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Many a twilight dream burnt by the Phoenix That won’t be gathered in some ashes’ amphora
Stéphane Mallarmé
Sonnet: ‘Quand l’ombre menaça…’
When the shadow with fatal law menaced me
A certain old dream, sick desire of my spine,
Beneath funereal ceilings afflicted by dying
Folded its indubitable wing there within me.
Luxury, O ebony hall, where to tempt a king
Famous garlands are writhing in death,
You are only pride, shadows’ lying breath
For the eyes of a recluse dazed by believing.
Yes, I know that Earth in the depths of this night,
Casts a strange mystery with vast brilliant light
Beneath hideous centuries that darken it the less.
Space, like itself, whether denied or expanded
Revolves in this boredom, vile flames as witness
That a festive star’s genius has been enkindled.
Sonnet: ‘Le vierge, le vivace…’
The virginal, living and lovely day
Will it fracture for us with a wild wing-blow
This solid lost lake whose frost’s haunted below
By the glacier, transparent with flights not made?
A swan from time past remembers it’s he
Magnificent yet struggling hopelessly
Through not having sung a liveable country
From the radiant boredom of winter’s sterility.
His neck will shake off this whitest agony
Space inflicts on a bird that denies it wholly,
But not earth’s horror that entraps his feathers.
Phantom assigned to this place by his brilliance,
The Swan in his exile is rendered motionless,
Swathed uselessly by his cold dream of defiance.
Sonnet: ‘Victorieusement fui le suicide…’
Victoriously the grand suicide fled
Foaming blood, brand of glory, gold, tempest!
O laughter if only to royally invest
My absent tomb purple, down there, is spread.
What! Not even a fragment of all that brightness
Remains, it is midnight, in the shade that fetes us,
Except, from the head, there’s a treasure, presumptuous,
That pours without light its spoiled languidness,
Yours, always such a delight! Yours, yes,
Retaining alone of the vanished sky, this
Trace of childish triumph as you spread each tress,
Gleaming as you show it against the pillows,
Like the helmet of war of a child-empress
From which, to denote you, would pour down roses.
Sonnet: ‘Ses purs ongles très haut…’
Her pure nails on high dedicating their onyx,
Anguish, at midnight, supports, a lamp-holder,
Many a twilight dream burnt by the Phoenix
That won’t be gathered in some ashes’ amphora
On a table, in the empty room: here is no ptyx,
Abolished bauble of sonorous uselessness,
(Since the Master’s gone to draw tears from the Styx
With that sole object, vanity of Nothingness).
But near the casement wide to the north,
A gold is dying, in accord with the décor
Perhaps, those unicorns dashing fire at a nixie,
She who, naked and dead in the mirror, yet
In the oblivion enclosed by the frame, is fixed
As soon by scintillations as the septet.
(The septet may indicate the constellation of Ursa Major in the north.)
Sonnet: ‘Pour votre chère morte, son ami…’
(For your dear departed wife, his friend)
– ‘Over the lost woods when dark winter lowers
You moan, O solitary captive of the threshold,
That this double tomb which our pride should hold’s
Cluttered, alas, only with absent weight of flowers.
Unheard Midnight counts out his empty number,
Wakefulness urges you never to close an eye,
Before in the ancient armchair’s embrace my
Shade is illuminated by the dying embers.
Who wishes to receive visitations often,
Mustn’t load with too many flowers the stone
My finger raises with a dead power’s boredom.
A soul trembling to sit by a hearth so bright,
To exist again, it’s enough if I borrow from
Your lips the breath of my name you murmur all night.’
© Translated by A. S. Kline
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