Monique Morelli - Aragon - Santa Espina

Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1970
This poem is about a catalan Sardane, Santa Espina (Holy Thorn), which had been outlawed by the dictatures of Rivera and Franco.

I remember a tune that could not be heard without the heart beating
And the blood being on fire
Without the fire starting again like an heart under the ash
And we finally knew why the sky is blue

I remember a tune alike to the air from the open sea
A tune alike to the shout of the migrating birds
A tune of which the sob seems to carry in the margin
The revenge of the seas on their tamers

I remember a tune which we whistled in the shadow
During the times without sun, nor errant knights
When childhood was crying and in the catacombs
A pure people was dreaming of the death of tyrants

He was carrying in its name the holy thorns
Which gives, at the forehead of a god, his colored tears
And the song in the flesh, like an anchored smallboat
Revived his wound and reopened his pain

Noone would have dared to put words
On this tune humming all the forbidden words
The universe ravaged with ancient poxes
It was your hope and your four thursdays

I search in vain its heartbreaking sentences
But the earth only has tears of Opera left
At the memory of those murmuring waters is missing
The call from spring to spring of the tenoras

Oh Holy Thron Oh Holy Thorn resume
We were listening to you standing up in time past, remember
Who could restore your romance nowadays
Give back the voice to the singing woods which went quiet

I want to believe that there are musics still
In the mysterious heart of the country there
The mute will talk again and the paralytics
Will walk a fine day at the sound of the cobla

And we'll see fall from the forehead of the Son of Man
The crown of blood symbol of misfortune
And Man will sing loudly this time as
If life was beautiful and hawthorn in blossom

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - Epilogue

Original Title: "Epilogue"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1994

Life would have passed like a sad big castle through which all the winds go
The drafts slam the doors and yet no bedroom is closed
Some strangers sit there, poor and weary who knows why, some of them armed
The grass grew in the ditches so much the portcullis can not be closed anymore

When I was young I was told that soon would come the victory of angels
Ah how I believed in it, how I believed in it then I became old
The time of the young people is for them like a forelock always falling back over their eyes
And what's left of it for the elderly is too heavy and too short that for them the wind changes

I will write those verses with arms wide open so that one can feel my heart beat there four times
Even if I have to die for it I will go beyond my throat and my voice, my breath and my song
I am the reaper drunk from reaping who is being seen laying waste to his life and his field
And panting of the time he loses there, who beats the living out of his scythe

I see all what you have in front of you, of misfortune, of blood, of weariness
You would not have learned anything from our illusions, not understood a thing of our missteps
We were of no use to you, you will have to pay the price at your turn
I see your shoulder bend. On your forehead I see the crease of the habits

Of course, of course you will tell me that it's always like that but precisely
Think about all those who put their living fingers, the flesh hands in the gearing
So that it changes and think of those who weren't even discussing their cage
May we have the right to despair, the right to stop for a moment

I will write those verses with arms wide open so that one can feel my heart beat there four times
Even if I have to die for it I will go beyond my throat and my voice, my breath and my song
I am the reaper drunk from reaping who is being seen laying waste to his life and his field
And panting of the time he loses there, who beats the living out of his scythe

Think that we never stop fighting and that having vanquished is hardly a thing
And that everything is in the balance again from the moment that man is accountable of man
We have seen great things done but there have been dreadful ones
Because it not always easy to know where is the evil where the good

And one day will come when you'll have on you the senseless sun of victory
Remember that we knew that as well and that others climbed up
To tear off the flag of servitude from the Acropolis and that they were thrown down,
Them and their glory, still panting, in the communal grave of History

I will write those verses with arms wide open so that one can feel my heart beat there four times
Even if I have to die for it I will go beyond my throat and my voice, my breath and my song
I am the reaper drunk from reaping who is being seen laying waste to his life and his field
And panting of the time he loses there, who beats the living out of his scythe

I don't say that to demoralize you. One has to look straight at the nothingness
To know how to triumph against it. The song is not less beautiful when it declines
One has to know how to hear it elsewhere when it rebirths like the echo among the hills
We aren't the only one in the world to sing both the drama and the collection of songs

Drama one has to know how to hold his share of it and even if a voice may go quiet
Remember always that the deep chorus will take back the interrupted sentence
As long as up to the bottom of himself, the singer did what he could
No matter if along your way you'll abandon me like an hypothesis

