by Edgar Quinet
THE CHORUS
What do you do there?
THE POET
1.
Everywhere, my heart in my bosom pricks me like my horse’s spur. Everywhere, I have devoured the dew that I have found on my path. I have drunk more of my tears than the wine of my valley in Burgundy. I have eaten, crumb by crumb, more of the bread of my regrets than the rye of my furrow in Bresse. At this moment, I am coming to draw a drop of water from the well of my heritage to wash the sweat from my soul.
2.
Here my life is a tower that I am building in mystery. I have climbed half way up the steps of my days. I see nothing appear but the shadow of my ruin, which lies in my brambles, the peel rejected from my table-cloth, the accumulated years that cannot follow me, and my spring, which has no more water to knead the mud of tomorrow. A little higher up, shall I see anything else? Well then, let me go back down to my threshold, toward my young years, in order to take them in my arms, like an Alpine goat-kid knocking on the door with its horn, unable to climb the ladder.
THE CHORUS
The sky is not as far away as the door to your life; and dolor, once you have entered it, is a path that goes ever upwards and never down. Drown your pain, like a willow leaf, in eternal poetry, into which all pain flows, and which will give you in return, to put you to sleep, a plaint from its shore.
THE POET
1.
Many times I have opened my mouth to speak, but words failed me. My voice was in my heart; my heart is broken. When a tear, falling on to my bosom, gradually hollowed out a dwelling there, my thoughts, in order better to heal that wound, often went wandering through the world, begging the sea for a little of its water, a star for one of its rays, a vessel emerging from the gulf for a scrap of its sail. I asked the boat for the gold of its wake, the river-bank for the murmur of its grass, the fisherman for a broken thread from his net, the desert for the lake of its burning ands. Oh, what could the Ocean do, what could the star do, what could the grass of the river-bank do, what could the Syrian desert do in this dusk, to fill the abyss and the ennui of my soul?
2.
Instead of making my ears ring with sonorous words any longer, I would rather nourish my thoughts henceforth with the heads of poppies, so that when I wake up, on searching in my bosom, I would not find them anymore. I would rather the cold wind of my path, as it flowed, took them from my lips, where they remained frozen, in the evening, with my breath on the panes of my window. For it’s an hour that I hate; and always, winter or summer, my thoughts are standing by my beside, in order to grind the poison of that hour in secret, and mix it with all my days into the crucible of my years.
THE CHORUS
If you can do it without weeping—for your tears, in falling to the ground, would become mud—you must tell me, then, what hour it is that does you harm, and how that came about.
THE POET
1.
I would rather have hidden it forever; and if my strength had not failed me once, no one would ever have heard it from my mouth. To you, however, I shall speak, although the memory weighs me down, and every morning it wakes me up too soon in my bed. It is a word that my mouth does not want to pronounce, that my land never wants to write in my book; it is the one that all things pronounce with a sigh, that queens covet under their awnings, that two souls stammer on seeing one another, that women know how to say, that the palpitating stars write in their summer vigils with their golden ink, and which has broken my heart since the morning of the May day when I read it.
2.
That day, on the road, the one whose honeyed name my mouth is too coarse to pronounce said to me: “Go! Take this flower of May; before it has withered we shall see one another again, tomorrow. But the flower faded, the next day passed, and the one after that; and after that day another night; and our eyes have not seen one another again, from afar or at close range, in the plain or on the mountain. We have made a thousand detours, without ever finding one another; we have climbed a thousand steps without ever encountering one another; we have knocked on a thousand doors, and a stranger had always opened them. Life had separated us and death did likewise. A harsh destiny did not want to give our bones the same earth. We shall turn over eternally in our half-empty, half-empty tombs, each crying: “Is that you?” Eternally we shall search for one another in the place where everything is reborn, without ever recognizing one another.
3.
To distract myself, I have seen more than one sky, more than one spring, more than one city full of people. No sky is as pure as her eyes, no spring as profound as her heart, no city, on a day of festival, as full as the stairway that she climbed every day.
4.
It is seven years since that tear was shed; and, if you want to know, an impure world, for which nothing is sacred, was the cause of it. Never was it able to believe that I adored a thought, as it adores its mud; nor that my eyes, on the hill where the vines ripen, were only seeking an image of the heavens. Well, are you content, world that I do not know? Oh, what have I done to you that you should kill me so quickly? Calumny, black calumny, which grew up around me, where my feet trod; damned lie, which has lived in my shadow, are you content? No tears in my eyes, nor breath in my soul, nor chimera to nourish, nor thought to cradle, not heaven, nor earth, nor me, nor her—I no longer have anything. Nothing! And that word, you have written in your venom everywhere I look.
5.
