This wound
Where dies the sea like a flesh sorrow
Where goes life to germinate in the desert
Which makes of blood the whiteness of the cribs
Which closes up at the marble of the tomb
This wound from which I come
This wound
Where my lip at dawn of love
Where beats your fever a bit like a drum
Where leaves your vine when pressing fingers on it
Where the shout comes, the same every time
This wound from which you come
This wound
Which closes up at the edge of boredom
Like a scar of the night
And which never stops reopening
Under some tears sharpened by desire
This wound
Like a sun under melancholy
Like a garden which we only open at night
Like a perfume which lags during the tide
Like a smile on destiny
This wound from which I come
This wound
Draped of silk under its black triangle
Where go the surveyors of fate
To build from nothing some assisted sorrows
While digging there for the sin
This wound from which you come
This wound
Which we would like sewn in the middle of desire
Like a sewing over pleasure
Which we would like to see close forever
Like a door opened on death
This wound of which I die
Original Title: "L'étang chimérique"
Text: Léo Ferré
Year: 1958
Our most beautiful memories blossom on the pond
In the faraway castle of a faraway Spain
They tell us of the time lost oh my companion
And that white water lily it's your twenty year old heart
One day we'll embark
On the pond of our memories
And will do again just for the sake of it
The sweet journey of life
One day we'll embark
My sweet Pierrot my great friend
To never ever come back
Our bad memories will drown in the pond
Of that faraway castle of a faraway Spain
And we'll only keep for ourselves oh my companion
That white lily and your twenty year old heart
One day we'll embark
On the pond of our memories
And will do again just for the sake of it
The sweet journey of life
One day we'll embark
My sweet Pierrot my great friend
To never ever come back
I met you by chance,
here, elsewhere or somewhere else
Maybe you remember it
Without knowing each other we fell in love
And even if it's not true
One has to believe in the ancient stories.
I gave you what I had:
What to sing, what to dream
And you believed in my Bohemia
But if you thought at twenty years old
That one can live of the spirit of time
Your point of view is not the same
This infamous end of the month
Which since we are you and me
Is coming back seven times a week
And our evenings without cinema
And my success which is not coming
And our uncertain means of sustenance
You see I haven't forgotten anything
In this statement of affair sad to make one cry
Which records our failure
You still have nice days ahead of you
Enjoy them my poor love
Beautiful years are passing by fast.
And now you are going away
Both we are going to grow old
Each for himself how sad that is
You can take the record player away
Me, I'll keep the piano
I continue my life of an artist
Later, without knowing why
A foreigner, a clumsy man
Reading my name on a poster
Will talk to you of my successes
But a little sad, you, who knows
You'll tell him that I flaunt myself.
I'm from a different country than yours, from another neighborhood, from another loneliness.
Today I invent myself some side roads.
I’m no longer local, I’m waiting for some mutants.
Biologically I’m working out with the idea
I made myself of Biology: I piss, I ejaculate, I cry.
It’s of highest urgency for us to shape our ideas
as if they were manufactured objects.
I am ready to provide you with the molds. But...
The loneliness...
The loneliness...
The molds are made of a new texture, I'm warning you.
They were cast tomorrow morning.
If you haven’t from this very day the relative sentiment of your duration
It is futile to pass on to you, it's useless to look in front of you
Because the front is behind, night is day, and...
The loneliness...
The loneliness...
It’s of utmost urgency for our laundromats,
At street corners, to be as imperturbable as the stop lights or free way indicators
The cops of the detersive will show you the box
Where you'll be at liberty to wash what you believe to be your conscience
And which is nothing more but an dependency of the neurophilic computer
That is serving you as brain. And yet..
The loneliness...
The loneliness...
Despair is a superior form of the critique.
For the moment, we’ll call it: “happiness”
The words which you are using no longer being “the words”
But some sort of canal through which
The illiterate people are easing their conscience. But...
The loneliness...
The loneliness...
We will talk about the civil code later
For the moment, I would like to codify the uncodifiable.
I would like to measure your monarch butterfly democracies.
I would like to insert myself into the absolute void and become the unspoken,
The never happened, the non-virgin by lack of lucidity.