I will write those verses with arms wide open so that one can feel my heart beat there four times
Even if I have to die for it I will go beyond my throat and my voice, my breath and my song
I am the reaper drunk from reaping who is being seen laying waste to his life and his field
And panting of the time he loses there, who beats the living out of his scythe

Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - The disguised birds

Original Title: "Les oiseaux déguisés"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1994

All those who speak of marvels
Their fables hide sobs
And the colors of their ears
Always to complaints alike
Give their tears for water

The painter sitting in front of his canvas
As he ever painted what he sees
What he sees his story veils
And his darkness are stars
Like singing changes the voice

His secrets which he exhibits everywhere
Are disguised birds
His gaze make things beautiful
And people take for roses
The sorrow by which he is broken

My life in the distance, my stranger
What I was, I left it
And the shades of love changed
Like is turning brown in the ferns
The nightsummer dream

Fall, fall, lengthy fall
Like the shout of the glazier
From street to street and I sing to myself
A tune of which slowly is surprised
The one who is unable to pray anymore

All poems by Louis Aragon.

Jean Ferrat - Aragon - The lilacs

Original Title: "Les lilas"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1970

I dream and I wake up
in a scent of lilac
On which side of sleep
Have I let you here or there

I was sleeping in your memory
And you were forgetting me in a whisper
Or it was the other way around, just because
Was I where you weren't?

I fall back asleep to reach for you
In the country you dreamt about
Nothing there does anything else but to flee and feign
You, you had left it already

In life or in dream
Everything has that peculiar sparkle
Of the perfume which persists
And of a song which flew off

Oh clear night, dark day
My absent one in between my arms
And nothing else in me last
But what you whispered

All Aragon's poems/songs

Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - When the evening comes

Original title: "Lorsque s'en vient le soir"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1994

When comes the evening which turns through the door
To live suddenly has the depth of a wheat field
I find you back, love, with my trembled hands
Which make the tender soil between the dead leaves
And we get rid of our stolen clothes

Nothing calmed those hands that I have to know you
Keeping from the first evening that turmoil of touching you
I find you back, love, sought for a long time
As if suddenly a window were to open
And if you gave up to always hide yourself

I am forever your scene and your theatre
Where the curtain of loving takes off anywhere
The star snows in me its eternal month of August
Nothing calmed that heart to beat when seeing you
It ends up hurting me and nothing is as sweet to me

Yet you are still to me the furtive passer-by
Who we hold back miraculously at the bend of a moment
Nothing calmed my fear, I doubt and I wait for you
God lose the steps he makes when you are absent to me
A look is sufficient for you to make a beautiful weather

When comes the evening which turns through the door
To live suddenly has the depth of a wheat field
I find you back love with my trembled hands
Which make the tender soil between the dead leaves
And we get rid of our stolen clothes

all poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - The fires of Paris

Original Title: "Les feux de Paris"
Text: Louis Aragon

Year: 1994

Always when to the obscene mornings
Between the legs of the Seine
Like a drowned woman with crazy eyes
From the mist of your poems
The Saint-Louis Island is rising pallid
Baudelaire I think of you

When I learned to see things
Oh slowliness of the metamorphosis
It's your Paris I saw
It was required for Paris to change
Like the oranges turn blue
The whole length of my life

But to seek those adventures
The city threw its belt away
of walls of herbs and of wind
She painted her landscape
Like a girl does of her face
To seduce a new lover

Nothing is at the same place no more
And the water of the Wallace fountains
Cries after the merchants of wafers
Who were shouting Pleasure Ladies
When the pianos were practising scales
In the lounges for outfits

Where are the big tapestry makers
The reed pipes in the dust
Where are the weddings in songs
Where are the mules of Réjane
One does not go on donkey's back
To have lunch in the grass at Robinson's

What good can it do to you
One does not choose his hell
Backward what's the point to search
That the past consumes itself without you
It's here that your fate lights up
One does not choose his bonfire

With your steps the clouds move
Go away in the street with the red eye
The world bleeds in front of you
You walk in a barbarian day
The present time is burning in the Snackbars
Its purple dawn is on the roofs

To hell with the lunar beauty
And the millenial darkness
Spotlight on the Champs-Elysées
Here is the new carnival
Where electricity gives a facelift to
The edifices set ablaze