Poetry, poetry—a fine word that resonates so loudly!—when I search the entire sea of my thoughts, to the depths where its waves roll its pearls, I no longer find anything now but sand and marsh grass. She, she was poetry, at all times, in all places, and her lips without speaking, told tales of heaven when she sought the shepherd’s star from her terrace, after dawn, in order to show it to her child; and when she heard her great poplar trembling in her garden and she said: “Here’s the dusk;” and along the canal, when she saw the water pause and quiver; and when she opened her door to the odor of vines in April and May; and in her courtyard, when the nightingale sang to her on a currant bush until midnight, to amuse her and its own young; and when, sitting, without saying anything, on her bench, she held my soul in her hand all day like a partly-open book through whose pages one is turning without ever getting to the end.
6.
Oh, the book is finished, and more than one page is missing. The wind has snatched them from her hands one by one and has not returned them. The grass in her garden sees her all the time; it is only me who will not see her again. The bird on her roof can hear her, if it wishes; it is only me who will hear her again. The errant leaf can ask for news at her door; but only death will give it to me. Too great for the world, the world will not know her; her pure secret, the most beautiful on earth, will perish on her lips without anyone ever knowing it—except for the person who cannot say anything about it.
7.
Nonchalant, in the midst of her needlework, her gentle genius rose up, and up, without knowing it, to where the stars do not go. As others, without wearying, night and day, spin cotton or silk on her threshold, she, in her house, making all sorts of things for her task, without wanting to, dropped enough wool and silk of thoughts steeped in tears from the furthest regions of her soul to dress a world. In the city and the fête, at the first breath, her heart, effortlessly, went up to heaven, as a boat with a lateen sail, at the first gust of wind, soundlessly, with neither oarsmen or adieux, quits the coast and the harbor-wall, and the heavy vessels of the port, and the streets of merchants, to go all alone to dream and bathe in the great Ocean. Then, afterwards, she said that the rumor of the earth was not worth a sigh, and that nothing can be said except the end of what a soul would like to say. And I believed in her God; and I remained mute, and I lowered my eyes; and never thought of descending again from that living poem to the shabby work that my regretful hand was making at that time.
8.
It is done. There was no adieu; there will be no point of return. Why write? Why speak
? Why remain silent? Why touch words that are no longer anything but needles? What heaven has taught me does not guide my pen and will not bring me back to the place of my fault. All is finished. There is no more poetry here; there is nothing more than the string still vibrating to the bow of calumny.
9.
For whoever looks and passes by, the wound scars; but the worm, to hide itself, crawls further forward every day. Every evening, it says: “One more step,” and the fruit of your life falls from your branch, on a beautiful summer’s day, just when it was thought to be ripening. That is the cause of my pain, and how I learned how hard it is to shed the tears that you see. I cannot say any more.
THE CHORUS
Involuntarily, your pain causes me to bow my head toward the earth, and draws one of those bitter tears from me. If the one who played her part therein, in the time of cruel sighs, has forgotten it, I shall not ask it of you, nor how that azure flower came to be born of the impure furrow of our days. But your lips have closed too quickly; rather than die alive, like you, I would have wanted to knead my blood and my dolor in a poem; and the stars, on seeing me, and the rumor of the waters, the rumor of people, the rumor of bells, and he changing sky, would all have murmured around me in the evening, to lull my hear, as a woman, in a low voice, sends her child to sleep on the road.
THE POET
1.
Yes, if my pen were a skylark that had never touched the earth, if my ink were gold, if my book were parchment, then, perhaps, without speaking, I would have liked, one again, to write the names of all the things I love, in order to prolong their life until nightfall, Land of Burgundy, which has given me, instead of your wine, my tears to drink beneath your press, I would fill your vat to the brim with grapes from Cyprus and Candia, so well that you would cry in the end: “I have had enough!”
Little town of Charles the Bold, where my sister lives, who cut my bread on the table when I was a child, seated on your two rivers, near Cluny and of which Elvire speaks so highly;27 you who hide travelers and shepherds in the hollow of your valley, ashamed of seeing yourself so weather-beaten beneath your old postern, instead of your walls and your decrepit tower, I would make you three blue-painted walls, three sculpted towers and three ivory roofs to shelter, with your starlings’ nests the memory of my young years. And you, village with neither belfry nor bell, who has banished me, watch, watch night and day without getting drunk on your grapes, over the one you have stolen from me.
Oh, I would have given for her all the mosques of Syria, with their white minarets, their fresh cisterns, all the arched palaces of Venice, with the gondolas moored on their steps, and all the old castles of Germany with their balconies over the Rhine. Even now, if you only told me that you have seen her pass, that she went to the fête, that her mouth was smiling, that you have planted balm in your hedge to soothe her dolor, I would go to seek, in the depths of my thoughts, I another climate, for golden sand for your stream. I would tell, when I passed by, the waves of the bay of Zea, and the lemon-trees of the villa I love, to send their breezes untiringly, each by a different path, to your crossroads.
2.
But to you, land of Germany, I would say with no lie that you have returned my love for you in bile, in black insomnias, in dolorous days. Do you even remember when I lay by the edge of your road, fainted in my dolor? In the depths of our science, ah, how black the night was then! In your whitened church, how cold it was, alone, on the flag-stones, with no priest and no God! Above all, how harsh your women are, a thousand times harsher than your sky! Their smile is made of winter flowers; why have I tasted its honey? The Danube pauses to gaze at their blonde tresses; a mystery closes their mouths.