Lucidity is located in my pants!
In my pants!
I love you
When there is the sea and then the horses
Making rounds like in the movie
But it's way more beautiful in your arms
When there is the sea and then the horses
When reason is wrong
And our eyes play at toppling themselves
And we don't know who is the boss
When reason is wrong
When we'd miss the end of the world
And we'd sell eternity
For that eternal second
When we'd miss the end of the world
When the devil sees us turn pale
When it's not possible to draw anymore
The love flower which is going to open up
When the devil sees us turn pale
When the machine has started
When we are not sure where we are anymore
And we wait to see what is going to happen
I love you
I love you for your voice, for your eyes on the night
Pour those shouts that you shout from the bottom of the pillows
And for that movement of the sea, for your life
That looks like the sea climing up to drown me
I love you for your belly where I'm going to get you
When your eyes look for the night that swings
To my hollow that digs you and from which my hurt life
Runs like a torrent in the bed of the silence
I love you for your open mug over the night
When your sap climbs like from the bottom of the eras
Boils in your belly and that I curse you
To be at the same time my sister, my angel, my light
I love you
When there is the sea and then the horses
Making rounds like in the movie
But it's way more beautiful in your arms
When there is the sea and then the horses
When reason is wrong
And our eyes play at toppling themselves
And we don't know who is the boss
When reason is wrong
When the devil sees us turn pale
When it's not possible to draw anymore
The love flower which is going to open up
When the devil sees us turn pale
When the machine has started
When we are not sure where we are anymore
And we wait to see what is going to happen
Original title: "Nous deux"
Text: Jean-Roger Caussimon
Year: 1961
They left without a warning
With their kids and their guitars
Our gipsy brothers of Saint-Ouen
They left in a flurry of wings
And without return, the swallows
Paris had no use for them anymore
Waves of concrete and idiocy
Drug stores and some strip tease are necessary
High rises and undergrounds
And of Boulogne and of Vincennes
And of the florished quays of the Seine
Soon nothing will be left no more
But that day my turtledove
My girl who's mine, my all beautiful
My love sister, my mom
In spite of the planks and the soil
We'll snuggle up like we can do
Both of us...
In spit of the soil and the planks
We'll cuddle like on Sunday's
When we go to the movies
Both of us...
And let us meet in dream afterwards
Fascinated like Adam and Eve
But all proud of having found that
Both of us...
You see it's written on the frontpage
We are already fighting over the moon
Inocent children of tomorrow!
One general on the planets
Will follow you with its spyglass
And will say "It's red with blood ! "
By juggling so much with the bomb
One day it'll have to fall
It's its purpose and it's our lot
That day has to come eventually
Farewell, Paris and farewell, Vienna
Farewell Rome and Monte Carlo
But on that day my turtledove
My girl who's mine, my all beautiful
My love sister, my mom
Be it that everything turns to ice or burns
It does not matter if we are together
Us both...
That everything burns or that every turns to ice
We'll already have our place
In the legend of the lovers
Us both...
So when the planet will explode
If the trumpets ever sound
We'll divinely not care
Both of us...
People will treat me of artist
Of being heartless and if it saddens me
I'd not be surprised of it...
Because that pitiful and tender heart
To you only who could take it
It's been a long time I have given it...
Just like I give you today
This song of end of fall
That thought itself love song
I'm not a saint nor an apostle
And to still think of other people
The time left to me is too short
In the meanwhile my turtledove
My girl who's mine, my all beautiful
My love sister, my mom
As our souls wander
Let's kiss very close to the waves
Of the Ocean of the bad days
Us both...
And then to our faithful loves
In the heart of eternal snows
Let's get lost forever
Both of us!
Both of us!