Spotlight on the man and on the woman
On the Louvre and on Notre-Dame
From the Sacré-Coeur to the Panthéon
Spotlight from the Concorde to the Ternes
Spotlight on the modern universe
Spotlight on our soul with neon

Spotlight on the darkness of the dreams
Spotlight on the arts of lies
Burn perpetual summer
Burn of our human flame
And that everywhere our hands bring back
The sun of the truth.

all poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - Happy the one who dies of loving

Original Title: "Heureux celui qui meurt d'aimer"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1967

Oh my garden of fresh water and shadow
My dance of being, my dark heart
My sky of the countless stars
My smallboat in the distance, sweet to row
Happy the one who becomes deaf
To the song if it's not about his love
Blind to the day after his day
His eyes on you alone closed

Happy the one who dies of loving
Happy the one who dies of loving

To love so strongly, his lips closed
That he does not need anything
But the memory of the roses
Forever perfumed of you.
The one who dies even with pain
To whom without you the world is delusion
And holds nothing else from it but your colors
It's sufficient for him that he named you.

Happy the one who dies of loving
Happy the one who dies of loving

My child, he says, my sweet soul
The time to know you, Oh woman
Eternity is nothing else but a swoon
To the fire of which I am consumed
He said, Oh woman and may he keep quiet
The name which resembles to the glowing embers,
To the mouth red, to the strawberry
Forever in his teeth formed.

Happy the one who dies of loving
Happy the one who dies of loving

He said: Oh woman, and comes to an end
So goes life, so does the dream
And be it on the Place de Grève
Or in the accustomed bed,
Young lovers you whose age it is,
Between the round and the journey,
Crazy ones sparing yourselves thinking yourselves wise
Shout to those who want to blame you

Happy the one who dies of loving
Happy the one who dies of loving

Another version:


all poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - Guess

Original Title: "Devine"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1994

A big field of blue flax
among the black grapes
When, toward me, the wind
bends it trembling

A big field of blue flax
Which makes mirror to the sky
And it's me who trembles
To the bottom of my blood

Guess
Guess
Guess
Guess

A big field of blue flax
In the day, coming back
For a long time drags there
A mist of dreams

I am afraid to flush there
Unknown birds of which far away
The winged shadow
obscurely grows longer

Guess
Guess
Guess
Guess

A big field of blue flax
Of the color of the tears
Opened on a country
of which only love knows about

Where everything has the perfumes
the power, the charm
As if some kisses always
were wandering there

Guess
Guess
Guess
Guess

A big field of blue flax
of which it's the surprise
always to discover
A pure and deep water

Of its coat covering
Miraculously,
Is it a lake or the sea,
The shoulders of the world

Guess
Guess
Guess
Guess

A big field of blue flax
Which speaks, laughs and cries
I plunge and lose myself in there
Tell me, do you guess

Which sowing made there
the joy and the pain
And why loving it
makes you drunk and kills you

Guess
Guess
Guess
Guess
...

all poems written by Louis Aragon

Monique Morelli - Louis Aragon - The crazy woman

Original Title: "La folle"
Text: Louis Aragon
Music: L. Leonardi

Year: 1966

Have a look at this crazy woman and her ankle shoes
She has all the streams in her enamel eyes
She has all the birds on her straw hat
And her handbag her dreams of when she was twenty years old

Have a look at this waste of tulle and anemone
That dusty dream like an old ashtray
It's yesterday's sheet on the calendar
The faded refrain of an autumn song

Have a look at this smile and that flutter
Almost nothing would be enough for us to start believing them
Would it be for the deep cruelty of the mirrors
And that faded reflection which looks like a renunciation

It's my life, I well have to recognize her
It's my life, and it's me, that distorted song
One fine evening the future is called the past
It's then that we turn and see our youth...

What more were you expecting, which fate, which adventure
Which glory for you only or which stolen happiness
What else are you in the end but what the wheat is to the millstone
What the ash is to the fire, the body to the torture...

