Léo Ferré - Our love

Original Title: "Notre amour"
Text: Léo Ferré
Year: 1953

As long as we will write our names
On the sick trees of Fall
Birds will be able to sing
We will be able to love one another

I am the one you are waiting for
I am the one who loves you so much
For a long time
Oh such a long time
If it happened that you forgot me
You know that I, I will never forget

When our names will be withered
On the sick trees of Fall
The birds will be able to leave
We will be able to die of it

I was the one you are waiting for
I was the one who loved you so much
For a long time
Oh such a long time
It happened that you forgot me
Know that I, I will never forget
Because my love is stronger
Than love.

Jacques Douai's version:

Serge Reggiani - Venice is not in Italy

Original Title: "Venise n'est pas en Italie"
Text: Claude Lemesle
Year: 1977

You don't have enough money to take a plane or even a train
You wouldn't be able to offer her a one way trip to Melun
But you take her away
As you love her
On oceans of which the sailors
Have never seen the end
You have the sky that your windows have drawn
And the sun on a theater movie
But you don't care
But you are rich
You are since you love one another

Venice isn't in Italy
Venice it's at anyone's place
Make love to her in an attic
And make fun of the gondoliers
Venise is not where you believe it is
Venise today is at your place
It's where you go, it's anywhere you want
It's the place where you are happy

You aren't in that room a bit common
This evening you have a date on the canal
Fireworks
The small boat glides
You are going to see everything, discover everything
Included the Bridge of Sighs
It'll last a year or an eternity
The time for a god to come and tell you "enough sung"
Does it matter
It's the holidays
All that because you love one another

Venice isn't in Italy
Venice it's at anyone's place
Make love to her in an attic
And make fun of the gondoliers
Venise is not where you believe it is
Venise today is at your place
It's where you go, it's anywhere you want
It's the place where you are happy

Venice isn't in Italy
Venice it's at anyone's place
It's anywhere, it's important
But it's not any time
Venise it's when you see some sky
Run under cherry plum bridges
It's the other side of rainy mornings
It's the place where you are happy

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.

Dominique A - Everything will be like before

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

Monique Morelli - Ronsard - To drink over the tender grass

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.

All poems by Ronsard

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

Jacques Bertin - I ring at your door

Original Title: "Je sonne chez vous"
Year: 1972

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