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
Original Title: "Tout sera comme avant"
Year: 2004
Everything will be like before
Under the summer coats
Like before existing
Like before
In the congested yard
Girls sitting in a line
Some riders
Everything will be like before
When you'll remember
The snows would have melted
On the clogged earth
In the stumbling evening
I'll tell you
Everything will be like before
I promise it to you
At last, coming back from the avalanche
from the fire perched on the branches
came out out of the long black path
Each drags a child one evening
With a look of having in himself
Absorbed all the nights
Since the beginning
Everything will be like before
Everything will be
Like before
Everything will be like before
When you'll remember
The outskirts of school
Where we were thrown
And the stumbling evening
In the clogged yard
And the merry glass
My legs which come unstuck
Everything will be like before
To start rising
The sky has come to the end of its time
Well enough
Under the scraps of summer
I'd tell you so much
I promise it to you
Everything will be like before
Everything will be like before
Everything will be like before
Original Title: "Pour boire dessus l'herbe tendre"
Text: Pierre de Ronsard
Year: 1978
To drink over the tender grass
I want to lie down under a bay-tree
And want that Love, with a small blade
Or of flax or of hemp
Tucks up to the side
Her light dress
And half-naked, pour me wine.
The uncertain life of man
From day to day unfolds like
Onto the riverbanks rolls the waves
Then, after our final hour,
Nothing of us remains in the coffin
But a little ash from our bones
I do not wish, as is the custom,
For my tomb to be perfumed with incense,
Nor for scents to be poured over it,
But so long as I am alive
To wear perfume I feel like
And to crown myself with flowers,
Of myself, I want to make myself,
The hair to sastisfy my own self;
I do not want to live for anyone else
Fool the Pelican who hurts himself
For his likes, and crazy the one who lets himself
For his likes work in boredom
Corydon, go and summon my love.
Before that the small boat turned pale
Sends me to the eternal nights,
I want with full cup and with her
To take away the pain
Of my lamentable troubles.
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
I ring at your door empty handed
I am only giving my song
I do not know the first words of it nor the music
But hear
That breathing which is mine
Rolled in a ball
And on it holds its song
I giving nothing else but friendship
In the broken bowl of the head
Like that dog in the gaze of men
Who lived
Happy the one who receives me in his home
And with his hand he caresses his wife
And the sheets are folded in the cupboard
At the place of the sheets
And the hour at the place of hour
And the laugh of your child
it looks like chalk
And all things have the dead momentum
Of the stones
I am giving nothing else but my dead song
Which is surprised by the deads
And you'll never know
What was bothering him
The children in the yard
Were keeping him completely busy
He opened the window
As if he was ready to burst
Sweet, you joined with him
Saying "Just come eat"
There are too many words
In Men
In Men
There are too many words
In Men
In Men
And they did not come out
As if stuck in the forehead's folds
When smiling you knew patiently
to take them away from him
He told you: You only.
When he wanted to love you
And it was sufficient
Like the sun during the summer
There are too many words
In Men
In Men
There are too many words
In Men
In the houses you go
In a silent yard
The mouths are too small
And words too numerous
To hold
All the shouts in the yard
seem to die down at last
And you'd only be too pleased
That he never admit anything
But there are too many words
In Men
In Men
There are too many words
In Men
I was not able to leave far away
Convoking the harbors and the islands
Broking the lines of fate
Like a smart knucklebones player
Shaking up the deal and the towns
I was not the birdman
Ruling over the Dalmatian coast
Nor protector of the Baltic countries
With his scepter of reed
His arm reaches out to Malta
To the Vidame of the bridges, in Pisa
Before killing him like a dog
He bought his seven whores back
Who come eat in his hand
And love him and tell him they do
His pirogues are on the Ogooué
Loaded with his camphor and his honey
The king of Sudan cajoled
Pays him plants of salt trees
With two hundred saddle horses
He conquers the countries of the Book
With four hundred riders
- My purple coat makes them drunk
Deliver your soul and your coins
Thank God who frees you!
I lied more than one can say
I sold for years on
Fake tin ciborium’s
Saying the mass in German
For fake badass monks
Boatmen coming down the Ogooué
Who is moaning in those barrels then?
Souls of smothered children
Blue stones of the god April
Gem tears for the islands
I saved the convents of Basel
Surrounded by the hateful Teutons
They wanted the skin of the cloistered nuns
Those demons were fighting better than them
- The superior has been ordinary
I traveled the ancient Epirus
Running from Europe and my better half
Followed by a mameluke of the Empire
And two women who were beating me
Beat me, my former one is worse*
Of a minister, the wife on the run
White and fat and always naked
Would it be what excites me:
The virtue of the ministeresses?
Iconoclasty you haunt me!
Then the negress beautiful and lean
Gift of his father to Sidney
- I had saved him from ruin
Offering me his daughter and he was crying:
"Take my daughter and give me back my mine"
They ambushed me
The Turkish man having burned my foot
I had to slit the throat of my beauties
In accordance with an Umayyad ritual
Thinking to it, I am still sick of it
The fat queen of Bohemia
Had me whipped by her pretty boys
Before offering me to herself
Male or female, I don't know
Was impaling me among the blasphemies
Oh the nostalgia of the Ogooué
The songs of the Nile rowers
The spell of the April river
The canons shooting from the bay
And the peoples milling about and flying
I fought for nothing in Mexico
I vanquished in Tenochtitlan
Driving an army of children from the field
Scrawny and twelve years old each
They were singing pathetic songs
Then were falling among the meager wheats
That naïve painting is sold
- The commodore has been hanged
I keep a tender memory of it
And of the rifles in Portalegre
We make feasts on the Ogooué
You can't imagine which kind
The gall oozes out of the brain
Of a scalded young monkey
For Easter, eat some virgin
Yes, the Negus was cheating at cards
Yes, a fine day I boarded
Salome, Sarah, and Jacobé
Dyking on their little sailboat
Who didn't want me to leave again
Another time, wandering about in Indre
I have seen the Lavilliers mission
Looking for Peru on the Allier
Crossing the Hallier expedition
Pretending to be in India
Pretty lies, pretty bargemen
Carry me toward other harbors
Fake palaces, fake marbles, fake jades
Beside you of the Templars
The secret looks quite insipid to me
But the craziest adventure
It's the girl I loved
When I was twenty who in the corolla
Of her arms imprisoned me
And who doesn't want me to shake them off
The pout of your cruel lips
Whips me more than whip lashes
Flapping sails of the caravels
Your real eyes are fake notes
Every night I forget the beauty because of them
Your holy alcove counts for me
More than the hovels of Tangiers
You talk to my ear and shame
comes to me, the thunder to the sky loaded
I bribe you and we mount each other
Sometimes the wind is rising
For the migration of the gazes
"Mistress, let's go in, it's late"
- I love that light despair
which give its scent to the dreams
Sometimes I believe in Man
You convince me and absolve me
Through laugh and love. In short
The faith is hiding beneath
I believe in the world or it's as if
And you are my whole border
A kiss is being smuggled through it
One more and the whole life
I charter to rig
my pirogue on the pillow.
*play on words with "ancient Epirus" in french "mon ancienne est pire" sounds exactyl the same