I don't see really what grieves you here
Or gives you the right to shout in the night
Your destiny resembles you and your shadow follows you
The crazy ones are those who think themselves others

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Aragon - At the end of my age

Au bout de mon âge Jean Ferrat par rozenfelds
Original Title: "Au bout de mon âge"
Text: Louis Aragon

Year: 1965

At the end of my age
What would I have found
To live is a village
Where I have badly dreamt

I feel alike
To the first oaf
Who is still filled with wonder
at the songs of the birds

People of my kind
There are many
Do they know they carry
A stone around the neck

At the end of my age
What would I have found
To live is a village
Where I have badly dreamt

For them the mirrors
It's more often than not
Without even seeing themselves
That they pass in front of them

They have no sense
Of what their life is
It's an innocense
Which I envy them

At the end of my age
What would I have found
To live is a village
Where I have badly dreamt

As much for the pleasure
Than for poetry
I believed I was chosing
And I was chosen

I believed myself free
On an iron thread
When any equilibrium
comes from the pendulum

At the end of my age
What would I have found
To live is a village
Where I have badly dreamt

I had to be born
And dieing follows
I was only made to be
What I am,

A season of man
Between two tides
Something like
A lost song

At the end of my age
What would I have found
To live is a village
Where I have badly dreamt

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - Robert the devil

Original Title: "Robert le diable"
Year: 1971
Song written by Louis Aragon in memory of Robert Desnos

You were carrying in your voice something of a song of Nerval
When you were speaking of blood, peculiar young man
Giving emphasis to cruelty with your regular verses
The butchers' laugh were escorting you in the markets
You had in those days those accent of impossible
which I hear reverberate through the years
Twenty year old poet assassinated in advance
And that were already avenged by the blasphemy and the insult

I think of you Desnos who left from Compiègne
Like one evening while sleeping you told us the story of it
To fulfil to the end your own prophecy
Over there where the destiny of our century bleeds

Standing under a porch with a cornet of fries
Here you are under bad weather near Saint-Merry
Staring at the world with insolence
Of your look alike to the one of Amphitrite
Enormous and quivering of a pale steam
And the ground at your foot alike to the foam at the bare breast
Covers itself with cigarette butts, with spits, with vegetables
In the steps of the rain and of the prostitutes

I think of you Desnos who left from Compiègne
Like one evening while sleeping you told us the story of it
To fulfil to the end your own prophecy
Over there where the destiny of our century bleeds

And it's you again who endlessly goes out for a stroll
Shepherd of the long desires and of the broken dreams
Under the dark trees in the Champs-Elysées
Until the exhaustion of the night, your domain
Oh the East Station* and the first croissant
The black coffee that one takes next to the coffee machine
The fresh newspapers the boulevards full of scents
The mouths of the metro which catches the passers-by

I think of you Desnos who left from Compiègne
Like one evening while sleeping you told us the story of it
To fulfil to the end your own prophecy
Over there where the destiny of our century bleeds

The city, a bit everywhere, keeps of your presence²
A shadow of colour to her dirty pediments
And when the day rises at the dim Sacré-Coeur
When on the Panthéon like a squaring off dusk puts its grazed scraps
When the wind screams wolf under the Pont-au-Change
When the sun in the Wood runs with the oranges
When the moon sits from church tower to church tower

I think of you Desnos who left from Compiègne
Like one evening while sleeping you told us the story of it
To fulfil to the end your own prophecy
Over there where the destiny of our century bleeds

*Gare de l'Est
²literally "coming through"/way

Christine Sèvres' version


All poems written by Louis Aragon

Monique Morelli - Louis Aragon - An October tune

Original Title: "Un air d'Octobre"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1966

A tune like a vast train
A tune which never ends
An October tune, a romance
Softer than the month of may
A tune that always starts again

Your eyes have the horizon sickness
Crazy the one who finds azure blue enough
To whom the sky isn't a prison
One has to love with immoderation
Reason is not enough

Beautiful autumn with velvet hands
It's the song that is never sung
It's the song of our love
It's the song of the tea-roses
Which heart have the color of the day

A tune like a vast train
A tune which never ends
An October tune, a romance
Softer than the month of may
A tune that always starts again

Is there a deep enough sob
To tell the physical deserts
Alike to the circles one makes in the water
Are the words matching the music
Of the long desire in the heart enclosed

A tune, Elsa, of dementia
A tune which never ends
An October tune, a romance
Softer than the month of may is
A tune like a vast train

A tune like a vast train
A tune which never ends
An October tune, a romance
Softer than the month of may
A tune that always starts again

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Léo Ferré - Aragon - Blues

Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1961

We stay up, we think about everything, about nothing
We write verses, prose
We have to fiddle something about
while waiting for the day that is coming