If your body was made of thin lace
I'd embroide it by the four ends
And then I'd made so beautiful tablecloths out of it
That we'd eat love on our knees
If your eyes were ancient stars
Of those we see but are no more
I'd look behind the canvas
Of that big painting of suspended blue
If your crazy hair were the foremast
And that I made a boat out of your heart
While going back up the flow of the Seine
You'd be Paris and I sailor
If your black star where I brighten up
Was the chalice and if I were God
I'd drink Death there down to the roots
And then I'd go away to make the heavens again
If the dead suns of the celestial plains
Were coming down one day in your faded body
There would still shine to your modest breasts
A bit of their flame, a bit of my hunger
Van Gogh's chair where you do not sit
Vincent's shoes which you do not put on
The ear of that guy who does not listen to you anymore
Those crows in the wheat of a lost canvas
I do not stop anymore when I see madness
I run her errands and sleep in her bed
The tears of that tree worried in the forest
What kind of wood was Vincent's chair?
The sheeps of the street hide in scarves
Workers change tune without stopping work
I do not stop anymore when I see madness
I run her errands and sleep in her bed
The steps of that child in the hell of the Faculty
Her sex and her virtue, her pill and her stage fright
When vertigo penetrates and overtakes her
Under the double and iced eye of an old prostitute's mirror
It's at that moment that I lose madness
And that I stay alone with my madman's eyes
A leather dress like a spindle
That would be hot unintentionally
And inside, like a sailor
A girl who sways an english tune
It's great
The Moody Blues singing the night
Like some satin of a married's white
And in the harbor of this night
A girl who sways and comes to berth*
It's great
It's great
It's great
It's great
Some hair falling like the evening
And some music at the bottom of the loins
That jazz jazzing in the dark
And that ache that feels good
It's great
Those hands playing some rainbow
On the guitar of life
And then those shouts raising to the sky
Like a shining cigarette
It's great
It's great
It's great
It's great
Some stockings holding high up
Like the strings of a violin
And that flesh troubled by
The bow that runs my song
It's great
And under the barely closed veil
That tuft of black jésus
Streaming down in its craddle
Like a swimmer noone expects anymore
It's great
It's great
It's great
It's great
A leather dress like an oversight
That would be hot unintentionally
And inside, like a grey morning,
A girl swaying and keeping quiet
It's great
The Moody Blues who do not care
That amp not meaning anything no more
And in the music of the silence
A girl who sways and comes dying
It's great
It's great
It's great
It's great
*: To berth in French uses the same verb as to wet, originates from wetting the anchor used in a different context here.
When sorrow knocks on your closed door
Give it fire for the sake of God
If your flame is dead and everything is resting
It'll go away I have not done better
If your flame is dead and everything is resting
It'll go away I have not done better
Flowers of my life were white roses
I've given them to all my friends
to pluck their petals under 4 planks
I'd have done better to decorate my life with them
to pluck their petals under 4 planks
I'd have done better to decorate my life with them
I had clothes made from clouds
I had hair like flags
And my well-behaved mane was floating to the wind
Then I have lost it all, there was nothing left but the skin
And my well-behaved mane was floating to the wind
Then I have lost it all, there was nothing left but the skin
I went away under ten feet of clay
Stuck face to face by a sky of wood
And telling my verses to my docile verses
Who would have rhymed me differently than I did
And telling my verses to my docile verses
Who would have rhymed me differently than I did
When sorrow knocks on your closed door
Give it fire for the sake of God
And the last rose would flare up
Which I'd go and pick up between two farewells
And the last rose would flare up
Which I'd go and pick up between two farewells
Original Title: "La mémoire et la mer"
Year: 1970, 1994 (Léotard's version)
The tide, I have it in the heart
Which comes in me again like a sign
I die of my little sister
Of my child and of my swan
A boat it depends on how
It is secured to the harbor, barely.
Some lightyears are crying down
from my firmament and I leave some behind
I'm the ghost of Jersey
the one that comes the evenings of show
Throwing at you the mist as kisses
And picking you up in his rhymes
Like the trammel of July
Where the lone wolf was glinting
The one I was seeing shine
At the fingers of sand of the earth
Remember that sea dog
That we were setting free on parole
And who barks like mad in the desert
Of wracks from some necropolis.
