Jules Laforgue: "It's Autumn"

 


Jules Laforgue (1860-1887) was an avant-garde French poet, one of the many who came from Uruguay (Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, and Jules Supervielle are also of their number).  His highly-strange poetry has been claimed to be both Symbolist and Impressionist.  The poem translated below is one of the many given the title "Dimanches" ("Sundays") in Laforgue's collection The Flowers of Good Will (1890); the English title is my own.  I kept loosely-rhymed couplets in the quatrains, as in the French, and I replicated the ABBABA rhyme scheme of the second sextet, but I rearranged the rhyme scheme of the first sextet (ABBABB in the French; ABBCCB in my translation).  Occasionally I rejiggered the words and order and compressed lines in order to match the structure and rhyme.  "Pitman" is an etymological rendition of the French Fossoyeur ("gravedigger").


It's Autumn

It’s autumn, autumn, autumn…

The grand gale and its train!

Yearly cloister, curtains chained!

Fall of leaves, of Antigones,

Of Philomeles,

The Pitman sloughs them with his spade…


(But I turn to sea, to the Elements!

And all that’s got no more than black grunts!

Like a poor, a pale, a paltry guy

Who only believes in his I at lost times…)


Marriage, O, you dancing buoy,

Painted blue, sweet milk, and rose,

My soul—being corsair morose—

Goes to never more be floaty!...

She’s in the throes

Of blasts of wind, of rain, of cloudings.


(One night, I believed in me!  I didn’t troth!

Can it be…where all this happened so!...

With me, Galathea’s blinding Pygmalion!

Ah! we’d have to change this situation…)


Source: Jules Laforgue, Les Complaints / L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune / Derniers Vers, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Libraire Armand Colin, 1959), 238.

Translation ©2024 B. P. Otto.  Licensed via CC BY-NC.  Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the translator.

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