The mist when the morning breaks
Takes away from the windows their breath
It was like that when Verlaine
Here slowly passed away

Several are dead, several alive
We do not all have the same cards
Before the other I have to go
Them out I remained dreaming
Not everybody is Cézanne
We will content ourselves with little
We cry and we laugh as we can
In that herbal tea universe

"Young man what do you fear
You will grow old somehow"
Was saying the shadow on the high wall
Painted by a Breughel of fairground
We stay up, we think about everything, about nothing
We write verses, prose
We have to fiddle something about
while waiting for the day that is coming
We stay up, we think about everything, about nothing
We write verses, prose
We have to fiddle something about
while waiting for the day that is coming

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - It's always the first time

Original Title: "C'est toujours la première fois"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1965

At last, at last I find you back
You who had never been
Anything else but absent like a young she-wolf
Or the sleeping water at the bottom of the moats
Escaping under the sun of summer

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

Absent like a souvereign
Who is seen passing between two hedges
Oh you so close and so distant
As soon as love spins its wool
Between our out of tune fingers

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

The hunger of you which is devouring me
Makes me bend knees and arms
I would not have enough amphorae
Nor words again and again
To give birth to an end for it

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

The thirst of you by which I tremble
My lip forever parched
My love what do you think of it
Is it of living or not together
That will be able to quench my thirst of it

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

Love of you by which I exist
Has no other reality
I am nothing else but a name on your list
A step on the floor that the wind
erases before it existed

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

Live version:

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Monique Morelli - Louis Aragon - Paris 42

Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1966

A song that speaks of an incurable ill
Sadder than the plaza of Italy at midnight
Alike to Point-du-Jour for the melancholy
More dreams at the fingers than the sandman
Announcing pleasure like a merchant of oblivion

A vulgar and sweet song where the voice lowers
Like a one night love doubting of the following day
A song that takes women by the hand
A song that is being said under the Barbès metro station
And that changes at Etoile and goes down at Jasmin²

It's Paris that shadow theater that I carry
My Paris that couldn't completely be taken away from me
Not more than one could take to lips their shout
What had been required to threw me out of it
Tear me the heart and you will see Paris in it.

It's of that Paris that I made my poems
My words are of the weird colour of those roofs
The throat of the pigeons are cooing and glistening there
I have written more of you Paris than of myself
And more than of growing old suffered to be without you

Who hasn't seen the day rising up on the Seine
Ignores what is that heartbreak
When caught in the act the night fails itself
Defends itself, comes undone the red eyes obscene
And Notre-Dame comes out of the waters like a magnet

The aorta of the Pont Neuf shivers like an orchestra
Where I hear beginning the wine of my twenties
There blows here a wind that comes from the times of yesteryear
To die in the hair of the equestrian statue
The city like an heart opens itself double-doors.

The wind will whisper my verses to the waste grounds
It will brush against the benches where no one sat
We will hear it cry on the quays of Passy
And the bridges repeating the promise of the rings
will go away engaged to the following rhymes

Paris wakes up and I to find those myths back
That were burning our blood in our obscurity
I will put in my hands my irritated face
Let the song be reborn that the birds imitate
And which answers Paris when one says liberty

² Parisian metro stations

Jacques Marchais' version:

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Aragon - The poets

Original Title: "Les poètes"
Text: Louis Aragon

Year: 1969

I do not know what possesses me
And pushes me to say out loud,
Nor for the pity nor for the help
Nor like one would confess one's faults,
What inhabits me and what obsesses me
What inhabits me and what obsesses me

The one who sings tortures himself
Which shouts in me, which animal
I kill or which creature,
In the name of good in the name of evil,
Only know those who remained silent.
Only know those who remained silent.

Machado sleeps in Collioure
Three steps were enough out of Spain
For the sky for him to become heavy
He sat in this countryside
And closed his eyes for ever
And closed his eyes for ever

Above the waters and the plains
Above the roofs of the hills
A plainchant rises at the top of the voice²
Is it toward the star Hölderlin?
Is it toward the star Verlaine?
Is it toward the star Verlaine?

Marlowe you need the tavern
Not for Faust but to die there
Between the killers surrounding you
with their daggers and their laughs
By the glimmer of a lantern.
By the glimmer of a lantern.