I'm sure that life is there
With its flannel lungs
When it cries of those weathers
The cold, all grey, which is calling us
I remember evenings over there
And sprints won over the foam
That slobber of the short-haired horses
At the level of the rocks which are wasting away
Oh the angel of lost pleasures
Oh rumor of an other habit
My desires from then on are nothing more
but a sorrow of my loneliness
And the devil of the conquered evenings
With his palenesses of rescue
And the shark of the paradises
In the environment wet with mosses
Come back green girl of the Fjords
Come back fiddle of the violin bands
In the harbor, the horns are clamoring
For the return of the comrades
Oh rare perfume of the salants
In the pepper fire of the chappings
When I was going while geometric-ing
My soul at the hollow of your wound
In the disorder of your ass
Nabbed in the sheets made of thin dawn
I was seeing one more stained glass window.
And you green girl, my spleen.
The sea shells acting a minor part
Under the broken liquid sunlights
Playing so much castanets
That it looked like Spain, livid
God of the granites have mercy
Of their vocation of finery
When the knife comes to interfere in
Their castanet figure
And I was seeing what one has a foreboding of
When we have a premonition of the glimpse
Between the shutters of the blood
And that the corpuscules represent
A blue mathematic
In that sea which is never slack
From which comes in again little by little towards me
That memory of the stars
That rumor coming from there
Under the friendly arc where I blind myself
Those hands which show off to me
Those ruminatning hands that moo
That rumor follows me for a long time
Like a beggar under the anathema
Like the shadow which loses its time
Drawing my theorem
And on my red make-up
Comes beating like a door
That rumor which goes standing
In the street filled with dead musics
It's over the sea, it's over
On the beach, the sand bleats
Like sheeps of infinite
When the shepherdess sea is calling me
All those shouts from the street, those men, those shops
Where I see you in the alleys like an offense
To the three pences jewelry, to the lingeries of nothing
Those shadows in the eyes of the women when you pass
All those noises all those chants and those passing perfumes
When you place yourself in it or when I exile you there
To love you from further away like that in passing
All those slightly crazy stuffs, all that is your style
Your style is your ass, it's your ass, it's your ass
Your style is my law when you bend to it, slut!
It's my blood to your wound, it's your fire to my cigarettes
It's love on the knees that never ends
Your style is your ass, it's your ass, it's your ass
All those harbors of the night, that kid that we'd like to have
And then we don't want him anymore as soon as you beckon me
At the corner of a saying sticked in your wellness
By the blood of my set² and the wine of your vine
All this blending in memories of us
In those lost worlds of the year eighty thousand
When we'll not be there anymore and when we'll be reborn
All those slightly crazy stuffs, all that is your style
Your style is your ass, it's your ass, it's your ass
Your style is your right when I'm allowed to your style
It's that hellish game of head and then of tails
It's love that keeps quiet when you do not sing anymore
Your style is your ass, it's your ass, it's your ass
Wanting so much to know, one does not know anything no more
What I like about you it's what I imagine
At the tip of a gesture, at the rescue of my hand
At your mouth invented beyond indignity
In those streets of the night with my masked eyes
When you only recognizes a specific style of me
When I make of myself another one, imagined
All those careless things all that it's your style
Your style is your ass, it's your ass, it's your ass
Your style is your law when I bend to it, slut!
It's your wound, it's my blood, it's my ash at your cigarettes
When the night has thrown its fires and is dieing
Your style is your heart, it's your heart, it's your heart
²slang designating men's three pieces, usually used to ask to be left alone
Original Title: "Tu ne dis jamais rien"
Year: 1971
I see the world a bit like one sees the unbelievable
This what the unbelievable is, it's what we are not seeing
Flowers inside pencils, Debussy on the sand
In Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer which I do not know
The girls in iron at the bottom of the habits
And miners digging in their all warm bellies
Some bras with cats, some bosses in the South
Busy working hard for the workmen from Renault
Me, I thus live elsewhere in dimension four
With the comic book "At mc²"
I am Tomorrow, I am the Oak and I am the hearth
Come over to my place, my love, come to my place there is some fire
I'm flying for the skin on the rest area of the miseries
I am an old Boeing of the year eighty nine
I leave the flower at my teeth for the last war
My typewriter has a whole new suit
I see the stereo in the eye of a petite girl
Some pianos on some girl's bellies in Paris
A frozen chimpanzee singing my music
softly along with me, and you, you did not say anything
You never say anything, you never say anything
Sometimes you cry, like beasts cry
Without knowing why and who do not say a word
Like you, the eye elsewhere, celebrating me.