Whiter than almond-blossom, timid they are born, timid they die; one thought brought once by the wind, murmurs without dolor in their ear all their life; like a spring in the Black Forest their footsteps undulate languidly, but their overly pale blood scarcely tints their cheeks with a memory. For whoever comes from the land where olives and oranges ripen, their hearts beat too slowly; beneath the sky of passions, it melts in a day like snow; their silence is gently, more gentle than their speech, but its meaning is harsh. Their lips are too cold to heal the wounds that they have made. Their tears remain frozen in their bosoms; and the hearts that they have broken once never heal.
3.
No, I no longer like, in Germany or anywhere else where the mist thickens north of this side of the Alps, the paths beneath the fir-trees that all lead to regret, not the tall linden trees too full of shadows and memories, nor the Gothic ruin that one sees at Linange, too similar to a desire on its slope, nor the long waves of the Rhine, toward Baden, which make me dream too much and sigh like them, nor its vaporous isles, nor those supercilious cathedrals, nor its amber, nor its excessively deep valley, nor its excessively plaintive wave, which says to me as I pass: “Remember me.”
4.
At present I like the region near Salerno in Calabria, or even further on, toward old Navarin and Tinos, when the sun that comes from Asia, as soon as it rises, scintillates in my night and cuts my insomnia in half. Evening and morning, I like to drink its myrrh-scented radiance with every breath, for my remedy. It is cold and somber at that hour in my heart. I like to dry the wound that another has given me, also too bitter, in the light of August, when the fishermen of Capri extend their nets on the shore at midday, as I extend my memories; when the lonely seagull in the bay of Lepanto seeks its shadow under its wing, or when the lightning on the Albanian shore say to you: “I want to glisten, and gaze, into the depths of your bosom, at what has caused your pain.”
THE CHORUS
Indeed! Tortuous as it is, the path of your poem is better than that of life. There your wound can be its balm; and, without going as far as Albania, the sun that is setting on your hill can aspire the tears in your bosom like dew. Enough love! Enough suffering! Too much hope! Don’t expect any longer that your oft-deflected desire can be fulfilled before death, or that you can retain more than one drop of the Ocean in your hand. Ask no more of the universe than two rays of daylight in order to see, and see again, beneath the vaults, the gilded paintings of old Florentine masters, and the narrow path that your thought leaves as it marches. After love, after faith, art is beautiful, art is holy. It isn’t Heaven, but it’s no longer earth.
THE POET
1.
If you can, I’d like that; bring me back in my mind to the place at which my feet went astray; and I’ll follow the example of the man whose feet follow his guide, and whose overly heavy heart remains behind with his burden. As for you, world, in quitting you, I know you; you have broken me, but you haven’t vanquished me; it’s you who have killed me, but it’s me who is scornful of you. So you’re mocking, beautiful mask? An hour before death, I’ve perceived that: an hour, oh, that’s enough!
2.
Oh, how my heart is beating me, after having shut me up before speaking! Everything irritates me, everything annoys me; I’ve finished too soon what I wanted to say.
3.
Oh how my heart is weighing upon me; I don’t know how I can finish my task this evening. My ink isn’t gold; it’s made of tears. My pen isn’t a quill from a bird of Heaven; it’s ripped from the wing of my dreams. My book isn’t parchment; it’s the fabric of my soul, yes, my soul and my despair.
4.
Oh how my heart is squeezing me, how my heart is bleeding me; I no longer know anything but that phrase, and I need, in order to finish my book, more than a thousand. Since my bosom is bloody, why am I not a bullfinch? Evening and morning, moaning, in the garden, I always repeat the same phrase on a branch in the currant bush. Since my voice is sobbing, why am I not a stream? Without advancing or retreating, but snaking, all my life I bathe the threshold where my thoughts, too poorly healed, want to remain sitting, night and day.
THE FOURTH DAY
THE LAST JUDGMENT
I.
THE OCEAN, to Ahasuerus
Stop on my shore, A
hasuerus, I beg you, until nightfall. Once, hosts of people passed with the noise of their cities over the sand of my shores. On approaching their walls by night, in the mist, I heard their secrets escaping in whispers, waves of love, anger, sighs, priestly hymns and wedding songs, which I allowed to mingle with my waves. Often, I reached as far as their balconies, sad, wearied by my journey, having found nothing in my path but rushes and uprooted seaweed; and I carried back, an hour later, a golden crown, a diamond-encrusted miter or some old ruined empire that a passer-by had thrown to me in handfuls from his triumphal chariot, to amuse me at night in my abyss. Their towers climbed to the summit of my rocks in order to see me from afar; the stairways of their places descended into my waves in order to help me climb up when I needed to do so. To court my all-too-amorous waves the merchant ships and flag-bearing frigates leaned over my bed, listening to my breath. Merely to touch me with the tip of wing, they went tirelessly to carry my messages to my howling capes, my gulf and my scattered islands.