Stars, dusts of flames,
In august which fall on the ground
All the sky, this night, proclaims
The slaughter of the nightingales
But what does the universe know of the tragedy.
But what does the universe know of the tragedy.

The suffering gives birth to the dreams
Like a hive its bees
The man shouts where his iron gnaws him
And his wound fathers a sun
More beautiful than the ancient lies.
More beautiful than the ancient lies.

I do not know what possesses me
And pushes me to say out loud,
Nor for the pity nor for the help
Nor like one would confess one's faults,
What inhabits me and what obsesses me
What inhabits me and what obsesses me

²at full throat
All poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Aragon - The misfortune of loving

Original Title: "Le malheur d'aimer"
Year: 1971

What do you know of the simplest things?
The days are suns in disguise
Of which at night dream the roses
All the fires go away in smoke
What do you know of the misfortune of loving?

I have looked for you at the back of the bedrooms
Where the lamp was lit up
Our steps did not ring there together
Nor our arms on us closed up
What do you know of the misfortune of loving?

I have looked for you at the window
The parks are perfumed in vain
Where can you, where can you well be?
What's the point of living during the month of may?
What do you know of the misfortune of loving?

What do you know of the long wait
And of living only to name you
God, always the same and different
And of you, I only to blame
What do you know of the misfortune of loving?

That I forget myself and I remain
Like the rower without rowing
Do you know how long it's to die
While listening to yourself being consumed
Do you know the misfortune of loving?

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Aragon - We will sleep together

Original Title: "Nous dormirons ensemble"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1963

Be it sunday or monday
Evening or morning, midnight, midday
In hell or paradise
Loves resemble to loves
It was yesterday that I told you:
"We will sleep together"

It was yesterday and it is now tomorrow
You are the only path left for me
I've placed my heart between your hands
With yours how it beats the amble
The whole human time it has left
We will sleep together

My love, what has been, will be
The sky is over us like a bedsheet
I've enclosed my arms around you
And I love you so much that I tremble
For as long as you will want
We will sleep together

another version:


All poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Aragon - It's an understatement to say that I love you

Original Title: "C'est si peu dire que je t'aime"
Text: Louis Aragon

Year: 1965

Like a torn cloth
We live together separated
In my arms I hold you absent.
And the wound meant to last
Is it required to feel it so deep
When the sky is limited to us?
It's an understatement to say that I love you

This existence is a farewell
And we both only have eyes
For the light turning down.
Put on seven league boots
While saying ourselves that there is no hurry
That's what it means to be old.
It's an understatement to say that I love you

It is as if never, ever
I had told you that I loved you
If I was worried to be surprised by
The night on my throat that lays
Her gloved fingers of sovereign
When never again it is the month of May
It's an understatement to say that I love you

When things are nothing more
than a remembrance of their thrill.
An echo of dead music.
The pain of the sound remains
which the more it fades out the stronger it becomes
It's not much, some words for the song.
It's an understatement to say that I love you
And I would only have said that I love you

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Jean Ferrat - Aragon - I arrive where I am a stranger

Original Title: "J'arrive où je suis étranger"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1994

Nothing is as precarious as living
Nothing is as passing as being
For frost, it's a bit like melting
And for the wind like being light
I arrive where I am a stranger

One day you pass the border
Where do you come from, but where are you going?
What matters tomorrow and what matters yesterday
The heart changes with the thistle
Everything is without rhyme or forgiveness

Brush your finger there on your temple
Touch childhood with your eyes
Better leave the lights low
The longer night suits us better
It is the bright day that is getting old

The trees are beautiful in autumn
But the child what has he become
I look at myself and I wonder
Of this unknown traveler
Of his face and his bare feet

Gradually you become silence
But not fast enough though
To not feel your dissimilarity
And on the yourself of yesteryear
Fall the dust of time

It takes a long time to age afterall
Causes the sand to leak through our fingers
It's like a cold water rising
It is like a shame that grows
A leather to shout for auction that we trim

It takes a long time to be a man, a thing
It takes a long time to give up everything
And do you feel the metamorphosis
That are happening inside of us
Making our knees slowly bend

Oh bitter sea, Oh deep sea
What is the time of your tides
How many years-seconds are required
For man to abjure man
Why, why those airs and graces

Nothing is as precarious as living
Nothing is as passing as being
For frost, it's a bit like melting
And for the wind like being light
I arrive where I am a stranger

All poems written by Louis Aragon