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