
Between the teeth of the days a rose sparkles
In Praha with fingers of rain where Nezval will sing

Jacques Bertin's version

Léo Ferré - Rimbaud - The sitting ones

Original Title: "Les Assis"
Text: Arthur Rimbaud
Year: 1964

Black with wens, pockmarked, eyes rimmed of rings
Greens, their curved fingers clutches at their thighbone,
The sinciput planted with vague spitefullities
Like the leprosian blossomings of old walls;

They have grafted, in epileptic loves,
Their whimsical skeletal structures with big black skelettons
Of their chairs; their feet to the scrawny rungs
Intertwines for the mornings and the evenings!

Those old men always have braids with their seats,
Feelings the vivacious suns percalise their skin,
Where, eyes at the window where the snows wither,
Shake of a painful shake of the toad.

And the seats are very kind tor them: mellowed
with brown, the straw breaks at the angles of the small of their back
The soul of the old suns lights up, wrapped up
In those braids of ears where the grains were fermenting

And the sitting ones, knees to the teeth, green pianists,
The ten fingers under their seat with rumors of drum,
Listen to themselves lapping some sad baracolles,
And their heads are going in some love rolls.

- Oh! Do not make them stand up! It's the wrecking...
They spring up, rumbling like slapped cats,
Opening their shoulderblades slowly, Oh rage!
The whole of their pants puffs out at their bloated waist

And you listen to them, banging their bald heads,
To the dark walls, planting and planting their crooked feet,
And the buttons of the outfit are fawn eyes
Which catch your eyes from the back of the corridors!

Then they have an invisible hand which kills:
When they return, their gaze filter that black venom
Which loads the suffering eye of the beaten bitch
And you sweat, caught in an atrocious funnel.

Seated back, fists drown in some dirty cuffs
The think about those who made them stand up
And, from dawn to the evening, clusters of tonsils
Under their puny chin stir to the point of bursting.

When the austere sleep has lowered their peaks,
They dream on the arms of their fertilized seats,
Real little loves of seats on the edge
Through which proud offices will be lined with;

Some ink flowers spitting pollen in commas
Rocks them, along long squatted chalives
Alike to the threads of gladioli the flight of the dragonflies
- And their limbs excites themselves to beards of ears

Live:

Jacques Bertin - Tough to go through

Original Title: "Dure à passer"
Year: 1975

You hung around the whole night in the cafés of the center
You go back home, you take a paper, a pen
But nothing comes because in the end there is nothing to say
You have a bath then you prepare your suicide

Sometimes night is way shorter than we imagine
Death comes quickly but it's too late, the day is here
In the tree, always the same, here is the nightingale already
The day that comes has stabbed you, you are pallid

I feel, I feel all those who are alone this night
Who are going to pass the night holding the handrail
To look at the abyss, to sink in it
I feel death who springs out of the shattered mirror

We have to go down in the street, we have to populate the night
We have to take death by the halter and lead her for a drink
Together in a bright dawn of dew drops
Which will be the countless words we left on the ground

Oh my Anne when I will be on the other side of the night
I will be in the salt of your tears, yours only
Tonight death lays her warm muzzle on my shoulder
Like a good companion not too bothersome for now

Charles Dumont - I might still be loving you

Original Title: "Il se peut que je t'aime encore"
Year: 1980

I never know how to say the words you expect
I am better or worse than those you talk about while dreaming
I am a sleeping water, you'd like a torrent

But my love, Is way stronger
Than lightning and the north wind
And even after, after the autumn
I might still be loving you

I know nothing of the tears, I know nothing of the shouts
I only know the scale, of the piano on which I play my life
I only have one weapon, the words I am writing you

But my love, Is way stronger
Than lightning and the north wind
And even after, after the autumn
I might still be loving you

I am a bad student, to life lessons
I only believe in dreams
Which I invent at the bottom of my nights
The day takes them away from me, and leaves me misunderstood

But my love, Is way stronger
Than lightning and the north wind
And even after, after the autumn
I might still be loving you

Because my love, Is way stronger
Than lightning and the north wind
And even after, after the autumn
I might still be loving you

Yes my love, Is way stronger
Than lightning and the north wind
And even after, after the autumn
I might still be loving you
Still, still, still