In your barren belly, I see some multitudes
I am Tomorrow. It's You the tomorrow of my life
I see some lost fiancees who are getting undressed
to the velvet of your voice that goes over the night
I see some tepid smells on cobbles out of a dream
In Paris when I am lying down in her bed
To see passing over me some girls and some sponges
Who sob of the sap of the age of foly
Me, I live thus elsewhere in the X dimension
With the comic book at a friend's home
I am Never I am Always I am the X
Of the love formula and of the boredom one
I see some blue tramways on some rails of sad children
Some chinese folding screens in front of the North wind
Some objects without purpose, some artist's windows
From which come out the sun, genius and death
Wait, I see very close an orphan star
Which comes inside your house to talk to you about me
I know her for a long while, she is my neighbor
But its light is illusory, like I am
And you do not say anything to me. You never say anything
But you shine in my heart like this star shines
With its lost fires in some far away paths
You never say anything like stars do.
You never say anything
You never say anything
You never say anything
You never say anything
Original Title: "Nuits d'absence"
Text: Jean-Roger Caussimon
Year: 1985
There are nights when I go away
Discretely, secretely
My image alone is present
It has my forehead, my clothes...
It's my double in that mirror
It's my cinema stand-in
To that reflection replacing me
You'd swear I'm there
But I fly over in a hang-glider
The blue tops of the Pyrénées
In Andorra-The-Catalan
I let my destiny go...
I trample a rye field
Or maybe a wheat field
In the air, I've met eagles
And I thought I looked like them...
The summer wind, sometimes, carry me away
Too far, it's a risk to take
In the tumult of the arena's
I'm everything which must die
I am the poor nag
Belly opened by a bull
I'm the bull who falters
I'm the fear...of the torrero
Weekday or is it Sunday?
All shivering in the thaw
I'm on the edge of the White sea
In the white night of Arkhangelsk
I hail drunk sailors
As much from alcohol than sleep
"That bleak glare on the frost
Is if the moon...or the sun?"
The pale day saddens the furniture
And here it's, it's already tomorrow
The frost persists to the blind eyes
Of my dog which is looking for my hand...
And you, you sleep in the silence
Where, without me, you manage to recover
That calm face from childhood
Which moved me...to the point of crying...
There are nights when I go away
Discretely, secretely
My image alone is present
It has my forehead, my clothes...
It's my double in that mirror
It's my cinema stand-in
To that reflection replacing me
You'd swear I'm there
There are nights when I go away
Discretely, secretely
My image alone is present
It has my forehead, my clothes...
It's my double in that mirror
It's my cinema stand-in
To that reflection replacing me
You'd swear I'm there
Original Title: "On est pas sérieux quand on a 17 ans"
Text: Arthud Rimbaud
Year: 1986
We are not serious when we are seventeen years old
- A fine evening, to hell with the ales and the limonades
Of the rowdy cafés with bright chandeliers
- We go under the green lime trees of the promenade
The lime trees smell good in the fine evenings of June!
The air is sometimes so sweet that we close our eyelids;
The wind loaded with noises - the city is not far -
Has some scent of vines and smells of beer
Here we catch a very small piece of rag
of dark sky, framed by a very small branch
Stung of a bad star, which merges
with sweet shivers, small and all white...
Night of June! Seventeen years old! We let ourselves get intoxicated
The sap is like champaign and goes to the head
We ramble, we feel a kiss to the lips
Beating there, like a small beast
The crazy heart robinsons through the novels
When in the pale light of a streetlamp
A damzel passes with charming airs
Under the shadow of the detachable collar of her father
And as she thinks you are immensely naive
While she trots about in her small ankle boots
She turns around, agile and with a lively gesture
On your lips then dies the cavatina
You are in love. Praised until the month of August.
You are in love. Your sonnets makes her laugh
All your friends go away, you are of unpleasant taste
Then the adored one, one evening, deigned writing you!
That evening - You enter inside the loud cafés
You ask for ale or limonade
We are not serious when we are seventeen years old
And we have green lime trees on the promenade
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.
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
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
